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border="0" style="width: 100%"> <tr> <td style="width:400px;"> <div class="inside_title">FEATURES</div> <div class="inside_title2">Interview with John Baldessari (1973)</div> <div class="inside_subtitle">MOIRA ROTH</div><div class="inside_text"><p><br><b>Edited by Naomi Sawelson</b><br><b>Forward by Micol Hebron</b></p> <p><br><i>Photography theorist Liz Wells once noted that the paradox of fashion is that it has to be simultaneously timeless and timely. I am reminded of this when I read John Baldessari's words and see his art, both of which have sustained historical significance and contemporary insights for over four decades. As one of Baldessari's students in graduate school at UCLA, I found him to be tremendously influential and one of the most supportive mentors I encountered. At 74, he still teaches art at UCLA, continues to exhibit throughout the world, and works out four days a week with a personal trainer.</i></p> <p><br><i>Moira Roth interviewed John Baldessari at his residence in Santa Monica, California, on January 6, 1973, for her University of California at Berkeley dissertation, entitled "Marcel Duchamp and America, 1915-1974." The text below came to X-TRA from Naomi Sawelson, who edited it based on a new transcription of the audiocassettes in Roth's possession. A few excerpts from an earlier (c. 1973) transcription have appeared in the catalogs of Baldessari's retrospective exhibitions at The New Museum, New York (1981) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1990). <sup><a href="#footnotes">1</a></sup> Below is the first publication of an extensive version of Roth and Baldessari's original conversation.</i></p> <p><br><i>I recently interviewed Baldessari as a follow up to the 1973 interview. I asked him about some of the themes that arose in that original conversation with Moira Roth, inquiring as to how much he thought things had changed since the '70s. In particular, I asked him to speak to any differences in his views on teaching, the use of language in his work, and the role of galleries in the art world. His replies indicated that he continues to consider teaching to be an important part of his practice. He also responded that he had recently read that there are three levels in a person's teaching career. "The first one is where you think you know it all, and then the last one is that you don't know anything. It becomes more interesting to let the students lecture you. ...I listen a lot more now."</i></p> <p><br><i>Baldessari's recent show at Margo Leavin saw his return to the language-image parity of his pioneering postmodern ideas in the 1970s. I asked him about the fact that he used language in his early practice, but for years afterwards he worked only with imagery. He replied, "At first it was an interesting battle to get language accepted as art. But when I could see that the battle had been won, that made it less interesting. And I felt uneasy about exhibiting things that were just in English. It's ok if you're in an English speaking country, but if you're in a country where English is not the dominant language, then it feels a little imperialistic."</i></p> <p><br><i>In the recent series, Baldessari presents a series of diptychs that juxtaposes a movie-still close-up of an actor's face with an equally sized image of a word that describes the emotional disposition that they portray. Of the work he explained, "What I was trying to do was find equivalents--one word that would have the same weight as the photograph. But knowing that, one, I'm using actors and actresses, and what they do is fake emotion, and then trying to figure out if I saw a person with that face that I might think they were angry or suspicious or unpleasant or whatever, but I could be entirely wrong. Who knows? That's why I call it Prima Facie--first sight; that's how we jump to conclusions. ...The image size and text size are equal. I've always had this idea that a word and an image are interchangeable."</i></p> <p><br><i>Despite three retrospective exhibitions in the last year, and gallery shows around the world, Baldessari remains gracious. On the inevitability that he might be an art world celebrity, he remarked, "I think it is a danger when one pays attention to press; you get to believe it. ...Yeah, now and then I'll see somebody who'll stop me on the street and ask me if I am who I am. And I momentarily think 'this is crazy' but then I forget about it." I asked Baldessari if he told people that "he was who he was" when they asked. He smiled and bashfully replied, "Yeah."</i><br><i>--Micol Hebron, August 2005</i></p> <p><br><i>[The following is an excerpt from the longer interview printed in entirety in the magazine. The entire interview is approximately 7300 words, and this excerpt represents about one-third of it.]</i></p> <p><br><b>Moira Roth:</b> You said you were interested in talking about Duchamp. Is there any particular statement by Duchamp that is important to you?</p> <p><br><b>John Baldessari:</b> He said so many things that can be interpreted variously, that can get deciphered in as many ways as you want. For instance, I was reading the [Bruce] Nauman catalog again, where [Marcia] Tucker quotes Duchamp talking to some critic who said, "Well, what you do best is the way you use your time." The way Tucker saw this statement was that Duchamp used time as an art activity. <sup><a href="#footnotes">2</a></sup> But what Duchamp meant-and this is my take on it, knowing what I know of Duchamp--was that he just enjoyed living, walking around, eating in restaurants, talking, nothing in any conscious way as art. Duchamp was just having a good time, but having a good time in an incredibly sophisticated way that's very disarming because it looks very simple. And it's that attitude of not caring in his work that has been intriguing to me. Also, Duchamp always keeps art a little bit off balance.