john baldessari

His work often attempts to ironicize contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His art has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.

Body of work and themes

Early text paintings

Baldessari's early major works were canvas paintings that were empty but for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. An early attempt of Baldessari's included the hand-painted phrase "Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?" on a heavily worked painted surface. However, this proved personally disappointing because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ. Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. The first of this series presented the ironic statement "A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE." (1967)

Another work, Painting for Kubler, 1967-68, presented the viewer theoretical instructions on how to view it and on the importance of context and continuity with previous works. The seemingly legitimate art concerns was intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.

Juxtaposing text with images

Related to his early text paintings were his series of canvases that had a photo emulsion image paired with a line of text to play with the way the semantic and the aesthetic interplay and interchange. His photographic California Map Project found physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed. In the Binary Code Series, Baldessari used images as information holders by alternating photographs to stand in for the on-off state of binary code; one example alternated photos of a woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it away.

Another of Baldessari's series juxtaposed an image of an object such as a glass, or a block of wood, and the phrase "A glass is a glass" or "Wood is wood" combined with "but a cigar is a good smoke" and the image of the artist smoking a cigar. These intentionally referred to Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images, and the images similarly were used to stand in for the actual objects, which are themselves the objects and nothing more. However, Baldessari wished to additionally claim that the act of smoking a cigar is an experience that transcends the object itself.

Arbitrary games

Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing 4 Balls in the Air to Get a Square, in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the "best out of 36 tries", with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of film.

Pointing

Much of Baldesarri's work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now, entitled "Examining Three 8d Nails," in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears "cooler, more distant, less important" than the others.

Baldessari's Commissioned Paintings series took the idea of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption "A painting by [painter's name]" to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted.

Awards

• 2006 Certificate of Recognition, the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, Los Angeles, CA.
• 2005 Americans for the Arts, Lifetime Achievement Award, New York, October 11, 2005
• Rolex Mentor and Protégé' Arts Initiative, Honoring, New York, November 7, 2005.
• 2004 American Academy of Arts & Sciences fellowship, Cambridge Massachusetts.
• 2003 “2nd Place Best Show Commercial Gallery National by US Art Critics Association for exhibit at Margo Leavin, 2003
• 2002 “Best Web-Based Original Art,” AICA USA Best Show Awards, 2001/2002 Season.

Los Angeles Institue for the Humanities Fellow, sponsored by the University of Southern California.

• 2000 Artist Space, New York
• 1999 Spectrum-International Award for Photography of the Foundation of Lower Saxony, Germany

College Art Associations Lifetime Achievement Award.

• 1997 Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts, California.
• 1996 Oscar Kokoschka Prize, Austria.
• 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship