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
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.
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.
two surface articulation
A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE
smart successful work-out
If you're smart, you abandon the things that didn't work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to be successful.
definitions normal why-not
I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?
photography cameras worst
Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.
photography art figures
I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.
photography photograph
There's no such thing as a bad photograph.
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.
photography painting hybrid
Ideally I would like the work to be a hybrid between painting and photography.
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.