John Baldessari: when destroying your own art becomes art
John Baldessari was a highly influential figure in the Los Angeles art world, one who spearheaded a conceptual art movement by incorporating wit and humour in his work at a time when it was more fashionable to create high-minded, self-serious art.
Having started out as an abstract painter in the 1950s, his early work lent itself far more to deep philosophical questions than the dry humour featured in his later pieces.
Baldessari’s first works were strictly textual, simply words plastered on a canvas. He’d handpaint rhetorical questions – such as 1967’s piece: ‘Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?’.
But he soon realised hand painting these words took away the power he intended to give them, so he settled on printing them instead, removing any of his own influence so the words spoke for his artistry. ‘A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE’ was his 1967 effort, setting up Baldessari for a career that would be coloured not by conceptual art but by conceptual humour within his art.
On what drove him to push boundaries, he said: “My mission for my own art was to break the certain ‘no-no’s’ and ‘taboos’ for galleries. One: that you never saw photographs in art galleries, they were always in photo galleries. So, I wanted to do that – photography as a tool that an artist can use. Then, I was very much interested in using language as a tool for art and just information, rather than something visual.”
While talking about his creative use of language and combined elements of photography, he said wryly: “Both of those battles have been won.”
His boredom with his own concept-driven work started to show in 1968 when he hired a sign painter to add a caption to his Artforum cover that read: “This is not to be looked at.” In 1970, he drove that statement to new heights when he decided to destroy all the paintings he’d done from May 1953 to March 1966.
Baldessari took them to a San Diego funeral home to cremate them – creating the piece he is best known for: ‘The Cremation Project’. Folding the smoky embers into what resembled charred cookie dough, he displayed the baked art in a glass jar in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in a seminal show of conceptual art titled ‘Information’.
What couldn’t be moulded into dough was kept on his bookshelf, held in a bronze urn shaped like a book. ‘The Cremation Project’ was an obvious comment on the death of a style that no longer severed him, launching Baldessari into a new phase of artwork, ushered in by his subsequent work, titled ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’.
His next artistic phase saw him embrace a far wider range of mediums, which included text-based art as seen in his early work, but also: videos, photography, prints, and various installations. His reflection on ‘The Cremation Project’ was typically dry, with him explaining it was a very public and symbolic act – sort of “like announcing you’re going on a diet in order to stick to it.”
