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John Baldessari: King of the Conceptual
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19585 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
1,402 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
Snippets of unrelated conversations overheard on a plane or at a party, the garbled messages emitted by a radio as the desired station is tuned in, the barrage of images that hit the reader of a magazine or the viewer of television as they flip through the pages, punch through the channels: This random sensory overload of daily experience is the stuff John Baldessari's art is made of. Exploring and testing the conventions of everyday life, Baldessari has, since the mid-sixties, rearranged the familiar, combining it in new contexts, scrutinizing life with incisive wit and intellect. Now sixty, this master of visual and verbal parable and paradox is recognized as the seminal contributor to Conceptual Art and text related work that has swept through the United States and Europe in the last twenty years.
In the early 1970s Baldessari was trying to cut through the traditional categories of painting, sculpture, and photography--as well as through such constricting labels as Minimal and Conceptual. As an instructor at the California Institute of the Arts, he spawned a whole generation of artists who have garnered more fame than their teacher. His student list reads like a who's who of artists operating in the high-risk lane--Matt Mullican, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Eric Fischl, David Salle--all of them as fed up with traditional practices of painting and sculpture as Baldessari was. His Post-studio Art course, designed as a catchall for anyone who wasn't doing straight painting or sculpture, brought to campus an international array of artists--Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, Douglas Huebler, among others. Through nearly twenty years of shaping the curriculum and students, Baldessari has become the most significant art teacher in the States since Hans Hoffman opened his New York School in 1933.
The success of Baldessari's former students in the 1980s finally brought him attention in his native land. The retrospective now on view at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art does much to set the record straight about who came first. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the hundred-object show gives Americans a chance to discover what Europeans have long known about Baldessari's role in the genesis of Conceptual Art.
Born and raised in National City--a neither here nor there kind of place locked between San Diego and the Mexican border--Baldessari, the son of European immigrants, grew up slightly outside American society. His unusual height (six feet six inches) set him apart from his peers and he kept to himself, withdrawing into a fantasy world that led him to art. At San Diego State College he majored in art,
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