In 1971 the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design invited John Baldessari to have an exhibition, but it couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs. Baldessari proposed instead to invite students to write on the gallery walls, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art.” The students showed up in droves and covered the walls. The school subsequently made prints of the phrase—one was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. Baldessari had clearly hit a nerve.
Eighty-two years old and playful and Santa Claus-ish in appearance, if Santa were 6’7” and on a kale diet, John Baldessari has been hitting nerves for over five decades. His contrarian brand of conceptual, often photo-based art seethes with irreverence and dry humor. It questions the very notion of art, often turning inward, or inside out. "Pure Beauty," for instance, consists of those two words, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters on an off-white canvas. One of his well-known text pieces simply says EVERYTHING IS PURGED FROM THIS PAINTING BUT ART, NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK. In "California Map Project," he created physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed.
Baldessari grew up in National City, California. He studied at San Diego State, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the Otis Art Institute, and the Chouinard Art Institute. Initially a painter, he began to incorporate text and photography into his canvasses in the mid-sixties. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. His works are collected in the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Broad Collection. He has won countless awards, among them a Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. He is known for being a wonderful art teacher, in fact, he used to have his students throw a dart at a map of Los Angeles and wherever it landed, they’d visit on a field trip. The idea was to break out of the studio.
I met with Baldessari in his spacious Venice studio. He was kind and thoughtful and laughed easily. I got the sense that he was greatly at peace with the world, or at least having a lot of fun in it.
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