In Memorium: John Baldessari

Portrait by Michael Tighe. Courtesy of John Baldessari and Mixografia

By Daneal Rozman and Emilie Murphy

John Baldessari, famed and celebrated conceptual artist, died January 2nd at his home in Venice, California. He was 88 years old. 

With a genre-defying aesthetic he once described as “serious unseriousness,” Baldessari is credited with helping to put the Los Angeles art scene on the map and injecting it with his own brand of humor. The Marian Goodman Gallery, which represents Baldessari, Tweeted the following, “It is with immense sadness that I write to let you know of the death of the intelligent, loving and incomparable John Baldessari.”

Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931 to immigrant parents. After receiving a degree in art education followed by a master’s degree in art from San Diego State College, Baldessari began to teach art in junior high schools and community colleges. He later accepted a job at the University of California, San Diego, where he fostered the careers of a star-studded list of contemporary artists. 

Baldessari originally focused on semi-abstract painting before moving towards more experimental works of art, many of which echoed Reneé Magritte’s technique of pairing images and text. 

He is widely known for cremating his traditional paintings in 1970, a public and anti-art act that eventually became its own stand-alone piece. Baldessari mixed some of the paintings’ ashes with cookie dough and exhibited the baked goods at the Museum of Modern Art as part of an exhibition entitled “Information.” Among his other well known acts features a recording of his own hand writing the words “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” on notebook paper over and over again, echoing the grade school punishment of writing lines. 

Later in his career, Baldessari turned to photo collages, eventually finding his signature technique: painting dots over faces in found photographs. The technique invites viewers to look beyond the face of the subject, reminding us to focus on more than just an expression when studying an image. 

In recent years, Baldessari had become a household name, garnering an endless list of awards and recognition. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from Americans for the Arts and, in 2014, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts. Spanning Europe and America, Baldessari’s work was featured in more than 300 solo and 1000 group exhibitions.

Between 2009-2011, a five-decade retrospective on Baldessari’s work that traveled from London’s Tate Modern to LACMA and, eventually, ended at MoMA. Reviewing this exhibition, Los Angeles Times writer Christopher Knight called Mr. Baldessari, “arguably America’s most influential Conceptual artist.”

The words of Knight ring true now more than ever. John Baldessari will be deeply missed and not soon forgotten. 

Read John Baldessari’s interview with Musée Magazine from issue No. 16 Chaos here.