John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020) was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970, he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography.John Baldessari MoMA Collection. He created thousands of works which demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of s and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe. His work influenced that of Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Annette Lemieux, and Barbara Kruger among others.John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, 13 October 2009 – 10 January 2010 Tate Modern.Lance Esplund (August 17, 2010), Much Less Than Meets the Eye The Wall Street Journal.
Early life and education Baldessari was born in National City, California, to Hedvig Marie Jensen (1896–1950), a Danish nurse,Oral history interview with John Baldessari, 1992 Apr. 4-5 Archives of American Art. and Antonio Baldessari (1877–1976), an Italian salvage dealer. Baldessari and his elder sister were raised in Southern California.Michael Small (October 12, 1990), John Baldessari Rises from His Artistic Ashes and Finds That He's Hot People. Baldessari grew up in relative isolation during the Great Depression.
He attended Sweetwater High School; earned a BA from San Diego State College (1949–53); studied at University of California, Berkeley (1954–55); University of California, Los Angeles (1955); earned an M.A. from San Diego State College, California (1955–57); and studied at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles (1957–59), and Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles.
Career In 1959, Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He taught for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level. When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968. At UCSD he shared an office with David Antin.Karen Wright (October 23, 2009), John Baldessari Art in America. In 1970, Baldessari moved to Santa Monica, where he met many artists and writers, and began teaching at CalArts. His first classes included David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Ken Feingold, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, and Troy Brauntuch.Calvin Tomkins (October 18, 2010), No More Boring Art: John Baldessari’s crusade The New Yorker.Jori Finkel (June 20, 2010), John Baldessari's former students share memories Los Angeles Times. While at CalArts, Baldessari taught "the infamous Post Studio class", which he intended to "indicate people not daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone, that there might be some other kind of class situation."Knight, Christopher. A Situation Where Art Might Happen: John Baldessari on CalArts East of Borneo. November 19, 2011. The class, which operated outside of medium-specificity, was influential in informing the context for addressing a student's art practice at CalArts, and established a tradition of conceptual critique at CalArts that was carried on by artists such as Michael Asher. He quit teaching at CalArts in 1986, moving on to teach at UCLA, which he continued until 2008. At UCLA, his students included Elliott Hundley and Analia Saban.
Work and themes
Early text paintings By 1966, Baldessari was using photographs and text, or simply text, on canvas. His early major works were canvas paintings that were empty but for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. An early attempt of Baldessari's included the hand-painted phrase "Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?" (1967) on a heavily worked painted surface. However, this proved personally disappointing because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ. Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. The first of this series presented the ironic statement "A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE" (1967).
Another work, Painting for Kubler (1967–68) presented the viewer theoretical instructions on how to view it and on the importance of context and continuity with previous works. This work referenced art historian George Kubler's seminal book, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.
Disowning of early work In 1970, Baldessari and five friends burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. The ashes from these paintings were baked into cookiesPaul Levy (September 30, 2011), For Baldessari, Art Imitates Art The Wall Street Journal. and placed into an urn, and the resulting art installation consists of a bronze commemorative plaque with the destroyed paintings' birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies.Grant, Daniel. "Can Artists Really Disown their Early Work?" The Huffington Post. August 11, 2010. Through the ritual of cremation Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. Thus the act of disavowal becomes generative as with the work of auto-destructive artist Jean Tinguely.
Juxtaposing text with images Baldessari is best known for works that blend photographic materials (such as film stills), take them out of their original context and rearrange their form, often including the addition of words or sentences. Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series (1966–1968), which paired photographic images with lines of text from an amateur photography book, aiming at the violation of a set of basic "rules" on snapshot composition.Interview with Moira Roth In one of the works, Baldessari had himself photographed in front of a palm precisely so that it would appear that the tree were growing out of his head.John Baldessari, Wrong (1966-1968) LACMA, Los Angeles. His photographic California Map Project (1969) created physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed. In the Binary Code Series, Baldessari used images as information holders by alternating photographs to stand in for the on-off state of binary code; one example alternated photos of a woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it away.
Another of Baldessari's series juxtaposed an image of an object such as a glass, or a block of wood, and the phrase "A glass is a glass" or "Wood is wood" combined with "but a cigar is a good smoke" and the image of the artist smoking a cigar. These directly refer to René Magritte's The Treachery of Images; the images similarly were used to stand in for the objects described. However, the series also apparently refers to Sigmund Freud's famous attributed observation that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar",attributed in Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 15th Ed. as well as to Rudyard Kipling's "… a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.""The Betrothed," Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads, Ed. Project Gutenberg
In "Double Bill", a 2012 series of large inkjet prints,John Baldessari: Double Bill, April 6 - May 12, 2012 Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris. Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger with Max Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions. Baldessari then names only one of his two artistic "collaborators" on each canvas's lower edge, such as …AND MANET or …AND DUCHAMP.John Baldessari: Double Bill (Part 2), May 12 - June 30, 2012 Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles.David Pagel (May 18, 2012), Review: 'John Baldessari' is joyously more than sum of its sources Los Angeles Times.
Arbitrary games Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (1973), in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film. The writer eldritch Priest ties John Baldessari's piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) as an early example of post-conceptual art.eldritch Priest, Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and The Aesthetics of Failure, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 5 This work was published in 1973 by a young Italian publisher: Giampaolo Prearo that was one of the first to believe and invest in the work of Baldessari. He printed two series one in 2000 copies and a second more precious reserved to the publisher in 500 copies. Following Baldessari's seminal statement "I will not make any more boring Art", he conceived the work The Artist Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club (1972–73), composed of 30 photographs of the artist swinging and hitting with a golf club objects excavated from a dump, as a parody of cataloging rather than a thorough straight classification.John Baldessari: Early Work, 28 February – 11 April 2015 Marian Goodman, Paris.
Pointing Much of Baldessari's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings (1969) series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted.Harvey, Doug. "John Baldessari: Point Man". LA Weekly. August 5, 2010. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now (1973), entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails", in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.
Dots