Conceptual Alchemy

The Smithsonian Institution

Conceptual Alchemy: A Conversation with John BaldessariAuthor(s): Sidra StichSource: American Art, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 60-81Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/429975 .

Accessed: 20/10/2013 06:28

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Smithsonian Institution arecollaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Art.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.228.173.41 on Sun, 20 Oct 2013 06:28:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=smith

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/429975?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


61 American Art Volume 19, Number 1 © 2005 Smithsonian Institution

John Baldessari has devoted his career to exploring and questioning our basic assumptions about art—what it is and what the “rules” are for creating it. His work over the past four decades, often incorporating photographs and film stills and always riven with a feisty irreverence and wit, has made him one of the most influential artists on the contemporary international art scene. The stream of retrospectives, gallery shows, and presti-gious awards in Europe and the United States since the 1970s is an impressive index of the high regard in which he is held. So too is his impact on generations of artists who have been inspired by the conceptual rigor and visual pizzazz of his artworks. After years of teaching, he has witnessed many of his art students emerge as leading figures in their own right.

Unlike many American artists who eventually gravitate to New York, Baldessari has sustained a home base in Southern California. Born (in 1931) and raised in National City, California—a small town near the Mexican border—he has lived in Santa Monica since 1970. Baldessari received BA and MA degrees from San Diego State College in the 1950s. He completed additional study at the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses of the University of California and at the Otis and Chouinard Art Institutes in

Los Angeles. His teaching career, which began in public school classrooms, is hallmarked by professorships at the University of California, San Diego (1968–70) and the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1970–88). He cur-rently teaches part-time at UCLA.

Often described as a conceptual artist, his work in reality defies such easy categorization, mixing aspects of concept-based, pop, and minimalist art. It is distinguished by his efforts to produce an “artless art”—his term for art that is stripped of ingrained valuations regarding imagery, content, materials, the creative process, and presentational format. Perhaps more than anything, his adoption of photography—especially his focus on found, decontextualized images and his unorthodox means of taking “unselected” pictures—has established his preeminence.

Baldessari’s work ranges from the early phototext canvases, with which he came to art-world attention in the late 1960s, to sequential-image projects, storytelling videos, repetitive-action photographs, composites using film stills, parables formulated as artist books, deconstruction-based allegories, eccentrically shaped multipartite conglomerates, layered compositions with painted-out figura-tions, and overlapping and intersecting creations. It bears witness to linguistic

Conceptual Alchemy

A Conversation with John Baldessari

Sidra Stich

John Baldessari, Upward Fall, 1986. Black-and-white photo-graphs with oil tint mounted on metallic paper and board, 95 x 68 in. Private collection



62 Spring 2005

and postmodern theories as well as film-making strategies and idiosyncratic refer-ences to historical sources and mass media. Even as his art investigates how words and images convey meaning, it also considers the potency of selection and presentation in transforming or upending interpreta-tion. Using such tools as juxtaposition, decontextualization, image obliteration, cropping, close-up and panoramic perspec-tives, color versus black and white, and discontinuity, Baldessari disrupts the usual connotations, instead stimulating fluid as-sociations and ever-expanding narratives.

Now in his early seventies, the tall, white-bearded Baldessari is easy to talk with and articulate in expressing his goals. We met at his Santa Monica studio on two occasions, in June and August 2004, and discussed his evolving strategies for making “artless art” as well as some of his most famous works before turning to other topics—his position in the art world, his relationships with other artists,

and, finally, the important role teaching has played in his career.

SS: Film stills have been the primary imagery for your work, and probably the aspect for which you are best known. When did you first turn to film stills and why?

JB: The film stills probably first occurred when I did a show with James Corcoran in Los Angeles in 1976. At the time, though, it really didn’t matter that the source was film stills. That wasn’t the point for me. The point was that they were found imagery—I’d been using that a lot since the late ’60s. I tried all kinds of ways to find stuff. I would tear things out of magazines or newspapers, imagery I thought I might like. Or even if I found a discarded snapshot on the street, I’d pick it up. Anything that might be useful. I did dumpster diving for a while at photo processing places.

1 John Baldessari, Looking East on 4th and C, Chula Vista, Calif., 1967–68. Acrylic and photo-emulsion on canvas, 59 x 45 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund

2 John Baldessari, Everything Is Purged . . . , 1966–68. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 56 in. Private collection



63 American Art

What inspired your interest in found imagery?

It really grew out of the works with text and imagery I did when I left painting in the mid-1960s. What I was trying to get then was a kind of non-aesthetic art. I was living in National City, which is no garden spot, and I was saying, “This is where I live, warts and all.” In trying not to make beautiful compositions out of National City, I would just shoot randomly out of the car window (fig. 1). I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—compose; that was my starting point, the impetus for me. I saw it as a project of trying to make artless art, artless in the sense of tradi-tional beauty.

