John Baldessari, the Californian conceptual artist known for his witty and provocative image-making, has died aged 88.
Baldessari was known for countering what he saw as a po-faced conceptual art scene with colour and humour. He once videoed himself being forced to write lines in a notebook: “I will not make any more boring art.” Such pieces were devised in the 1970s, after Baldessari had grown so disillusioned with his painted works that he took them to a San Diego funeral home and had them incinerated. He called the work The Cremation Project. Baldessari then baked the ashes into cookies and exhibited them at the seminal 1970 show Information at Moma in New York. After this, he felt free to embrace a wider palette beyond painting, working with text, video, photo collage and sculpture, among other forms. Recently, he had turned his attention to the world of emojis, blowing them up on canvases in a playful exploration of one of his key fascinations – the intersection between images and words. “How can you not be interested in emojis?” he told the LA Times in 2017. “They just look so stupid!”
Born John Anthony Baldessari in National City, California, Baldessari studied at San Diego State College before taking various teaching jobs, including one at a camp for juvenile delinquents. His teaching experience was directly referenced – and mocked – in 1972’s Teaching a Plant the Alphabet, in which he held up flash cards of letters in front of an uninterested pot plant.
Baldessari’s feelings of being constricted by painting became clear before his bonfire ceremony. In the mid-60s he produced What Is Painting, which adorned a beige canvas with the text: “DO YOU SENSE HOW ALL THE PARTS OF A GOOD PICTURE ARE INVOLVED WITH EACH OTHER, NOT JUST PLACED SIDE BY SIDE? ART IS A CREATION FOR THE EYE AND CAN ONLY BE HINTED AT WITH WORDS.”
Ideas interested him more than craft, and over a career spanning seven decades he gained a reputation for being one of the world’s most important and influential conceptual artists.
“I think, maybe too optimistically, that art is a language in itself, and people anywhere can get it,” he told the Guardian in 2017.
Baldessari was also instrumental in turning the Los Angeles art scene into a force. He taught the likes of David Salle, Barbara Bloom, Jack Goldstein and Meg Cranston and held posts at the California Institute of the Arts (1970 to 1988) and the University of California, Los Angeles (1996 to 2005).
As part of a 2010 New Yorker profile he recalled meeting Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman at a party: “[They] came up to me, and Cindy said, ‘You know, we couldn’t have done it without you.’”
Between 2009 and 2011, a retrospective of Baldessari’s work visited London’s Tate Modern, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then Moma. President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Arts in 2014.
