John Baldessari
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessariis an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth17 June 1931
CountryUnited States of America
bill bit funny sort tries trying
That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting.
although bored denigrate god guess life pound thank trying
I guess I get bored easily, and thank God. I don't want to all my life pound only the same key, although some artists do it very effectively. I'm not trying to denigrate anybody.
art chance last realised
When I went to art school, I was just having fun. I realised that was the last chance I had, and then I would have to get a job.
art thinking people
I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.
art ideas green
A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.
photography painting hybrid
Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.
window dickens felt
I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.
horse fall kissing
What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.
artist glasses snow
I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?
photography photograph
There's no such thing as a bad photograph.
want produce recollection
I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.
desire feels humans
It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood.
thinking want kind
I think I live such a boring life. But I can't imagine any other kind of life, so I guess it's the life I want.
couple teaching college
I was teaching live drawing in a community college and students started zoning in on the face and spending a couple of hours on that and then putting the rest of the body on the face only in the last hour. It didn't work to just tell them, 'Well, you're really not thinking of the body as a totality.' So in desperation I would put a drape over the model's head so they couldn't see it. They had to draw the body and then at the end of the session for an hour I would take the drape off just to try to reverse their procedure.