This sensibility also prevails in your text paintings of the late 1960s, such as Everything Is Purged (fig. 2). Was irony or humor also part of your approach in these works?

I don’t know if I’d define it as humor, but it’s certainly a different way of approaching the world, or understanding the world. Art can be defined as a believ-able lie—that’s an idea that has always appealed to me. You’re trying to convince somebody of something. Even if it’s the best painting in the world, if you don’t believe it, then it’s just paint and canvas and picture [stretcher] bars. In all of these early pieces, I was basically seeing what I could get away with, and I figured that as long as it was on canvas and stretcher bars, what else was it going to be but art?

It wasn’t technical virtuosity, it wasn’t composition. It wasn’t content, it wasn’t the ideas.

In that period, if you put anything on canvas and stretcher bars, it was art. You won the game even before you’d begun. It was art before you did anything.

It’s art if I say it’s art?

Yes. Or as a painting instructor told me, “Your only job is to make the canvas look better than it is already.” And cer-tainly Robert Ryman or Ad Reinhardt would take it to that level, so there was that. And then I figured that it wasn’t necessary that I did the painting myself. Although I actually did teach lettering in high school and could have done it, I wanted to remove myself from it. I hired a professional sign painter and told him, “Don’t try to make it look like art. Just make it like ‘For Sale,’ or ‘Keep Out,’ or whatever. I just want it to look like infor-mation.” Also, the colors of the canvas were pretty much what I called “landlord colors”—gray, or that terrible peach color, or off-green.

Artless art and the removal of the artist’s own hand from the creative process occurs variously throughout the twentieth century, of course.

Oh sure. Even if you try to be artless, your taste is going to show its hand. So why not work on something else?

This brings to mind The Pencil Story (fig. 3), where two photographs of the same pencil—one showing it with a hand-cut, dull, and dirty point and the other with a perfectly sharpened tip—are accompanied by an inscription relating a tale about the object’s transformation. The text ends by saying, “I’m not sure, but I think that this has something to do with art.”

In this period in my life, I was trying to figure out what would be bedrock assumptions I would have about art, about what made art, what things I could abandon and jettison, and what was necessary. Certainly making a choice, one thing or another, was an important consideration. And I was so curious about why this dull pencil made me feel uneasy. Why do we come into a room and some-times straighten a book? It doesn’t need



64 Spring 2005

to be straightened. Or why do we take so many peas against so many carrots? It’s not about hunger. Maybe it’s about how one color looks against another. I think it’s low-level aesthetics myself. And why do we all of a sudden want to paint a chair?

So the juxtaposition of the two pencil images evoked questions about what constitutes art, what values apply in decision making?

It’s low-level art, low-level art making. It’s about being presented with a choice and what one would prefer. Given two choices, which would you choose? There might be some people who would really prefer the dull pencil. I don’t know. I’m just saying what my choice is.

And as always, you’re not providing answers but provoking us to think. The issue of choice or, more specifically, the distancing of yourself from the decision-making process in the creation of images, was a seminal part of your early work.

I tried all kinds of plans, like in the late ’60s I would have a video camera outside my studio and the monitor inside, and I would set up a camera on a tripod with something called an intervalometer, which automatically would take an image every five or ten minutes. I was trying to get imagery I wouldn’t select. Without saying “that’s a great shot” I would have prints made and try to use the material. Then somebody told me about a mall in Burbank that had a lot of bookstores and movie bookstores, and you could buy film stills there. At first this didn’t inter-est me because they were in the five- to ten-dollar range. But I found this one place with things that in their mind had no commercial value—movies that came and went—and I could get them for ten cents apiece. I didn’t care that the movies weren’t well known. Actually, if I knew the movie that the film stills were from,

then I wouldn’t use them; it had to be something I’d never seen before. Every time I would have a spare afternoon I would go to this Burbank mall and sort through things. Anything at all, any imagery that caught my eye, I would buy it. I didn’t quite know how I was going to use this stuff, but I just liked looking at photographic imagery. You know how when you’re sitting in a doctor’s or den-tist’s office thumbing through the maga-zines, all of the sudden you think “what was that?” and you go back? Well, I think I was looking for that kind of response. I went through all these images and bought the ones that caught my attention. A lot of the imagery I found was pictures with guns in them. Also, the obvious catego-ries like people kissing or embracing or in some proximity, cowboys, westerns, riding a horse, falling off a horse, being shot with an arrow—everything is pos-sible. I began to be interested in that kind of imagery as clichés, because a certain kind of shot would recur over and over and over again.

This activity of amassing a huge collec-tion of found materials brings to mind artists like Joseph Cornell or Jess, who developed intricate systems of categoriz-ing the images. How did you categorize them?