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Does your interest in Duchamp have to do with art history or with your own work?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Probably both. Although I thought I'd seen everything of his in the assemblage show, <sup><a href="#footnotes">3</a></sup> I remember when I opened [Robert] Lebel's book <sup><a href="#footnotes">4</a></sup> and saw all his things together, it was as if I had been hit between the eyes, like I'd come across some long lost relative. All of a sudden I felt I had a home, that I wasn't so strange.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Was that to do with language?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Probably it was, though probably then I didn't understand this. At the time, I was trying to get away from art schools and had gone to San Diego to work through a lot of things to find out what I was about rather than following certain models--and it came out that I was more interested in language than in painting.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> If you were interested in language, why didn't you write?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Well, I guess I'd always wanted to. All through school, I could always spell very well, write moderately well, and always loved looking up words. Words have always been a fascination for me. They're so very magical. And words just seem to me a very viable material to use in a creative way. We always think about using forms in some creative way and that seems interesting to me, but no more interesting than using words.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Didn't you plan to be a critic at one time?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> I started an art history graduate degree at Berkeley [in 1954] because I wanted to be an art critic, but I didn't find what I wanted at Berkeley. The curriculum was pretty much all archaeology. I didn't do that well in art history, so I thought that what I did best was to paint.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> What kind of paintings did you do?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Well, I had a funny idea about art history, which was rather cloudy. When I began college [at San Diego State] I didn't know who Matisse was, or Picasso. I remember taking a basic art history course and just being horrified at seeing a Matisse, and the instructor said to me, "You know, tastes change, you'll probably like him!" And sure enough by the end of the year I was copying every brush stroke of Matisse. Then I got into some kind of a cross between the structure of Cezanne and a three-dimensional configuration of Matisse, and then, working from that into some of the ideas of Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. I kept on adding things to the surface--just like Braque adding sand and collage material, I would add tar and canvas and pins to try to get more of a viscous surface going. Then I began to get into Dada and Surrealism, and saw there a way to get out from the surface, to go out from it. And then from that work--in which I sort of figured out some of the ideas of Cubism using portions of words and letters-I began to photograph torn-down buildings that I would use as source material. They provided a model for the kind of an image that I wanted. They would have bits of words in them, and I was interested in using those words, although fairly decoratively. And then I began to get billboard material, and I would do single words or parts of words.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Did you have friends who were doing the same thing?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> I had a friend, a close friend, who was very interested in Dada, and we sprung ideas off one another, although he was more interested in the assemblage quality of it. Then I came to an impasse. I would always copy down fragments of conversation I'd hear or maybe a couple of words, or I'd see them someplace and I'd copy them down, and I'd use them in paintings.</p> <p><br>Well, I got to a point where I could see that although it was interesting to me in a notebook, why did I have to put it on a canvas and deal with it visually? And this is where I really had to do some hard thinking. There was some sort of transition about there because I had gotten into Wittgenstein--his sentences--and so I became interested in the fragmentary nature of the work and began to make parts of paintings, rather than paintings.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> What were your "parts of paintings" like?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Just as if you'd take a painting and tear it up. They'd be fragments of the whole, but actually they were quite big. They were metal, and I would bend the metal so they would look like fragments of paper. When I exhibited them [in 1966 at the La Jolla Museum of Art], I scattered them in a room. I found it curious when I was reading the Nauman catalog, that he was doing something similar; his fiberglass pieces were meant to be parts of paintings. I liked the whole idea of incompleteness, where you could figure out the whole thing from one little bit, like shards of ancient pottery you'd see at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art in New York]. <sup><a href="#footnotes">5</a></sup> </p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> How would you describe those "things"?