John Baldessari (Painter) – Overview, Biography

Name:John Baldessari
Occupation: Painter
Gender:Male
Birth Day: June 17,
1931
Age: 91
Birth Place: National City, California,
United States
Zodiac Sign:Cancer

John Baldessari

John Baldessari was born on June 17, 1931 in National City, California, United States (91 years old). John Baldessari is a Painter, zodiac sign: Cancer. Nationality: United States. Approx. Net Worth: Undisclosed.

Net Worth 2020

Undisclosed
Find out more about John Baldessari net worth here.

Family Members

#NameRelationshipNet WorthSalaryAgeOccupation
#1Tony Baldessari Children N/A N/A N/A
#2Annamarie Baldessari Children N/A N/A N/A

Physique

HeightWeightHair ColourEye ColourBlood TypeTattoo(s)
N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

Biography

Biography Timeline

1959

In 1959, Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He taught for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level. When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968. At UCSD he shared an office with David Antin. In 1970, Baldessari moved to Santa Monica, where he met many artists and writers, and began teaching at CalArts. His first classes included David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Ken Feingold, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, and Troy Brauntuch. While at CalArts, Baldessari taught “the infamous Post Studio class”, which he intended to “indicate people not daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone, that there might be some other kind of class situation.” The class, which operated outside of medium-specificity, was influential in informing the context for addressing a student’s art practice at CalArts, and established a tradition of conceptual critique at CalArts that was carried on by artists such as Michael Asher. He quit teaching at CalArts in 1986, moving on to teach at UCLA, which he continued until 2008. At UCLA, his students included Elliott Hundley and Analia Saban.

1966

By 1966, Baldessari was using photographs and text, or simply text, on canvas. His early major works were canvas paintings that were empty but for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. An early attempt of Baldessari’s included the hand-painted phrase “Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?” (1967) on a heavily worked painted surface. However, this proved personally disappointing because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ. Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. The first of this series presented the ironic statement “A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE” (1967).

1968

Baldessari was in over 200 solo shows and 1,000 group shows in his six-decade career. He had his first gallery solo exhibition at the Molly Barnes Gallery in Los Angeles in 1968. His first retrospective exhibition in the U.S. in 1981 was mounted by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, the CAM, Houston, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Museum Folkwang, Essen.

1970

In 1970, Baldessari and five friends burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. The ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies and placed into an urn, and the resulting art installation consists of a bronze commemorative plaque with the destroyed paintings’ birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies. Through the ritual of cremation Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. Thus the act of disavowal becomes generative as with the work of auto-destructive artist Jean Tinguely.

Originally conceived in 1970, Unrealised Proposal for Cadavre Piece would have visitors look through a peep-hole and see a dead male body laid out with its feet towards them inside a climate-controlled vitrine, made to resemble Andrea Mantegna’s painting, The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1480). Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery and Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1, first attempted to realize Baldessari’s idea in 2011 and the resulting paperwork of failed attempts to procure a willing male cadaver was displayed in the exhibition “11 Rooms” at the Manchester International Festival.

1972

Baldessari’s film Police Drawing documents a 1971 performance, Police Drawing Project. In this piece, the artist walked into a class of art students who had never seen him, set up a video camera to document the proceedings, and left the room. Subsequently, a police artist entered and, based on the students’ testimony, sketched a likeness of the artist. In the black-and-white video I Am Making Art (1971), Baldessari stands facing the camera; for nearly 20 minutes, he strikes and then holds various poses — crossing his arms over his chest or swinging one arm out to one side or pointing directly at the lens, for example — and with each new gesture, he states “I am making art.” In a 1972 tribute to fellow artist Sol LeWitt, Baldessari sang lines from LeWitt’s thirty-five statements on conceptual art to the tune of popular songs. Other films include Teaching a Plant the Alphabet and the Inventory videos, also from 1972.

In 1972, Ileana Sonnabend agreed to represent him worldwide. In 1999, after twenty-six years with the Sonnabend Gallery, Baldessari went to Marian Goodman. He has also been represented by Margo Leavin (1984-2013), and Sprüth Magers (since 1998)

1973

Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (1973), in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the “best out of 36 tries”, with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film. The writer eldritch Priest ties John Baldessari’s piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) as an early example of post-conceptual art. This work was published in 1973 by a young Italian publisher: Giampaolo Prearo that was one of the first to believe and invest in the work of Baldessari. He printed two series one in 2000 copies and a second more precious reserved to the publisher in 500 copies. Following Baldessari’s seminal statement “I will not make any more boring Art”, he conceived the work The Artist Hitting Various Objects with a Golf Club (1972–73), composed of 30 photographs of the artist swinging and hitting with a golf club objects excavated from a dump, as a parody of cataloging rather than a thorough straight classification.

1977

A riff on his 1977 color video Six Colourful Inside Jobs, in Thirteen Colorful Inside Jobs (2013) a room is repainted by a performer in a different colour every day for the duration of the exhibition, carefully following the instructions of the artist.

1994

There was an “Artist’s Choice: John Baldessari” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1994, and the artist was invited to curate the exhibition “Ways of Seeing: John Baldessari Explores the Collection” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2006, and he created the exhibition design for “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

2007

Baldessari set a personal auction record when his acrylic-on-canvas piece Quality Material (1966–1968) was sold for $4,408,000 at Christie’s New York in 2007.

2009

Retrospectives of his work were shown at MOCA, Los Angeles, which traveled to SFMOMA, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum and the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal in 1990-92; at Cornerhouse, Manchester, and traveled to London, Stuttgart, Ljubljana, Oslo, and Lisbon in 1995-96 entitled “This Not That”; and Pure Beauty opened at the Tate Modern, London, in 2009 and travelled to MACBA, Barcelona; LACMA, Los Angeles; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through 2011.

2013

In 2013, the California Institute of the Arts opened its John Baldessari Art Studio Building, which features approximately 7,000 square feet of space—much of it used as studio space for art students and faculty.

🎂 Upcoming Birthday

Currently, John Baldessari is 91 years, 5 months and 16 days old. John Baldessari will celebrate 92nd birthday on a Saturday 17th of June 2023.

Find out about John Baldessari birthday activities in timeline view here.

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