Yes, I used to do that. The list of all my categories was actually printed in a book by Brian Wallis, Blasted Allegories—that was actually my title. After awhile the system became unusable, though, because any one photograph can have a thousand different categories. I remember the images and take great pleasure going through boxes of photographs to find them. The search reinforced the images that are indelibly there; they’re still there or new ones enter into my image bank. I store all this imagery in my head, it’s raw material. Like a kid learning new words, I’m storing up images that I can put together somehow.



65 American Art

And you also store words that people say, your own notes, or other verbal and text statements from different sources?

Yes, that’s an important issue too, because I think words and images have equal weight. They do the same thing in different ways.

You explore this concept quite rigorously in your 1978 Blasted Allegories Series (fig. 4).

Essentially these works started because I did not want to prioritize an image over a word. At the time, I was taking photo-graphs off television but not making the aesthetic decisions myself. The camera would be set on an intervalometer and I would have a studio assistant try to pair up a word with an image. We would simply file the words alphabetically. I started having different categories: black-and-

white photographs, full-color photographs, photographs broken down into the color wheel—blue, green, yellow, orange, and so on. I would have dictionaries of word images, orange dictionaries and red ones, full-color and black-and-white. Then I would construct these games for myself, where I would draw on this information. For example, I’d seek a word that starts with A and it’s got to be blue. I’d set up certain parameters and see what I’d get. Then I would be honor-bound to accept what I got. With these games, it gets me colliding images together that I probably would rather not see.

Arbitrary choice but also rules and limitations?

Probably I got that from Sol [LeWitt, a good friend and inspiration]. Or maybe somehow I got it myself—I don’t know.

3 John Baldessari, The Pencil Story, 1972–73. Two color photographs with colored pencil on board, 22 x 27 ¼ in. Private collection



66 Spring 2005

4 John Baldessari, Blasted Allegories (Colorful Sentences and Purple Patch): Starting with Red Father . . . , 1978. Color photographs on board, 30 ⅝ x 36 ⅝ in. Private collection



67 American Art

But I don’t think you can have complete freedom. What you have to do is set up some parameters where there is a lot of wiggle room and then see what happens. It’s kind of like a laboratory exercise.

You actually denote the parameters within the compositions. In Blasted Allegories (Colorful Sentences and Purple Patch), the bottom texts say “Conditions: (1) random T.V., (2) prior named, (3) color wheel order (red upper left) to generate, (4) sentence horizontal/vertical.” Having ordered the elements in a grid, you encour-age sequences that move horizontally, up, down, diagonally, by color, or by image. The composition offers various storylines, none preferred and all inter-twined.

Yes, it’s fluid.

Your compositional mode can be allied with filmmaking techniques—jump cuts, zooms, cropping, discontinuities, chains of associations—that were especially pronounced in the revolutionary films of Jean-Luc Godard and others during the 1960s. Was this something you were aware of?

Well, I spent a good deal of time from 1970 onwards doing video, film, photog-raphy, trying in some Greenbergian way to find out what was essential to each medium. When I look back, it seems that some of my early photo-works got to be cinematic, sequential, as a result of that. Then, when I started doing movies and video, they became very static, like a still image [laughter]. And you might think of some of the ensuing photographic works as large storyboards, and I did use story-board paper.

But the story-making aspect of your work isn’t in terms of linear narratives, since you arrange images in ways that provoke diverse and multiple readings.

In writing, if you take two of the right words and rub them up against each other, some new meaning occurs. You search for the right word; sometimes it’s not right but all of a sudden some chemistry or alchemy occurs. I like words that way, and images too that create new meaning. It’s beyond metaphor, or you could get some allegory possibly.

You take images from a culturally, visually rich source like films and then radically decontextualize and recon-textualize them, virtually eliminating primary interpretations. You adapted this approach in the series you made using the Grimm fairy tales and another using Goya’s art as points of departure. In the Grimm series—for example The Three Feathers (fig. 5)—a grid, storybook format contains eleven film-still images and one snapshot, but the images don’t directly connect to the Grimms’ narrative.

The Grimm compositions were done for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, which was the home of the Grimm brothers. They’re sections of stills, images that I thought would reverberate with the sense of the story. The central photograph in color is kind of a keystone photograph that’s emblematic of the story. It’s a lattice on which to construct meaning and nar-rative, to balance black and white against color. If the specific name of the tale were not an integral part of work, I would probably have a problem with it: I think art should be enjoyable without having to know a lot of outside information. Not that it doesn’t help. I take a chance that the Grimms’ fairy tales are in the public domain. I’ve done other ones like the Seven Virtues and Seven Deadly Sins, but that’s so much common parlance too. Sometimes I take things that may be more esoteric and use them as a point of departure. I did illustrations for Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Not a lot of people know that book, but it did help



68 Spring 2005

me produce a lot of interesting works, interesting in their own right. You don’t have to know Tristram Shandy. I’ve always wanted to illustrate Don Quixote. I haven’t done that yet, but a lot of the works I do have that spirit in them.

