John Baldessari remembered in 5 artworks

Last night, the art world went into mourning following the announcement that John Baldessari, pioneer of conceptual art, had passed away at the age of 88. Emerging onto the scene in the late 1950s, Baldessari’s particular brand of art stood in stark contrast to the pomp and bravado of Abstract Expressionism, which had defined American art of the previous decade.  Instead, the Californian artist and educator placed the very idea of what art was under the microscope, namely the arbitrary way in which an art object is imbued with meaning, and particularly the way in which image and text work in tandem to create meaning. While this concept may sound dully intellectual, somehow Baldessari brought lightness and humour to his pursuits. His madcap approach can be observed in one of his most famous text-based works—a framed sign hilariously stating: “Everything Is Purged from This Painting But Art, No Ideas Have Entered This Work.” Such a work sums up Baldessari’s irreverent approach to art, and in doing so his ability to challenge and disturb the foundations that the art world had been built upon. In memory of art’s great mischief maker, we take a look back at some of his most celebrated works.

What is Painting (1966-68)

Starting to work at a time that privileged the artist’s hand and brushstroke immeasurably, Baldessari sought to abandon the status quo as set out by his near contemporaries (figures like Ab Ex heavyweights Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko). To confuse things, Baldessari hired a commercial sign setter to make the lettering on his canvases, thereby upending the notion of the almighty ‘artist’s hand’ altogether.  In this particular text-based work, Baldessari borrowed sentences from an instructional painting manual as a comment on how language has the ability to conjure meaning of it own accord, without any image at all.

Wrong (1967)

In the ‘60s, photography was only beginning to be considered as a fine art medium, and as a result was bound by standards and rules as set out in instruction books. In this famous work, Baldessari questioned the ‘rule’ put forward in such manuals that photographers should not shoot their subject against trees. In response, Baldessari stood against a palm tree and photographed himself—standing at an impressive 6 foot 7 inches—and produced a deliberately grainy image. In doing so, the artist questioned the arbitrary way in which images are decided as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, or rather just how it is that an artwork comes to be judged as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art.

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971)

Baldessari’s desire to question the notion of artistic authorship reached its boldest and fullest potential in this installation created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the early 1970s. Baldessari, then a teacher at the California Institute of the Arts, was unable to travel to Nova Scotia, so he instructed his students to do the work on his behalf and print the phrase “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’ on the walls of the college’s gallery. Not only does the work put the role of the artist under pressure, but, as per all of Baldessari’s work, it asks how an artwork comes to be defined as such. For Baldessari, art is much like language: the rules are subjective and meaning is passed down generation to generation, but taken as fact. Instead, Baldessari poses that meaning, be it with regard to language or images, is not fixed but open to interpretation.

Dots series (mid-1980s—)

Baldessari’s mischievousness was never without thoughtfulness. In the 1980s, he started a series that arguably would become one of his most recognisable in which he placed colourful dots over figures’ faces in photographs. The premise was not just a playful act of artistic rebellion (which it absolutely was), but  it was also a call to look beyond the most obvious aspect of a photograph: the face. In the age of Instagram algorithms that privilege the human face above all else, Baldessari’s series was incredibly forward-thinking. Leaving only the mundane parts behind, Baldessari forces the viewer to look and make sense of what they may not have noticed before. “I think you really sort of dig beneath the surface and you can see what that photograph is really about, what’s going on,” said Baldessari of the series.

Goya series (1997)

At first glance, this series of blank monochrome photographs could be mistaken for innocuous studies in bland household ephemera—a paperclip, a spindly pair of glasses, a pencil. However, when an image such as a vase of flowers is paired with the phrase “There Isn’t Time”, the viewer is calmly confronted with the prospect of their own mortality. The concept for the series has its roots in art history, riffing on Francisco Goya’s series The Disasters of War (1810-20), in which the Spanish artist matched bleak war scenes with crisp, sardonic titles such as “Y no hay remedio (It cannot be helped.” Like all of Baldessari’s works the series can best be described by what he said of his approach to art himself—making art based on what he thought art should be and “not what somebody else would think art would be. You know, received wisdom, what you would get in school. And so a lot of my work was about questioning this received wisdom.”