"It's almost like Doctor Frankenstein": An Interview
with John Baldessari
It's two days before the opening of
Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange) at the
Deutsche Guggenheim. John Baldessari
, 73, is in the middle of putting up his show; pictures are being hung all
around him, and he's discussing the final details of the art edition
planned to appear in time for the show. He's put in a long day, but all in
all he seems quite pleased. When he walks, it becomes clear that he's
limping: he sprained his left ankle a few days ago, and now it's enclosed
in a discreet and elegant brace, black like the jeans and T-shirt he's
wearing. Then, in the conference room, he's suddenly highly concentrated
despite his fatigue. A gentle giant, and - without a question - a pro to
the core. An interview by Ulrich Clewing.
John Baldessari at Deutsche Guggenheim, October 2004
Photo: Maria Morais
Mr Baldessari, in the catalogue I found an
old quotation of yours. You once said that the artists you most admired
were
Giotto and then
Henri Matisse. Why these two painters in particular?
John
Baldessari: I think the reason would be that they are both paradoxes.
They might look very simple, but they're complex. They offer something for
the most average viewer and for the most sophisticated viewer at the same
time. It seems like a paradox, but it also seems to work. Their work can
be communicated on both levels. I think that's a very rare quality, and I
suspect for any artist it would be inspiring to do that. So in a way they
became role models for me.
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Henri Matisse: Goldfish and Sculpture
(Le Poissons), 1911
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Giotto di Bondone: The Sacrifice of
Joachim, Scrovegni-Chapel in Padua, 1305/06
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Some critics say you're a pop artist, others regard you
as a conceptual artist. Where would you locate yourself?
Well,
I'd locate myself as an artist [laughs], but I understand the question.
The categories are difficult, because they often don't quite hit the
point. For instance, if I would ask you the names of impressionist
artists, you'd probably start with
Monet and then you could find that nobody else would seem to fit into
that. A close friend of mine is
Claes Oldenburg, and I once called him a pop artist. And he said, no, I'm
just an artist. I don't know, but it seems that nobody likes to be in that
kind of category. But I will say that I emerged around the late sixties,
and so you're either a minimal artist or a conceptual artist or a painter.
As I'd given up painting, I seemed to be classified as a conceptual
artist. But I wouldn't choose that. The
Hayward Gallery once showed my work and included me in Pop Art. People
like to put you into categories. That's the way it is.
You
started your career as a painter. And then you stopped. Why?
Well, I didn't have any problems with painting. The way I've been taught
art was: art was painting, and painting was art. But after a while I began
to think beyond that. I thought that I could be more into art than just
painting and sculpture.
For your work Somewhere Behind
Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange), you used film stills from
movies. What's the idea behind that?
John Baldessari: from the series Black Dice, 1982 Deutsche Bank Collection
When I first started using
film stills, it was just because they were cheaply available. And what I
was interested in was what you would call a profound imagery. It didn't
necessarily have to be from film, it could also be from a photo album or
on the street or in the newspaper. In other words, it would be imagery
that's out in the world, and then you adapt it to your own ways. It's like
words in a dictionary: you just use them, rather than make up your own
words.
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By that time, I was living in
Los Angeles, where the movies are made. I found a place where film stills
could be bought very cheaply. But I actually mixed them as well with
photographs from newspapers. Then I realized that the movie stills fell
into categories. Of course that seems obvious: the ones with guns would
mean violence, people kissing would be love and so on. In the end, they're
all clichés. I found the attempt particularly appealing to put some
meaning back into something that has been completely emptied of meaning.
It's almost like Dr.
Frankenstein [laughs]. You try to make something come alive again, but
it's never going to be alive as it was before. That's not a bad metaphor.
John Baldessari: Beast (Orange)
Being Stared At: With Two Figures (Green, Blue), 2004
©2004 John Baldessari
You made a series
of
works with photographs printed on canvas.
The dominant movement
when I gave up painting was
Abstract Expressionism. And the normal complaint you hear is that a child
could paint like that. I just got tired of that, and so I thought, why not
give people what they want? To me, it seemed the most obvious thing would
be photographic imagery and text, words that you see in the magazines or
newspapers. That would be more in their immediate experience. That's why I
started doing that. I put those photographic pieces on canvas because it
made them into art. If it's canvas, you don't even have to have anything
on it and people still think it's art.
John Baldessari: Econ-O-Wash, 14th and Highland,
National City, Calif., 1967-68
©2004
John Baldessari
I'd like to name a few
topics now and ask you to tell me what you think about them. What comes to
your mind when you hear the word "photograph?"
Well,
I come out of painting, so as a painter I'm an artist using brushes and
paint. And if I pick up a camera, I'm an artist using a camera. Anyway, I
think there's only a very small difference. As a student, I remember
finding it strange that there would be a history of art and a history of
photography. I thought, why couldn't they just join. In the end, it's all
visual images. I would say that a photograph is just a visual statement,
like a painting is. It's also an arrangement in a formalistic way, of
lights and darks and colors, just like a painting. They're only different
materials.
What about the term color?
As a painter,
you normally use color in an intuitive fashion: So much green here, so
much red here. I wanted to go against that. I tried to use color just as a
signal, like a colored coding. Red might be dangerous, and green might be
safe. Like in a
color wheel you see in a show: red will be here, orange will be here, so
you don't have to think much about it.
Fissures (Orange) and Ribbons (Orange, Blue):
With Multiple: Figures (Red, Green, Yellow),
Plus Single Figure (Yellow) in Harness (Violet) and
Balloons (Violet, Red, Yellow, Grey), 2004
©2004 John Baldessari
And beauty?
Oh, "beauty" used to be a dirty word as a conceptual artist. In the last few
years it's become OK again to talk about beauty. I think there's nothing
wrong with it. Everybody has his own definition about what's beautiful. I
think the English critic
John Ruskin once said that he regarded artists as dangerous because
garbage on the street looked beautiful to them.
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