True, your work is permeated with irony, parody, a clever twisting of words and images, or a sort of “aha!” discovery quotient. In the Goya Series (figs. 6 and 7), the wit has a laconic, almost sarcas-tic character.

I’ve always been a fan of Goya, and in this series I took off from his titles, which are so ambiguous that I realized you could move them to another subject and wouldn’t know it. If someone’s body is being mutilated and you’re saying that this is bad, what’s bad? If you take the subject matter away, you can apply the title to another subject. I like that kind of mobility of meaning. In this case, I supplied my own subject matter to his titles. At a certain point, I felt confident enough to be a Goya doppelgänger and

5 John Baldessari, Grimm’s Fairy Tales: The Three Feathers, 1982. One color and eleven black-and-white photographs with acrylic mounted on board, 84 x 72 in. Private collection



69 American Art

began to make titles like he would make. So some of the titles I made up myself.

In these compositions, you don’t use film stills, and the images are mundane objects. You atypically use a single image, not a composite structure.

They’re as mundane as I can make them. Here again it’s a case where I don’t want to prioritize an image over the word. I’m trying to get an equilibrium. I spoke earlier about eliding words and images to produce this third meaning. I do rely on that, but it goes deeper. I titled one of my retrospectives While Something Is Happening Here, Something Else Is Happening There. I have difficulty think-ing that everything is a [single] point of view. I’m aware that something just as interesting may be going on over there and I want to underline that.

You convey this sensibility of boundless curiosity not only in the images you choose but also in your compositional arrangements. Early on, you broke away from the single framed art object and the rectangular frame, instead creating multipartite composites, where the positioning of the elements serves to enhance, repeat, or shift meaning.

If I just have four sides [to a picture], then it becomes clear it’s a point of view and a world that one is seeing. If I have multiple frames, it may add up to one big frame, but it’s a pretty awkward frame. There are slippages and overlaps—it kind of ends there but it doesn’t end there. I think that’s more like what the real world is about. When I first started exhibiting, I was adamant about not framing anything. I wanted to be pure, and for some reason that was pure to me. And then there got to be too much damage and Ileana

6 John Baldessari, Goya Series: True to Form, 1997. Inkjet print and sign painter’s lacquer, acrylic, and gesso on canvas, 75 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

7 John Baldessari, Goya Series: This Is Bad, 1997. Inkjet print and hand lettering on canvas, 75 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York



70 Spring 2005

Sonnabend [Baldessari’s major dealer from 1972 to 1998] said, “We really have to frame things.” I thought, “I hate that, but if I have to frame the works, I’m going to make framing part of my process.”

In Upward Fall (frontispiece) you have an irregular layout and one of the framed images is on an oblique angle. And you variously suggest meaning through the arrangement of the parts.

The falling images relate to climbing, like the man who seems to be walking upward. And the two cowboys, they’re like the antithesis of stability against free flight. They’re almost like bookends, two piers, and everything above is seemingly resting on them, although as you notice it’s really not resting. It looks stable, but it’s not. There’s also something in our col-lective unconscious coming from movies or whatever about cowboys as a symbol of stability.

In Bloody Sundae (fig. 8), the concept of framing is also signified in the imagery of picture frames and in compositional alignments that expressly skew, open, and close borders and associations.

It’s a little bit of thumbing my nose at frames. They’re in the picture, but they’re not framing the picture. With the empty frames, I’m suggesting that they might be framing something but you’re not seeing anything, just the signal of the frame. And with the disks that block people’s faces, I’m obliterating the hierarchy of meaning. We normally look at a face but you can’t see that, so maybe you have to look at the gestures or how they’re dressed or whatever. I first real-ized this when teaching life drawing. In a three-hour class, students would spend two hours drawing the head and the last half hour drawing the rest of the body. I would say, “No, the body is one thing.” So I would put a drape over the model’s head and not until the last part of the

period would I undrape the head so they could draw it.

Often your disks are in color within compositions that are otherwise black and white. You’ve spoken of color coding.

At first it was just a facial blockage in white, and then I thought I could color code the people. Red might be a danger-ous person, green might be a safe person. It was just fun. I could all of a sudden make somebody who was nonthreatening seem threatening. It was a way to change relationships.

The title Bloody Sundae is a punning reference to the political event in Northern Ireland.

The imagery also looks like a an ice cream sundae, so there’s a multiple entendre.

In recent work, the Duress Series from 2003, you expand the colored disk imagery and blocking-out concept to create full-blown, albeit abstract, figura-tions in brightly painted hues (fig. 9).

