Dots on Faces
John Baldessari
“I was getting tired of hearing the complaint ‘My kid could do this’, and ‘We don’t get it'. What’s modern art? Blah, blah, blah.’ And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.” — John Baldessari
While much of the art world uploads its content online, a curatorial initiative in locked-down Berlin has asked artists and cultural producers to put up art on their balconies instead, prompting viewers to put down their phones and go outside for a walk. The artist Olaf Nicolai, who participated in the 2017 documenta in Kassel as well as the Venice Biennale, contributed a small window-based work, sticking three oranges to the glass in reference to John Baldessari and his piece Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) (1973). Baldessari made career of upsetting and deconstructing commonly held expectations of how images function. In the mid-1960s, he was teaching art at a junior college near his home in National City, California, a working-class town near the Mexican border, known for its strip joints and sailors’ bars, with absolutely no art scene to speak of, when he started creating text works, which were simply words painted onto canvas. He started with hand-painted, rhetorical phrases, such as Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN? (1967), but what a young Baldessari was trying to achieve was to objectify language itself. The next logical step therefore was to print, rather than paint the words, thus removing the artists hand entirely. He started on a series of paintings, consisting of lifted short phrases derived from the tomes of contemporary art theory, painted by a professional sign painter in black capital letters. His instructions were explicit: “Don’t do any beautiful calligraphy. I just want this to be information.” A Two-Dimensional Surface Without Any Articulation Is a Dead Experience reads one. Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work, proclaims another — conceptual art mocking conceptual art.
“I was getting tired of people saying my art was like Abstract Expressionism,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Being in National City, where nobody cared what I was doing, I thought, What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks.” Baldessari’s works rebuff the immediate post-World War II modernist trends, explicitly rejecting surrealism and abstract expressionism and the fetishisation of the artist-as-lone-genius. He was on a lifelong battle against “good taste” and his work allows us to smile, if not laugh, embracing the obvious and presenting it to us in a new context, reflecting a wonderful outrageous, yet subtle, sense of humour; the purpose of art, Baldessari emphatically stated, is to keep us “perpetually off-balance”. After the photo-and-text pictures, Baldessari’s work became more ambitious addressing, on many complex levels, issues about art, language, information, games and the world at large. Playful as ever, upon hearing that the New York hard-edge painter Al Held (1928-2005) had (allegedly) said that conceptual art was “just pointing at things,” taking the accusation literally, Baldessari did a series of 14 “Commissioned Paintings”: he took photographs of his friend George Nicolaidis pointing at random, mundane, everyday minutiae that caught the pair’s attention as they strolled through town, then asked various local sign painters — whose skilled technique rivalled many of the conceptual photorealist painters gaining momentum at the time —to reproduce the images as faithfully as possible, finger included. These works are an early and particularly witty example of how Baldessari used sardonic conceptual humour and a fondness for visual jokes to rescue conceptual art from what he saw as its high-minded self-seriousness. “I don’t try to be funny,” he told the artist David Salle, a long-time friend and former student of his, in a 2013 conversation published by Interview. “It’s just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I’m sort of reporting.”
“Eyebrow”, Chromogenic print, flush-mounted to shaped aluminium (2009) by John Baldessari
“Nose Promontory (With Two Women)” (1989) by John Baldessari
In 1957, after obtaining a master’s in art education from San Diego State College, unsure as to whether to define himself as educator or artist, Baldessari enrolled in a studio-art course taught by Rico Lebrun (1900-1964), a charismatic figure in the Los Angeles art world. (ZaSu Pitts, the comedienne, was a fellow-student.) In his final lecture, Lebrun spoke favourably about Baldessari’s work, and then took him aside and said he should think seriously about being an artist. It was the first professional encouragement he had received. On Lebrun’s advice he enrolled at the hallowed Otis Art Institute, in Los Angeles, where he saw a landmark 1963 retrospective for Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps, that sent him down a less traditional route. In 1959, he moved back to National City, and began teaching first at a high school, then at a community college and, one summer, a stint at a rural camp working with juvenile delinquents. (The job for which, he later said, his 6’7” frame came in useful.) Already, Baldessari had an uncanny knack for enticing well-known artists to his classroom, despite the fact that at the time it was an obscure back-water art-school. Before assembled students, he asked the painter Sam Francis (1932-1994) what he found interesting about his down-at-the-heels hometown. “Well, it’s the end of the line,” came the answer. “You can’t get any further from the US than this.”
