John Baldessari

Summary of John Baldessari

John Baldessari was renowned as a leading Californian Conceptual artist. Painting was important to his early work: when he emerged, in the early 1960s, he was working in a gestural style. But by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce text and pre-existing images, often doing so to create riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting - as he once said, "I think when I'm doing art, I'm questioning how to do it." And in the 1970s he abandoned painting altogether and made in a diverse range of media, though his interests generally centered on the photographic image. Conceptual art shaped his interest in exploring how photographic images communicate, yet his work had little of the austerity usually associated with that style; instead he worked with light humor, and with materials and motifs that also reflected the influence of Pop art. Baldessari was also a famously influential teacher. His ideas, and his relaxed and innovative approach to teaching, made an important impact on many, most notably the so-called Pictures Generation, whose blend of Pop and Conceptual art was prominent in the 1980s.

Accomplishments

• Baldessari first began to move away from gestural painting when he started to work with materials from billboard posters. It prompted him to analyze how these very popular, public means of communication functioned, and it could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. He invariably worked with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employed to distort them - from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots - all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating.
• A crucial development in Baldessari's work was the introduction of text to his paintings. It marked, for him, the realization that images and texts behave in similar ways - both using codes to convey their messages. Text began to disappear from his work in the early 1970s, and from then onward he generally relied on collage, but his work continued to operate with the same understanding of the coded character of images. Typically, he collaged together apparently unrelated categories of image or motif, yet the result was to force us to recognize that those images often communicate similar messages.
• On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1965, Baldessari was struck by the use of unpainted plaster to fill in missing shards of Greek vases. This prompted his interest in how images are effected by having portions removed or blotted out, and he continued to explore this in his work. Often, the result of his alterations to photographs was to render them generic, suggesting to us that rather than capturing a special moment, or unusual event, photographs often communicate very standardized messages.

Progression of Art

Biography of John Baldessari

Childhood

Born in 1931 in National City, California, John Anthony Baldessari and his sister Betty grew up in relative isolation during the Great Depression. His mother, a Lutheran of Danish descent, was a nurse, and his father was a Catholic from the Dolomites in what is now Italy. His father's entrepreneurial attitude to supporting his family likely had a profound impact on Baldessari's decision to become an artist. His father worked in various trades, from crop-picking to building, and he would recycle and reuse everything from old faucets to cigarettes, cultivating and repurposing as many objects as he could to make money. From a young age, Baldessari would assemble and dismantle his father's materials, questioning why one object was chosen over another. Later in life he explained that “It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing. I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?” As a child, his teachers recognized his artistic talents, often selecting him for special projects, like paintings school murals, contributing further to his early decision to pursue a career as an artist (even though his father would have preferred for him to choose a more financially stable path).

Early Training

In 1949, Baldessari entered San Diego State College, where he studied art education at the encouragement of his sister. Following this, he decided to turn his attention to art history, so he went to study at the University of California, Berkeley. Baldessari developed an interest for more contemporary art, as opposed to the heavily weighted Renaissance coursework offered at Berkeley. He ultimately chose to return to San Diego State College where he obtained an MA in painting in 1957.

After an instructor at San Diego had taken ill, Baldessari was encouraged to serve as a replacement for one term. He proved to be an excellent mentor and went on to teach high school classes in life drawing and lettering. Here, he worked in relative isolation from the Los Angeles art scene, experimenting with new concepts and approaches without the fear of rejection. As evident in Art Lesson (1964), his early painted works often satirized traditional rules featured in art instruction manuals, such as how to create a proper composition and perfect perspective. In 1970, Baldessari incinerated all of his paintings prior to 1966 at a San Diego funeral home for a new piece titled 'The Cremation Project', for which he then baked the ashes into cookies and placed them in an urn. This conceptual work, which arts editor Jori Finkel recognizes as “an unmistakably Duchampian, anti-art gesture,” relates to the continuous cycle of life, everything is created, destroyed, and renewed. Said the artist, “It was a very public and symbolic act, like announcing you’re going on a diet in order to stick to it.”

Mature Period

Baldessari's approach was radical, mocking the absurdity of art making, and this encouraged him to abandon the hand-painted quality of his paintings and adopt elements of found text and photography. He exploited appropriated text and photographs from newspapers and magazines in his work, believing that people are able to relate to words and images that are familiar. His first breakthrough works featured only text, as exemplified in Tips For Artists Who Want To Sell (1966-68), where he sardonically explains the "necessary" formal elements for a painting to sell.