I was trying to use color in a more direct, more obvious way, and trying to get the ratio of photography to painted surface maybe 50-50—to up the ante of paint-ing. In prior work, I am basically painting out figures but it’s on the surface. In this case they are cutout shapes placed above or below the surface. There are three levels. I suppose I’m borrowing a little bit from [early-twentieth-century Swiss artist] Jean Arp with multiple planes.

In this series, the imagery focuses on stressful situations.

Again I am solving several problems with one move. I went to silent films, Harold Lloyd’s [as a visual source], because there’s no sound and it’s all about physical comedy. The usual physical comedy is about pratfalls, awkward positions, that



8 John Baldessari, Bloody Sundae, 1987. Black-and-white photo-graphs with vinyl paint mounted on board, 93 x 65 ½ in. Private collection



72 Spring 2005

sort of thing. The interesting thing about when you get those awkward poses and obliterate face and clothing and just make it one shape, it becomes an image that might be a person and might not be a person, it’s somewhere in between. That’s what attracted me.

So the duress is not only the stressful condition of the depicted figure, but the viewer’s stress in not being able to deci-pher or interpret the image.

Good point. I often like to present an image of stability, but with something in

9 John Baldessari, Duress Series: Person Holding onto Pole Attached to Exterior of Tall Building, 2003. Digital photographic print with acrylic on sintra board, 60 x 60 in. Private collection



73 American Art

the image that’s disruptive. I have a hard time with perfect order [laughter].

This is evident in your Intersection Series and Overlap Series (figs. 10 and 11), which further challenge the sanctity of the frame and image.

What I was trying to do was to get some slippage. In prior works, I’m building but images are always adjacent. In the Overlaps I’m letting them slide over one another instead of stopping at the edge. The same thing in Intersections, where images connect, creating something akin to a double exposure and you have the imagery of one affecting the imagery of the other. Because of this double exposure, it’s creating these strange shapes and I use this as an opportunity to paint, since it’s very evocative. What I’m doing is con-structing a world in which I can operate, and I choose different worlds. The long horizontal in Intersection Series: Seascape with Onlookers (Concerned) comes out of movie imagery and the vertical comes from nature. When I overlap one with the other it creates this ambiguous world that is a mélange of the two worlds. It’s fused, somehow making this third world. That’s where I feel it’s very suggestive of abstract shapes and forms, and that’s a playground for me to paint in. Similarly, in The Overlap Series: Street Scene (With Cosmic Event), the planet with a trail comes from a Buck Rogers movie and the bottom

10 John Baldessari, Intersection Series: Seascape with Onlookers (Concerned), 2002. Digital color and black-and-white photographic prints with acrylic on sintra board, 85 x 69 in. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York



74 Spring 2005

image is a maudlin scene in front of my studio. It’s sort of like When Worlds Collide [the 1951 science fiction film], and this gives me this opportunity to paint.

Let’s shift gears at this point and talk about your position in the art world. You’re a born-and-bred, committed resi-dent of Southern California, an artist who uses images from Hollywood films that are very American, and yet during the early decades of your career your art received a far stronger reception in Europe than in America (fig. 12).

At the time I emerged in Europe, there was a great interest in American art, period. It was a fascination with American culture, especially in Germany. It could have been one dealer, Konrad Fischer, who was incredibly instrumental in developing a generation of artists like

Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, and on and on and on. And the joke—well, it wasn’t a joke—was that no European artist could get a show in New York, and they were bitter. Of course, they came back with a vengeance. The only two I remember were Joseph Beuys, who did his show with the coyote [I Like America and America Likes Me, René Block Gallery, 1974], and Ulrich Ruckriem, who had a sculpture show at Paula Cooper [1972].

Even earlier, in 1961, French artist Yves Klein had a show with Leo Castelli, which didn’t go over well. It was also presented at Virginia Dwan’s Gallery in Los Angeles. Did it have an effect on you?

In fact I was just quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that when I’d seen the blue paintings [by Klein], it made me completely reassess what I was doing and the result was that I stopped paint-ing [laughter]. All the paintings looked identical—same size, same blue. I said, “Well, if this is painting, then I’m doing something wrong.”

Did Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibit of paintings with silkscreened photographs

11 John Baldessari, The Overlap Series: Street Scene (With Cosmic Event), 2000–2001. Color digital photographic prints with acrylic on sintra board, 34 ½ x 82 in. Private collection



75 American Art

from popular culture, also shown at Virginia Dwan’s in 1961, influence your thinking?

Well, I certainly knew his work, either by reproduction or seeing it, and con-sciously had to steer, navigate through Rauschenberg and [Andy] Warhol. While I was intrigued with using the photograph and intrigued with using it on canvas because canvas is a signal that it’s art, I didn’t want to use silkscreen because I knew I would be immediately identified with Rauschenberg or Warhol. So I decided to use this new liquid photographic emulsion, which was not a reproduction, not a mechanical reproduc-tion technique.

