John Baldessari

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes.

Presented without commentary, this film reveals the thinking behind the work of John Baldessari over the course of his career, and provides clues to the understanding of the artist's paintings, photographic work and books.

From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s (b.1931) varied work has been seminal in the field of conceptual art. Integrating semiology and mass media imagery, he employed such strategies as appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality, and text/image juxtaposition. With an ironic wit, Baldessari's work considers the gathering, sorting, and reorganizing of information. “Something that is part of my personality is seeing the world slightly askew. It’s a perceptual stance. The real world is absurd sometimes, so I don’t make a conscious attempt, but because I come at it in a certain way, it seems really strange,” Baldessari says in this interview with Nancy Bowen. A historical interview originally recorded in 1979 and re-edited in 2003 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.

Seen from a bird's eye view, a figure paints the walls and floor of a windowless room six times in six days, using each of the primary and secondary colors.

Seen from a bird's eye view, a figure paints the walls and floor of a windowless room six times in six days, using each of the primary and secondary colors.

A film by John Baldessari

Script is the opposite of an improvisational exercise. Seven couples, all amateurs, are handed pages from random movie scripts and instructed to enact the absurd text through force of imagination, without direction or knowledge of what the others are doing.

Baldessari introduces eight news photos to Ed Henderson — ranging in subject matter from geese at the zoo to an accidental electrocution — and asks him to identify them. Henderson's associative responses suggest the projection of unconscious desires and fears onto these arbitrary images, which are removed from their original contexts. The implied narratives that emerge from the seemingly random juxtapositions and sequences of photographs give rise to questions of manipulation, inference and meaning.

Baldessari has Ed Henderson examine obscure movie stills and attempt to reconstruct the films' narratives.

Baldessari has Ed Henderson examine obscure movie stills and attempt to reconstruct the films' narratives.

Contemporaneous to his best-known video works, these Super-8mm films represent Baldessari's conceptual engagement with motion picture film, pointing to the technical strengths and weaknesses of the celluloid medium relative to video, such as the superior reproduction of color, on one hand, and the difficulty of adding synchronized sound on the other. Conceived on an intimate scale (only the artist's hands are visible as he manipulates a range of objects), Baldessari's Super-8 films replace text and speech with a cunning visual language, in which he wordlessly describes physical changes in his environment: a bright light flashes on a mirrored surface, red liquid rises in a thermometer, and powdered pigment makes an indelible mess. Here Baldessari employs a method of communication that is based on spectacle rather than performance.

In a sly twist on the methodology of the 18th-century "philosophes" who classified the laws and history of the world in massive encyclopedias, Baldessari devises and then subverts his own system for cataloguing the world. In a matter-of-fact tone, he states that he is going to present a precise, methodical inventory of objects, progressing from small to large in size. Drawing on his own collection of found objects, he exhibits and describes a seemingly arbitrary series of over thirty disparate items. By undermining the viewer's empirical perception, video ultimately is proven to be a flawed medium for the indexing and classification of the world.

“[A] rather perverse exercise in futility,” this tape documents Baldessari’s response to Joseph Beuys’s influential performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Baldessari’s approach here is characteristically subtle and ironic, involving ordinary objects and a seemingly banal task. The philosophical underpinnings of Baldessari’s exercise are structuralist theories about the opaque and artificial nature of language as a system of signs. Using a common houseplant to represent nature and instructional flashcards to represent the alphabet, Baldessari ironically illustrates this theorem. That language is the structuring element of the tape—the length of the tape was determined by the number of letters in the alphabet—enforces the connection between language and art, a recurrent theme in Baldessari’s work.

Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting, editing and arc—the artist inverts the traditional Hollywood model, stressing structure over narrative coherence.

From Wikipedia- "In a 1972 tribute to fellow artist Sol LeWitt, Baldessari sang lines from LeWitt's thirty-five statements on conceptual art to the tune of popular songs."

From Wikipedia- "In a 1972 tribute to fellow artist Sol LeWitt, Baldessari sang lines from LeWitt's thirty-five statements on conceptual art to the tune of popular songs."

In Walking Forward-Running Past, Baldessari ingeniously employs photography and video to examine and ultimately deconstruct film. In this conceptual exercise, he tapes up photographic film stills of himself walking toward the camera—coming closer with each successive image—and then photos of himself running past it. The sequentiality of this action results in a crude montage, an ultimately futile attempt to recreate the phenomenological experience of cinematic movement. Gasping with exertion, Baldessari quickly and repeatedly replaces photo after photo. In his efforts to evoke the cinematic experience, a layered metonymic relationship develops between the static, photographic image of Baldessari running and his "real" movements on video.

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls. Inspired by the work's completion — the students covered the walls with the phrase — Baldessari committed his own version of the piece to videotape. Like an errant schoolboy, he dutifully writes, "I will not make any more boring art" over and over again in a notebook for the duration of the tape. In an ironic disjunction of form and content, Baldessari's methodical, repetitive exercise deliberately contradicts the point of the lesson — to refrain from creating "boring" art.

In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, intoning the phrase "I am making art" with each gesture. Each articulation of the phrase is given a different emphasis and nuance, as if art were being created from moment to moment. This index of body movements is ironically offset by the repetitive monotony of the exercise.

A short film by John Baldessari

A film by John Baldessari

Baldessari has commented that he is "less interested in the form art takes than the meaning an image evokes." In Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks for Photographs, he explores the relation between what is heard and what is seen, appropriating deliberately cliched imagery and generic film music to construct a series of surreal mini-movies. Baldessari describes photographs from National Geographic magazine to Ed Henderson, who picks out pieces of mood-setting stock music and sound effects to pair with the images. Baldessari subtly influences Henderson's selections, steering him towards music that he deems more appropriate. This strange collaboration results in an uncanny, often comic conjunction of sound and image. Removing the photographs and music from their original contexts, Baldessari deconstructs mass cultural narrative, suggesting how the associative meanings and evocations of its cliches and genres have permeated the collective unconscious.