In the early sixties, Baldessari was still painting on canvas, but his subject matter was becoming increasingly abstract. There are a small group of works from this period that escaped destruction in the “Cremation Project” (largely because they were in his sisters possession at the time) amongst them are Bird #1 (1962), which presents the image of a bird, body, feet, and tail feathers (but not the head) falling through the picture plane (an early example of the artists use of cropping for dramatic effect), and “God Nose”, a visual pun on the phrase “God knows”, that features a dismembered nose floating on an expanse of celestial blue canvas. In New York, Pop and Conceptual art practices had started to take hold, leading to the pre-emptive pronouncement of painting’s death: Joseph Kosuth’s (b. 1945) installation One and Three Chairs (1965), an iconic early example of conceptual art, consists of a folding chair placed between a photographic print of a chair and a printed dictionary definition of “chair”, inviting the audience to consider which of the three was the more “chair”. “I was a painter at the time and I just decided I was on the wrong path.” Baldessari said. “I had to do something very decisive and dramatic that would show myself and my friends that I was on the wrong path and I was not going to paint any longer … I had a feeling that there was more to art than painting; I felt like it could be something else. And I was interested in exploring that.” Baldessari felt stifled and inhibited by the constraints of utilizing traditional mediums, feeling increasingly as though painting in and of itself was tiresome. He knew that he could expand his limits, maybe even the limits of artistic expression, but that his next step couldn’t be tentative; it was, as it turned out, an act of artistic self-immolation, literally decimating any evidence of his earlier painterly hand.
At the time his National City studio was full of unsalable abstract and landscape paintings (some 500 in all, ranging in styles from fauvism to dada) that he’d retained from his former yearning-and-searching mode. At the same time, he had been invited to teach at the newly formed University of California San Diego. “So much of my thinking at that time was trying to figure out just what I thought art was”, Baldessari once said, regarding his works from the late sixties; he was ready to take his practice in a new direction, and so it seemed logical to have the early work cremated. “I thought about Nietzsche and the eternal return,” he said, “and equating the artist with the ‘body’ of his work, and so forth. The problem was that several local mortuaries refused to cremate paintings. I found one finally, but the guy said we had to do it at night.” With the help of friends, Baldessari gathered all his canvases from May 1953, the month of his college graduation, to March 1966, and cut them up. Then, the remnants packed together and loaded into the back of Baldessari’s Ford Econoline van, he drove to the crematorium and had them incinerated. The resulting ashes filled 10 bags, nine adult size, one child size. In honour of the old artworks, he placed a death notice in a local newspaper. He titled the action Cremation Project, yet it proved something of a rebirth. “There was a lot of doubt and anxiety,” Baldessari recalled. “But I breathed a sigh of relief when the crematory door slammed shut.” Now etched in the annals of conceptual art, it’s often cited as the moment postmodernism finally laid modernism to rest.
“Kiss/Panic”, photographs and oil tint on board (1984) by John Baldessari c/o Marian Goodman Gallery
A few weeks after the cremation, Baldessari moved from San Diego to Santa Monica to teach at the California Institute of the Arts (“CalArts”). Around the same time, the charred remnants of his early career were baked into cookies, some of which were displayed at “Information”, the Museum of Modern Art’s ground-breaking 1970 survey of contemporary Conceptual art. Others were placed in an urn, a plaque recording the artist’s name, the birth and death dates of the destroyed work, and a recipe for the ash biscuits. Cremation Project, Corpus Wafers (With Text, Recipe and Documentation) (1970) is now in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. At CalArts, he founded what he called his “post-studio”, where he worked across a range of new media – including films and performance work, such as “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” a 1972 video in which Baldessari is shot in grainy black-and-white, sitting in a chair, reciting each of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five statements on Conceptual art to the tune of popular songs (after the model of Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cole Porter) — “Some Enchanted Evening” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” among others. (This one is now on YouTube.)