So pop art played an instrumental role in your history?

I never thought that pop art was more or less significant. I identified with everything that was not painting because that’s what I wanted to get away from. Especially in New York, there was a line in the sand. Painters were on that side and everybody we call minimal or conceptual artists were over on this side. You could actually see the divisions in Max’s Kansas City, the very famous artists’ bar. One side of the room—painters; the other side—minimal and conceptual artists; the back room—Warhol. That’s the way it was.

My socializing at Max’s was with Bob Smithson, Richard Serra, Richard Long, Konrad Fischer, Lawrence Wiener, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Ryman. I didn’t know any pop artists until much later. At that time, Rauschenberg was kind of considered an old-fashioned artist. I remember one evening, at a big table with most of those artists and some Europeans, like Daniel

12 John Baldessari in his Santa Monica, California, studio with new work for the Deutsche Guggenheim, 2004



76 Spring 2005

Buren and Hanne Darboven, we were talking about a show somewhere in the world that we were all in. Rauschenberg happened to be at the table because he was a good friend of Mel Bochner—Mel had been working for him. Robert said, “Well, I’m not in the show,” and Konrad Fischer said, “Bob, that’s because you’re not relevant.” You could’ve heard a pin drop. Then Mel, trying to be diplo-matic, said, “Bob, Conrad’s bad with his English, it’s not what you thought he meant.” And Konrad said, “No, I said he was not relevant.”[laughs]

This issue of being in one group or another has also been raised with regard to your work in terms of distinctions made between artists who were con-sidered “pure conceptualists” and those who might be called “image conceptualists.”

The only pure conceptualist was Kosuth, and he was self-appointed. There was a wing, Mel Ramsden and some of the Art & Language people, who made very rigor-ous and pure conceptual art. I remember Doug Huebler telling me of a conversation in which Kosuth said it should be radical conceptual art. Doug dismissed it, and I said what would you call that, radicon? [laughter]. Kosuth was calling me a pop artist at the time. To him, I wasn’t relevant.

You once commented about the inspira-tion you derived from what you saw and the people you met at Documenta 5 in 1972, a landmark exhibition focusing on Arte Povera, conceptual, and minimalist art. You were included. That same year, you had shows in Brussels, London, Milan, Paris, Florence, Amsterdam, Rome, and Düsseldorf. But at that point you hadn’t had very many exhibitions in the United States.

I had one in New York with Richard Feigen [1970], and one in L.A. with Molly Barnes [1968], and another with Eugenia Butler [1970]. With Documenta 5, well, I felt like I had come home. I didn’t feel strange anymore. Here I am, at night talking with people like Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and the Bechers [Bernd and Hilla].

Did you know these people before? And their work?

No, no. I never knew Richter’s art. Konrad had a piece in his apartment, where I stayed. It was the painting of the nude descending a staircase. It seemed so unlike Konrad and he just said it was by some guy he went to school with.

How did someone like Fischer—fresh out of art school and using his apartment as a gallery—become so successful?

Having a dealer who is an artist, that’s pretty attractive, and Konrad had his own style, a style like he didn’t care but

13 John Baldessari, Concerning Diachronic/Synchronic Time: Above,

On, Under (With Mermaid), 1976. Retouched black-and-white photo-graphs mounted on board, 28 ¾ x 27 ¾ in. Museum of Contempo-rary Art, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg



77 American Art

he cared. I remember one morning at breakfast, he was reading the paper and commented on Ileana Sonnabend, who had her gallery in Paris where she was showing all the American pop artists. He said, “Oh, Ileana, she’s the most powerful dealer in Europe.” Then he raised his fist in the air and said, “Soon I’ll be the most important and powerful dealer.”

Speaking of Sonnabend, in 1972, you began a twenty-seven-year relationship with her as your main dealer. How did the association come about?

I was at the Cologne Art Fair with Konrad and she came up to me and asked if I would be interested in showing with her. I thought she meant New York, since by that time Richard Feigen had shifted from contemporary art to the impressionists, and I had no gallery in New York. It turned out she wanted to represent me worldwide. I’m not a good businessperson, and, as you pointed out, I had quite a few galleries and didn’t do very well just keeping track of everything. The idea of having one central gallery that others would work with naively appealed to me. When I say naively, it turned out that none of the galleries would continue showing me after I signed on with Sonnabend.

Although you had an extraordinary response from Europe, your hometown was slow in responding to your art. Not until 1976 did you have the show with James Corcoran. Then there was an exhibit at the L.A. Institute of Contemporary Art in 1980, a New Museum [New York] survey show that reached the Long Beach Museum in 1982, and your first exhibit with Margo Leavin in 1984. You were a living legend, a high-profile international artist, one of the most influential teachers at hotshot Cal Arts—and yet your work was barely visible in your own backyard. Amazingly, you weren’t in the 1981 exhibition

Southern California Artists: 1940–80 at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, and when L.A. MOCA opened in 1983 with an inaugural show highlighting the same years, you weren’t included there either!