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Well, they are in two parts: one would have an image and lettering, and some would be all lettering. At first, what I was going to do was to have one sentence I'd taken out of an art history book and to have several sign painters letter it with no instructions. I'd just give them the surface, and say "Letter this on that." And then what would go on would be a kind of connoisseurship, comparing how each sign painter handled it. But then I got to the second sign painter and I liked him so much--or maybe I got disenchanted with the project, that I just decided to...Oh, I know what it was! I had one of those hanging up in my house, and I cut every other painting. I couldn't figure out why, whether it was the visual thing--you know how you get hypnotized by print--or whether it was what it said, or what I knew. But clearly something was happening, so I decided to go on and do more statements that I found in art history text books, photography, definitions and so on. I would type them out. That's all I would do. An assistant then would make the canvas and take the statement and the canvas down to the sign painter, and the sign painter would letter them, and I'd get them back.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> When was this?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> That was about late '66.<sup><a href="#footnotes"> 6</a></sup> It went through '67. I think mid-'68 I stopped.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Did you choose statements at random, just open art history books and pick out something?At that point I started to do these things.</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Not random. Oh, sure, I was scanning and I would go through a lot of stuff, but there usually would be something that made a comment on the state of art that was really an in-language that maybe only a few other artists would understand. I also did some lighted messages--there's one up on the wall there, it's a dictionary definition of <i>isocephaly</i>, where it talks about characters all being in the same height, like in a frieze. And, of course, in the lighted message all the letters are in the same height and they are like a frieze, so it would be self-reflective, talking about itself. <sup><a href="#footnotes">7</a></sup></p> <p><br>Also, at that point I realized that I had stopped doing work by myself and I was having other people do it. And along with those pure statements were these images of National City. Something perverse was going on there, too. I was thinking about painting and abstract painting, and then realized that what people really wanted was to recognize something--it was an era of Abstract Expressionism where it was a real sin if you had anything recognizable--and so I said, "Why fight it? Why don't you just give people what they want, something they can understand very easily, and try that." And then I said, "Well, there's also that I have to try to paint it, do a photograph." So I found this liquid emulsion and began working with that. The first one I did was kind of interesting. I like it because I was still being painterly about the way I put on the emulsion. The other ones get pretty pure after that.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Did you specifically choose what you were going to photograph?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> I would drive around National City where I was living and randomly shoot out of the window with the camera without even looking and drive with the other hand. Wherever I shot, I would note down the location. In another series, I matched random photographs with statements. For instance, there'd be a statement about photography--about how the eye depicted, how the picture frame shouldn't be divided in half--and then I'd have a photograph with maybe a post right down the middle, and I'd match those two. Or in another one, I'm standing in front of a palm tree--you're not supposed to stand in front of trees because they look like they're growing out of your head--with an inscription that came from a book on composition about the right way and the wrong way. <sup><a href="#footnotes">8</a></sup> You'd have the right image and the wrong image. I loved that there'd be wrong things, so that's why I titled it <i>Wrong</i>. </p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> And you took these photographs too?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> No, Carol [Wixom] did them. <sup><a href="#footnotes">9</a></sup> Then there's another of me looking down the road [<i>The Spectator is Compelled</i> (1966-68)]--like the guy standing in the middle of the railroad tracks illustrating one-point perspective--and there'd be a statement about how it's bad to compose this way because your eye is led immediately into the middle of the picture, and that's supposed to be bad. The image comes from a book on perspective. <sup><a href="#footnotes">10</a></sup> So I was just trying to do everything wrong, and see if that would be right; I figured I had nothing to gain, nothing to lose. And then from there it was an easy jump to get into straight photographs, movies, and video.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Was all this involved with books or paintings or friends, or was it just you being very apart from things?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> I was living in National City, apart from any cultural center. I read a lot, and the works were completely out of my reading. I'd spend a lot of time in library stacks. I always did, all my life, just thumb through things. I'd read almost every art magazine ever printed, every art book-there probably wasn't a book on art printed that I didn't know about. But I got into Wittgenstein because somebody turned me on to him. Also it gets to you by word of mouth whom you should read, like Merleau-Ponty and Levi-Strauss.