A year later the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design had invited him to have an exhibition, but couldn’t afford to pay shipping or travel costs. Instead of sending his work, Baldessari sent instructions to the school in the form of a letter, proposing that the students should write “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” repeatedly across the walls of the gallery, “like punishment”, for the duration of the exhibition (April 1-10, 1971). By enlisting the art students to slavishly write the phrase over and over, Baldessari poked fun at the entire system of art education, which he felt encouraged students to imitate rather than experiment and innovate. The artist also sent along a handwritten page of the phrase, from which the students produced lithographic prints; one of which was bought by the Museum of Modern Art. Baldessari was not present at the “exhibition”, nor at the workshop where the print was made; he simply sent a handwritten page to be reproduced and made a videotape of himself writing the titular phrase on a ruled notebook, for thirteen minutes, like a penance — thus testing notions of authorship and the role of the artist. The artist had removed his hand from the work, and yet, by some strange logic, Baldessari could still be said to be the creator. Through his choice of words “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”, he references the fundamental modernist tension between the word and image that Rene Magritte (1898-1967) had exposed in his shop-sign-style The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (1929) and the cool, spare, self-referential repetitions of the minimalists
Over the next thirty years, the range of Baldessari’s witty and deceptively effortless work gradually silenced persistent attempts to dismiss him merely as a joke artist, with an ardour for amusing visual one-liners (which, in any event, align him with the illustrious tradition of conceptual punsters Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Joseph Kosuth). He evolved his practice through the 1970s into printmaking, films and video (sometimes featuring his students), artists’ books, billboards, public sculpture, photographic montages and yes, paintings, but most of all hybrid forms of these, like text painting. He investigated the use of chance methods with Throwing Three Balls Into the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-six Attempts), a photographic series recording Baldessari’s successive attempts to make a straight line by throwing three or four coloured balls in the air (thus spoofing the swagger of the Pollock myth of a man laying himself bare through his struggle with the elements). He wanted to make work out of things that nobody else would think of making art out of, for e.g. exploring accident and chance in the Choosing series (1971) as a means of avoiding composition or aesthetic decisions; participants were asked to select, much in the manner of game show, any three items — green beans, rhubarb, carrots etc — from similar group. Baldessari would choose one of the three by pointing to it, and a photograph would be taken. In the 1980s, he began working with photo-collages. In one such work, a film noir still, a beautiful woman reclines on a beach, reading a James Joyce biography. Baldessari’s text caption beneath this serene image: “Learn to read.” The artist developed a vivid, skewed world, employing a sort of Dada irony that demonstrated and disclosed the narrative potential of using found or appropriated imagery to explore the associative power of language within the boundaries of a work of art; the viewer can either participate or smile and walk away. Requiring the viewer’s participation is, by implication, also to insist on the egalitarian nature of art.
“Bloody Sundae”, photographs with vinyl paint on board (2002) by John Baldessari c/o Marian Goodman Gallery
Over the course of the twentieth century, the boundaries between art and design have slowly eroded; deliberately blurring the media and institution of art. Like much of the media-conscious art of the post-war period, Baldessari borrows from the immediacy of advertising and graphic design. This blurring of pop culture and high art is exemplified in Two Stares Making a Point But Blocked By a Plane (For Malevich) (1976), in which an appropriated movie still collides, literally, with a white collaged square of card tilted on one corner. The result leaves the two men who were the subject of the original image staring askance at a large abstract shape, thus confounding meaning while also inducing drama. Baldessari liked to tell his students: “Don’t look at things — look in between things.” He would go on to employ the trick of partially covering found images with planes of colour throughout his career, most famously obscuring the faces in found photographs (images from news, stills from Hollywood movies, or advertising campaigns, many of which were bought for 10 cents apiece from a trinket store in Burbank) with red, yellow or blue adhesive circles. His aim was to direct the viewer to focus on accidental elements of the composition in otherwise unremarkable photographs. “A hundred years from now,” Baldessari ruefully noted, “I will probably be remembered as the guy who put dots on faces.”
“Baldessari gave conceptual art a visual language,” as Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., puts it. Lauded as the “master of appropriation” and “a surrealist for the digital age”, he reinvented conceptualism in his own vein of laid-back, irreverent humour; using appropriation, erasure, alteration and montage to create an entirely new meaning out of recombined fragments. On the subject of his series Commissioned Paintings, he said: “I felt that art didn’t have to be about the touch of the artist, you could be an art director, or strategist.” Creative, fun, and cerebral, Baldessari helped transform Los Angeles into a global art capital through his witty image-making and his era-defying tenure at the California Institute of the Arts; where David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Analia Saban, Matt Mullican and Liz Larner were among his students. Baldessari’s work has served as the subject of over two hundred solo exhibitions and saw him elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008. He was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale and received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2014. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he was not afraid of new media, and his work retains a freshness and relevance that many contemporary artists still struggle to match. With the possible exception of Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) (who also works at the intersection of photography, painting and text) no other artist in Los Angeles has done as much to transform the city into a global art capital. While so much early conceptual art tended toward the cold and cerebral, Baldessari’s work was infused with a droll sense of humour — lampooning traditional notions about what was considered “high” art and critiquing the hegemonic rhetoric permeating the art world. Distilling his view of art, Baldessari’s said: “What the artist does is jump-start your mind and make you see something fresh, as if you were a visitor to the moon. An artist breathes life back into stereotypes.”