I had heard about L.A. MOCA going around to visit artists, but no one ever came to my studio. I do have a couple of stories I could relate to that. I remember when Kasper Konig did this show in Cologne called Westkunst, a very landmark show [in 1981], he said, “I hope you don’t mind, we have a West Coast section with you and Bob Irwin and Bruce Nauman.” I said, “No, I think whatever you want to do, Kasper, is fine. I’ve got to tell you there is a show on in L.A. right now of Los Angeles artists and I’m not in it, but if you want to call me a West Coast artist, that’s fine.” I always thought I was not a product of Hollywood, but people would say, “Well you must be since you live here.” At the same time I remember one comment when I began to show my early work around the galleries in L.A. and New York was, “You know, you’re a more European artist.” I had no idea what that meant, and all I could just think was, “Well, I’m a first-generation American [Baldessari’s mother emigrated from Denmark and his father was Italian], maybe there’s something in my upbring-ing that causes me to do what I do here.”

In a review of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, David Joselit noted that many young artists were “exploring painterly issues through references to film and mass media.” Do you feel an affinity with this generation?

What’s the old phrase about a shark being the last to criticize salt water? It may be all around and I may not see it. Art comes out of art. I obviously come out of Kurt Schwitters, John Heartfield, and God knows what. Picabia too. And two other artists I admire greatly are Matisse and Giotto. And Goya.



78 Spring 2005

Let’s turn to the importance of your teaching. You were trained as an art teacher and you’ve taught at every level—young kids, high school, college. Teaching has also been a subject of your art from the beginning, when you did the Art Lesson painting and text paint-ings, which related to art manuals and art practices. You’ve said you always feel there’s a dialogue between the artist and teacher in you.

I believe that art should communicate (fig. 14). There’s a great connection between teaching and art because they’re both about effectively communicating and making contact. It’s not just saying something, hoping or assuming it’s going to be absorbed. You don’t know. It’s just getting an idea across—being accessible to the most astute audience or student, and not being esoteric or opaque to the less informed.

When you started teaching at the University of California, San Diego [UCSD] in 1968, was Paul Brach responsible for getting you more involved with the local art and gallery scene?

Not with the Los Angeles scene, no. I was teaching high school, in the community college, and at UC extension school in San Diego. UCSD wanted to have an art department and Paul was elected to set it up. One of his first jobs was to familiar-ize himself with the extension staff, so that’s how I met him. We had a lot of the same sensibility—he loves to tell stories, I love to tell stories. I began to meet him at other social events in San Diego, and then, out of the clear blue sky, he called me up and said, “Would you like to come teach?” More money, less time, better students—it was a godsend. Everybody else he had hired was out of New York, so suddenly I began to have this New York contact. Especially helpful was David Antin, the poet—we shared an office—who connected me with a lot of Fluxus artists in New York. I had already made some forays into New York, but they [UCSD colleagues] gave me a lot of names. And then via New York, I began to show in Europe with Konrad Fischer and others.

In 1970 you moved from UCSD to Cal Arts, arriving in its inaugural years when lots of interesting people were on the faculty.

Yes, exactly. Paul was hired by Cal Arts and asked if I would teach for him there and I said yes.

Max Kozloff was there. Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik and his assistant Shuya Abe, who was very important, Alison Knowles, Emmet Williams, and then the painters, Paul, Mimi Shapiro, Alan Hacklin—we hired him later—and Judy Chicago, who I think was there from the start or soon thereafter.

14 John Baldessari, Two Languages (Begin), 1989. Black-and-white photographs and vinyl paint, 109 x 115 in. Private collection



79 American Art

No minimalists?

No. Again there was bifurcation. Allan and I were on one side and all the paint-ers were on the other. When students came in, they chose one side or another. A lot of people who came in as paint-ers defected to the conceptual side, like David Salle, Matt Mullican, and Jack Goldstein. Some remained painters, like Ross Bleckner and Eric Fischl.

Your renown as a teacher derives greatly from your openness, encouraging stu-dents to follow their own modes. You also urge students to explore the work of many different artists. To this end, you invited a stream of guest artists to Cal Arts.

I made it a mission to bring in as visitors only European or New York artists. I

thought we had enough L.A. aesthetic and I wanted to introduce another way—probably my way of striking back. I didn’t have any acceptance in L.A. anyway, so I drew on all the contacts I’d made in Europe and New York and tried to make Cal Arts kind of a watering hole for them.

And these artists would come for a day, a week, a month? Would they teach classes, or do crits in the studios?