Baldessari often employed local sign painters to complete the lettering, pointing them to remove the handcrafted quality entirely. In 1970 he took the concept of 'pointing' to a new level with his Commissioned Paintings series. In this he commissioned amateur artists to complete the painting, adding the caption "A painting by..." to each work. This body of work questioned the notion of artistic authorship, a highly criticized topic concerning conceptual art. During this time, Baldessari created several video pieces, such as I Am Making Art (1971) and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), where he makes humorous commentary on the decisions of the creative process as seen in contemporary conceptual art. He is also well known for his 1971 print work “I will not make any more boring art”, which features the phrase written over and over in the artist’s handwriting, in a similar manner to how students at school are often made to “write lines” repeatedly as a form of punishment.

Late Period and Death

In the 1970s, Baldessari took a more 'artless' approach to image making by appropriating stills from B-movies to create synthesized photomontages. The photographs were cheap and easy to acquire, allowing him to systematically juxtapose various images to create a new narrative context. Influenced by early Hollywood cinema, the work suggested movement, similar to a storyboard grid, allowing him to document actions rather than monumentalizing his subject matter.

As seen in Frames and Ribbon (1988), he incorporated stickers to conceal faces of individuals he didn’t like in news photographs and movie stills he purchased at a movie store in Burbank, thus veiling emotional content and drawing attention to minor details and the negative space between frames. The pricing stickers serve as a minimalist painting technique, creating a new depth within a flat field of color, breaking up the realistic black and white photo content. He often told his students “Don’t look at things — look in between things.”

Baldessari continued to examine parts of the body through the series Noses and Ears (2006-2007) and Arms and Legs (2007-2008). Both series expose isolated features on a minimal field of color, allowing the viewer to interpret the work through sensual precepts. Baldessari viewed his own features as separate entities, rather than belonging to a whole face or body.

Working in nearly every artistic media, including painting, collage, printmaking, performance art, and video, Baldessari exhibited his work around the world, including his first major U.S. retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October 2010. He also taught throughout his career, as he put it, “…everything from grade school to college to juvenile delinquents. I set out to right all the things wrong with my own art education. But I found that you can’t really teach art, you can just sort of set the stage for it.” He even set up CalArts’ post-studio art course, which he described as “all the kind of art you didn’t need a studio to deal with.” One of his notable students, David Salle, described him as “immensely understanding of human predicament and what’s involved in being an artist. […[ He gave form to a kind of linguistic, poetical way of representing the world that looks simple but is not.” Author Austin Kleon recounts one particularly fun exercise Baldessari would have his students do: “he’d have a student throw a dart at a map of LA and they’d all go to the spot and hang out all day for inspiration, taking pictures and video.”

Baldessari also served on the board of trustees for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The museum’s director, Philippe Vergne, called him “someone who’s been an inspiration, a teacher, a friend, a leader for many of us. And for us at MOCA, he’s a marvelous board member, a board member who tells it like it is — and God knows we need that.” Baldessari was honored with a number of prestigious awards during his career, including a lifetime achievement award from the Americans for the Arts in 2005, a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2009, and the National Medal of Arts, presented to him by President Barack Obama in 2014.

Baldessari continued to live and work in the Venice neighborhood of Santa Monica, California up until his passing in his sleep on January 2, 2020, at the age of eighty-eight, from unreported causes He is survived by his daughter, Annamarie, and his son, Tony (whose mother, Montessori teacher Carol Ann Wixom, was Baldessari’s wife from 1960-86).

The Legacy of John Baldessari

John Baldessari has been recognized by art critic Christopher Knight as “arguably America’s most influential Conceptual artist.” He was an important influence on a generation of younger artists whose interests combine Conceptual art and Pop. He also demonstrated how humor can be combined with more serious investigations into language and photography. As arts editor Jori Finkel put it in her New York Times obituary for the artist, “While so much early conceptual art tended toward the cold and cerebral, Mr. Baldessari’s was infused with a droll sense of humor. He employed a sort of Dada irony and sometimes colorful Pop Art splashes […] to rescue conceptual art from what he saw as its high-minded self-seriousness.” Art history professor Lisa Wainwright notes that Baldessari was “among the earliest artists to engage with image culture and the onslaught of mass media,” and critic Charles Darwent insists that the artist “probably did more than anyone to establish Los Angeles as a rival to the art scene in New York.”

Baldessari inspired artists such as Richard Prince, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, Jack Goldstein, Jim Shaw, James Welling, and David Salle to push artistic boundaries while teaching at CalArts (1970-1988) and the University of California at Los Angeles (1996-2007). Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan has noted, “it’s not just that John taught so many students who went on to become major players. It’s that art turned and walked through this door he opened.” Wainwright also recognizes Baldessari’s legacy as deriving in large part from his approach to teaching, stating that “He had the idea that art school is about free play, that it’s about unfettered experimentation that issues creative propositions. […] Everything was possible and anything goes.” She adds, “He poked at the art world. He poked at institutions. He was unafraid and irreverent and playful.”

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