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> When you lived in National City, were you teaching?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Yes, I was teaching a whole gambit of jobs. I was teaching in a high school, then a junior high school and I quit that. Then I was doing part-time jobs, like adult school, university extension, and junior college. I finally decided that I was doing a full-time job teaching art part-time, so when they offered me a job in this junior college where I was [Southwestern College in Chula Vista], I took that.</p> <p><br>Southwestern was a really hip school. They bought a Bruce Nauman--the one that says "dark"--for the sculpture collection; I lost my job on that one. <sup><a href="#footnotes">11 </a></sup>Then, when the University [of California] was moving into San Diego, I met Paul Brach, who was the chairman down there. I was talking with him at a party and he asked me how many hours did I teach a week, and I said, "Oh, forty-five." "That's ridiculous," he said, "Why don't you come to work for us?" So he gave me a studio, and I only had to teach about twelve hours. And then when he moved to CalArts [California Institute of the Arts], he asked me to come along with him, so I moved up here.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> When did you first start showing? </p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Well, my whole involvement with art in the public scene has been fairly late in my life. When I got out of art school, I tried the gallery rounds and was so discouraged that I thought, God, just forget it, I was going to paint for myself and for other artists. I really was a closet artist. I didn't know how to get into the galleries--that situation--so I set works up as shows. I have a whole list of those kinds of shows, like juried shows, that sort of thing. Then I tried again around '67, '68. I guess I had just completely shut out the idea of showing when things began to escalate. David Antin, who was down in San Diego--he came to teach at the university the same time I did--took a real interest in my work and encouraged me. David was tremendously supportive. He was going around saying that I was the best artist he had seen on the West Coast. That just bowled me over and gave me some belief in myself. He literally got me a show in Los Angeles, and then talked me up in New York.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Was there anyone else who was interested in your work?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> When I did the statements and those other works, I showed them around Los Angeles and people just laughed. In California, the whole idea of plastic and so on was one I couldn't get into and I knew I couldn't do that. I felt nobody was interested in what I was doing. I showed my work to Nicholas Wilder. He was a little better, but he said he was at a loss. He thought Richard Bellamy might be interested. So Wilder got me together with Bellamy when he was out here, and also Walter De Maria--he was doing a show then in L.A. at Wilder's gallery [in April 1968]--and they all came to look at my things. They didn't say anything. And then Bellamy said, "Well, I don't quite understand what you're doing either, but here are the names of people who might be interested in your work in New York. I don't know what they're doing, but it seems like you might be interested in what they're doing." And so I thought there was a whole world for me in New York, and I decided to go and find out what that was all about.</p> <p><br>It was ridiculous. I just pounded the pavement, went from gallery to gallery to gallery. I remember going into one gallery and somebody was screaming at this artist: "I don't want to see any of your slides!" Oh God, it was really a terrorizing experience doing all of that.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> But you did finally show in New York?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> In '68 at [Richard] Feigen's downtown gallery--Feigen was the second gallery in downtown New York after Paula Cooper--in its first show, a group show, and then I had a solo show with him after that [in 1970]. <sup><a href="#footnotes">12 </a></sup>Actually Feigen was the one gallery I didn't have any introduction to. I just walked in. About a year ago, I talked to a secretary there who said, "Oh, yes, we always used to call you 'the artist who walked in off the street.'" I didn't realize it was so unusual. But then, after a while, you begin to build up some currency and it's not so hard.</p> <p><br><b>Roth:</b> Did you meet other artists in New York and talk about or show them your work?</p> <p><br><b>Baldessari:</b> Well, Paul Brach gave me a lot of names of people to see there but I didn't know they were all first and second generation abstractionists, so when I showed them my work, they said, "Ha, ha." I didn't know whom to talk to! Finally, however, I got to talk to some people from the list that Bellamy gave me--Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth. Actually, I was very surprised how open artists were in New York. I would just call up anybody who I wanted to meet and they'd say, "Sure, come on over," and that was really fantastic. I don't think that happens so much in California because of distances, no artists' bars. Whereas in New York, all you do is go to a bar and hang out and talk about art. I don't know how to express this, but when I began to meet artists in New York, it was a burst of energy for me simply because they're into a whole different attitude about talk. And that was a kind of unveiling for me. Also when I was in New York, I found that there were other people interested in similar things that I was, and liked to talk about art. So that, and Europe, were very important to me.