Whenever they wanted. Crits or talk, depending on how long they stayed. Sometimes they stayed a whole term, like Vito Acconci, Yvonne Rainier, Richard Artschwager, and Laurie Anderson. Sometimes a week. That’s another lesson I learned: if you want artists you’ve got to make it very pliable.

As we know from history, your pres-ence at Cal Arts and the visiting artists you brought in played a seminal role in shaping several generations of artists who have acquired international stature.

Here’s a case in point. I have Daniel Buren around. He’s talking and wants to do a project in Los Angeles where he puts stripes on billboards and bus stops. Who did I arrange for a driver? David Salle. Now that must’ve had some effect—on both of them.

Teaching played a role in a classic conceptual work you did in 1971 for an exhibition at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. You couldn’t go there, so you sent instructions for students to write on the wall: “I will not make any more boring art” (fig. 15).

They were invited to do this. It wasn’t a demand.

Was the phrase a response to your own previous work, a warning to the students, or a comment on the current art scene?

15 John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971. Installation. Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax



80 Spring 2005

I think all. At the time, I was very much interested in language, but what I saw as a bad road to travel on was making the language very academic and boring. I thought artists could deal with language but in a nonboring fashion. I remem-bered I had scribbled “I will not make any more boring art” in my notebook. It struck me that it was like one of those elementary school punishments inflicted on young kids, like “I will not throw rocks in the playground.” You know it’s not going to cure you if you write it enough times.

Did your instructions to the students tell them to write the phrase numerous times so it covered the whole gallery like wallpaper?

Frankly, I thought the gallery was going to be bare and that it would just be an intellectual exercise! Sometimes you strike a nerve, you just don’t know.

Your interest in creating nonboring art with language also produced the ironic, absurdist video Teaching a Plant the Alphabet (fig. 16).

It was a response to my surroundings, the intellectual climate, the cultural climate. One, I was certainly aware of Joseph Beuys’s teaching and his famous performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare [1965]. Also back then people thought they could talk to plants. You might start out in a very elemental fashion and teach the plant the alphabet first and then simple words and so on [laughs]. In the video, you don’t see me, just my hand holding up the alphabet card. They were big flash cards. It’s my voice. I’m saying: “A. A. A. A.” I’m sure there’s a set interval designating how many times I repeat it. Then “B. B. B. B.” I was aware of and actually owned the Joseph Beuys record where he was saying: “Ja. Ja. Ja. Ja.” And then: “Nein.

16 John Baldessari, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, 1972. Film still from black-and-white video, 30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

17 John Baldessari, Aligning: Balls, 1972. Variable number of color photographs and chalk line, 3 ½ x 5 in. each. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York



81 American Art

Nein. Nein. Nein.” And: “Ja. Ja. Ja.” So it’s kind of a response to that.

But pushing his mysticism into a realm of absurdity. The absurd also shaped various series you made based on repeti-tive image photographs of mundane actions. For example, Aligning: Balls (fig. 17).

I’ll tell you how that work started. There was an exhibition, probably the first exhibition, or one of the first, of conceptual art in New York at the Modern [Museum of Modern Art, in 1971]. It was called Pier 18, and various artists were invited down to this deserted pier. The photographers [Harry] Shunk and [John] Kender would be there at the artists’ disposal and anything you would want to do they would record. Those photographs would comprise the show. I was well aware of their reputation, and my strategy was to prevent them from making beautiful photographs. I had this rubber ball and I would bounce it on the pier and say, “All you have to do is to get the image of the ball in the center of the photograph.” I figured they’d be so busy doing that that they couldn’t compose. I went on with that idea, using it as a device.

In Aligning: Balls, I’m doing the same thing, bouncing or throwing the ball in the air and trying to get it captured. That’s part of it, but the real thing is that I’m getting background information that I would not normally compose. It’s a kind of a net for getting information that you wouldn’t because of your own aesthetic taste. So these are photographic shots that I would never take. When I first installed the photographs, I made a pencil line on the wall that went through the balls making them go up and down. It [the alignment] was a disrup-tive technique.

A sense of order and disorder both, of having a system and changing in mid-stream to another system or no system. Was this at all a critique of the exacti-tude of minimalism and its geometric rigors? So much of your art seems to play with minimalism and challenge its severity.

Probably. Here the repetition is a way of escaping the frame, raising the suggestion that it goes beyond any kind of confine-ment. You’re always going to have rules. You just have one set of rules displacing another set of rules. I always want to find the weak link in something.

Photo Credits 60, 62 (both), 65, 66, 68, 71, 72,

74, 76, 78, 79, Courtesy of John Baldessari and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; 75, Courtesy of John Baldessari, Photo by Analia Saban



Conceptual Alchemy

Documents

Transcript of Conceptual Alchemy