Who is he ?
In Venice, Calif., 81-year-old artist John Baldessari respects these definitions — and then turns them upside down. Baldessari is an icon in some art circles, especially in Southern California. Six-foot-seven, with long white hair and a beard, he's been called "a towering figure." Thoughtful and provocative, he has burned his own paintings, put coloured dots over faces in photographs, and covered floors at the Los Angeles County Museum with a carpet of blue sky and puffy white clouds.
Lots of times, a Baldessari makes you smile, then go ... "Huh?" In his sunny studio, the artist says he's trying to slow us down, to look in new ways. "You know, when you're sitting in a dentist office or doctor's office, and you look in a magazine and, and you go, 'What was that?' I would like people to have that feeling, you know, that, 'Wait, what did I just see?' " Baldessari says with a laugh. Like with the colored dots pasted onto photographs — they're actually price stickers. Over the years he'd been collecting black-and-white news images — pictures of people at various civic occasions. |
June 17, 1931 (age 84), John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
BORN: June 17, 1931 (age 84), National City, California, United States |
|
In 1967 John Baldessari exhibited his ‘wrong’ series. He uses a selection of photographic images anchored by text. The most famous of which titled ‘wrong’ shows an image with poor composition juxtaposed by the text ‘wrong’ bellow the photograph. This image references a chapter on composition in a photography techniques book. The irony of the word is what makes the image so appealing, just blatant judgement of the photograph. The message that Baldessari was trying to say in the image is why should we conform to conventional aspects of art or photograph, why does our work have to be judged? The interesting fact is that an idea cannot be wrong or right as it is executed as a personal response. John Baldessari once stated: "You don't want anyone to say 'You can't do that!' But you do get a lot of that in New York. One of the healthiest things about California is - 'Why not?'
|