</p><a name="footnotes" id="footnotes"> <p><br></a> <p><br><b>FOOTNOTES</b><br>1. Marcia Tucker, "<i>John Baldessari</i>: Pursuing the Unpredictable," in <i>John Baldessari</i> (New York: The New Museum, 1981), pp. 8, 10, 15, 17 and 23; and Coosje van Bruggen, John Baldessari (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Rizzoli, 1990), pp. 69, 70, 75, 76, 80.<br>2. Marcia Tucker quoting from Pierre Cabanne, <i>Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp</i>, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 72, in her essay "Bruce Nauman," in Jane Livingston and Marcia Tucker, Bruce Nauman: <i>Work from 1965 to 1972 </i>(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1972), p. 33. "Nauman's attitude toward making art, and those pieces which most reflect it--records of his activities in the studio such as breathing, clapping, stamping, playing the violin, tossing a ball, arranging flour, or making a mess on the floor-parallel many of Duchamp's ideas. For example:<br>Duchamp: I like living, breathing, better than working.<br>Cabanne: That's what [Henri-Pierre] Roche said. Your best work has been the use of your time.<br>Duchamp: That's right. I really think that's right."<br>3. <i>The Art of Assemblage</i>, curated by William C. Seitz, traveled from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2 October-12 November 1961) to the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts (9 January-11 February 1962) and the San Francisco Museum of Art (5 March-14 April 1962). While the New York showing included thirteen works by Duchamp, only six of them were exhibited in Dallas and San Francisco.<br>4. Robert Lebel, <i>Marcel Duchamp</i>, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959).<br>5. According to van Bruggen, p. 28, the first work of this series, <i>A Two-Dimensional Surface</i>..., was dated 26 April 1967, the date it was completed by the sign painter.<br>6. According to van Bruggen, p. 28, the first work of this series, <i>A Two-Dimensional Surface...</i>, was dated 26 April 1967, the date it was completed by the sign painter.<br>7. <i>Lighted Moving Message: Isocephaly... </i>(1968), commercial lighted moving message unit with Formica-laminated plywood base: ISOCEPHALY--A STYLE OF COMPOSITION CHARACTERISTIC OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD--ESPECIALLY IN RELATION TO GREEK ART-IN WHICH THE FIGURES IN A COMPOSITION ARE SO ARRANGED THAT THEY ARE ALL OF THE SAME HEIGHT; AS FOR INSTANCE, IN A FRIEZE. JB 68.<br>8. The specific reference has yet to be identified.<br>9. Wixom was Baldessari's wife at the time.<br>10. Ernest Ralph Norling, Perspective Made Easy: <i>A step-by-step method for learning the basis of drawing</i> (New York: Macmillan, 1939; reprinted 1949), identified by van Bruggen, <i>John Baldessari</i>, p. 32.<br>11. Bruce Nauman, <i>Dark</i> (1968), Southwestern College, Chula Vista, California.<br>12. John Baldessari, <i>Carol Brown, David Milne, Ralph Pomeroy</i>, Richard Feigen Gallery, New York (12 October-16 November 1968)--the upstairs space showed Baldessari, Milne and Pomeroy, and the downstairs space Brown, according to Ralph Pomeroy, "New York: Moving Out," Art and Artists 3, no. 10 (January 1969), p. 55-and <i>John Baldessari: Recent Paintings</i>, Richard Feigen Gallery, New York (1 March-8 April 1970).</p> </body> </html> <br/><br/>  </td> <td style="vertical-align: top; padding-left: 10px;"><div class="inside_pic"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20110721172055im_/http://69.73.141.126/~jxatraon/images//article/art_115_1.jpg" width="269" alt="" border="0"> <br/>John Baldessari, <i>Solving Each Problem as It Arises,</i> 1966-68. Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 46 inches. Courtesy John Baldessari.<br><br><br></div><div class="inside_pic"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20110721172055im_/http://69.73.141.126/~jxatraon/images//article/art_115_2.jpg" width="269" alt="" border="0"> <br/>John Baldessari, <i>Prima Facie: Intent / Concerned,</i> 2005. Archival digital print on ultrasmooth fine art paper mounted on museum board, dimensions variable. Courtesy John Baldessari and Margo Leavin Gallery.<br><br><br></div><div class="inside_pic"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20110721172055im_/http://69.73.141.126/~jxatraon/images//article/art_115_3.jpg" width="269" alt="" border="0"> <br/>John Baldessari, <i>Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A,</i> 1969. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 59.25 x 45.5 inches. Courtesy John Baldessari.<br><br><br></div></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </div><div class="col2"><div class="ad"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110721172055/http://www.x-traonline.org/hankerchief_haendel.php" target="_new"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20110721172055im_/http://69.73.141.126/~jxatraon/images//article/adhome_3.jpg" border="0"></a></div><div class="ad"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110721172055/http://www.x-traonline.org/hankerchief_haendel.php" target="_new"><img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20110721172055im_/http://69.73.141.126/~jxatraon/images//article/adhome_4.jpg" border="0"></a></div></div> <div class="clear"></div> </div></div></body></html>