John Baldessari

Born in 1931 in National City, California, Baldessari graduated from San Diego State College in 1953 with a BA in art education and in 1957 with a MA in painting. Yet, Baldessari made his mark on education as a teacher, first at the California Institute of Art from 1970-88 and then at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1996-2005. Having taught the likes of Mike Kelly, David Salle and Tony Oursler, among others, Baldessari’s teaching is credited for helping build the art scene in LA. 

Baldessari began his career as a semi abstract painter in the 1950s, but quickly grew disenchanted with handiwork, both his own and the overall concept of it. This culminated in 1970 when he famously took all of his abstract and landscape paintings produced between 1953-66 to a crematorium in San Diego where he burnt them to ash. Baldessari spoke of the event as a ‘very public and symbolic act, like announcing you’re going on a diet in order to stick to it’. This act, which has since been referred to as a conceptual art piece titled ‘Cremation Project’, is often cited as the moment in which Postmodernism laid Modernism to rest. 

This stunt had much to owe to the antics of Duchamp, an artist whose retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum he attended in 1963. The ironic tone of the Dadaists became Baldessari’s aid throughout his career, which he used to infuse Conceptual Art with a lightness and save it from its perceived high mindedness. 

In 1966, Baldessari began experimenting with alternative media and started his series of text paintings. Beginning as works which lifted text from art history, the series would incorporate puns and juxtapositions between image and text. This includes ‘Wrong’ (1966-88), a photograph of the artist standing in front of a palm tree with the word ‘WRONG’ written below. This was partly inspired by photography manuals which urge against photographing people in front of trees, a composition which makes it look like a tree is growing from the subject’s head. It also ironically points to the basic tenants of modern art which dictate that there are no universal standards to artmaking. 

In the 1980s, Baldessari’s signature technique – the dot – was born. He started producing collages using mainly news photos and Hollywood movie stills. Playing around with round white stickers used for price tags, Baldessari began sticking them over the faces in the photos. In doing so, he challenges the way viewers approach images. Typically, our eyes go directly to the faces, but he directs us to look at elements like arms and legs to consider body language. 

Baldessari continued to interrogate questions of viewing and the concepts of art history across his career, even overtly paying tribute in his final years to the Old Masters by appropriating the forms of the likes of Giotto and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Until his death in 2020, the artist consistently produced compelling work which directed viewers to look beyond the obvious.