"I guess a lot of it's just lashing out, because I didn't know how to be an artist, and all this time spent alone in the dark in these studios and importing my culture and constant questions. I'd say, 'Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?"
John Baldessari
John Baldessari
John Baldessari is known as a Californian artist. Painting was important as a part of his early work. When he emerged, in the early 1960s. But by the end of the decade he began to introduce pre-existing images, often doing so to create riddles. He once said, "I think when I'm doing art, I'm questioning how to do it." His art has shaped his interest in exploring how photographic images communicate. He works with light humor, and with materials that also reflect the influence of Pop art. Baldessari has also been a famously influential teacher. His ideas, and his relaxed and innovative approach to teaching, have made an important impact on many, most notably the so-called Pictures Generation, whose blend of Pop and Conceptual art was prominent in the 1980s.
Baldessari first began to move away from gestural painting when he started to work with materials from billboard posters. It prompted him to analyze how these very popular. It could be argued that his work has never been the same since he started. He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them - from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots - all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating.
He is both a photographer and and an artist. He burnt all his early work and kept the ashes of his work in a book style urn and has kept in safe with him since.
A crucial development in Baldessari's work was the introduction of text to his paintings. It marked, for him, the realization that images and texts behave in similar ways - both using codes to convey their messages. Text began to disappear from his work in the early 1970s, and since then he has generally relied on collage, but his work has continued to operate with the same understanding of the coded character of images. Typically, he collages together apparently unrelated categories of image or motif, yet the result is to force us to recognize that those images often communicate similar messages.
He was born on the 17th June 1931. he is known for combining his photography and art together. He works and lives in Santa Monica and Venice, California. he was first a painter and started to combine text and photography together.