Forever Provocative
Los Angeles' John Baldessari
John Baldessari started his career as a semi abstract painter in the 1950s and was evidently not in love with his work. He felt so strongly that he took all of his work in 1970 to a San Diego funeral home and had them cremated and used the ashes in other works of art.
He felt free to embrace a wide range of mediums including videos, photography, sculpture, prints and returned to painting. He entered the realm of conceptual art with a rebellious attitude and a self challenge to do something new with color, structure, messaging, and technique. He also ignited the Los Angeles art scene along with Ed Ruscha. John Baldesssari passed away last week at the age of 88 in Los Angeles. Oddly — but much of what John did was odd and unexpected — he had granted an obituary interview to The New York Times in 2008 and said, “It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing. I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t this be art?”
We would love to tour his collection of saved bits and pieces and objects for use in his art and ask the same questions he did.
He has been called, “…arguably America’s most influential conceptual artist,” by Christopher Kight of the Los Angeles Times. We couldn’t agree more. We will miss his vision and pluck to do art as he saw it. Our staff assembled our very favorite works of art by the great serial inventor John Baldessari. We close with something John Baldessari liked to say to his students, “Don’t look at things – look in between things.”
