Oral history interview with John Baldessari, 1992 Apr. 4-5
Baldessari, John,
b. 1931
Conceptual artist
Los Angeles, Calif.
Size:
Sound recordings: 4 sound cassettes analog
Transcript: 83 p.
Collection Summary: An interview of John Baldessari conducted 1992 Apr. 4-5, by Christopher Knight, for the Archives of American Art
This interview was conducted at the artist's studio in Santa Monica, Calif., 1992 April 4. Baldessari discusses his education; his teaching career; twenty years of teaching at the California Institute of the Arts from its inception in 1970; the development of his work; photo-emulsion pieces and text and image pieces; the art scene in Los Angeles during the 1960's; exhibitions; and his relationship with various dealers.
Biographical/Historical Note: John Baldessari (1931- ) is a conceptual artist of Los Angeles, Calif.
This interview is part of the Archives' Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics, and others. Funding for this interview was provided by the Lannan Foundation.
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Interview Transcript
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with John Baldessari, 1992 Apr. 4-5, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Interview with John Baldessari
Conducted by Christopher Knight
At the artist's studio in Santa Monica, CA
April 4, 1992
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with John Baldessari on April 4, 1992. The interview took place in Santa Monica, CA and was conducted by Christopher Knight for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Interview
JOHN BALDESSARI: JOHN BALDESSARI
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT
Tape 1, side A (30-minute tape sides)
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . should have the ringers off the phone.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Okay. Let’s see, this is Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, an interview with John Baldessari on April 4, 1992,
at [Baldessari’s] Studio in Santa Monica. The interviewer is Christopher
Knight.
[Interruption in taping]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: We’ll start at the beginning. . . . [laughter]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Okay.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . in National City, in June of [1931]. June?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: First?
JOHN BALDESSARI: June 17.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: June 17. Tell me about your parents. Your mother I think was Danish?
JOHN BALDESSARI: My mother is Danish, and my father, an Austrian citizen, coming
from a. . . . The city’s name was Albiano, and it’s near Trento
in northern Italy now. Where he was living was in Austria, and then after World
War I, the border shifted. But he was an Austrian citizen, and then he immigrated—when
he, as I remember, as my memory serves me, in his twenties. And he landed in
Colorado working in coal mines, just hustling one job after another. Ended up
in San Diego, where he met my mother. My mother had arrived in the United States
as a private nurse traveling with a wealthy American couple. And how they got
together—I mean, where they both, you know, two different social levels,
I’ve never been able to figure out, nor my sister, yet somehow they got
together.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Your father’s name was Antonio?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Antonio.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And your mother?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Hedvig, H-e-d-v-i-g. Her last name was Jensen.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How did she get from Denmark to San Diego?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, she was working in New York at Bellevue Hospital [chuckling],
and somehow—I’m not so clear in this—she met this wealthy
couple—I think they had copper mines in Arizona—and went out and
became a private nurse for them and traveled with them. And they had a home
in La Jolla. Was it La Jolla? No, it’s an area in, it’s called Sunset
Cliffs, I think. It’s on the ocean.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, that would be south of La Jolla.
JOHN BALDESSARI: South of La Jolla, yeah. Which was then very fashionable. And
the guy is. . . . Oh, I can’t remember their names. Anyway, he never had
any employment that I could figure out other than he collected artifacts for
natural history museums, and I remember he was always going around with a butterfly
net collecting butterflies. [laughs] And his wife was very well read and always
having books sent from the book store. And this wonderful, wonderful huge mansion;
I would visit there with my parents on Sundays. And I guess that was real culture
for me, sort of.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I wonder if they—maybe you know—had anything to do with. . .
. There’s like the Museum of Man in San Diego which is a sort of strange
_____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, he might have. He went all over the world. I remember
he gave me a headhunter’s axe I had for a long time. [laughs] He just,
you know, he’d travel around—and not paid, you know, by any museums.
He was very wealthy, and he just donated his services, you know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So was it in the twenties that your parents. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And what did your father do?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, he was sort of a self-made man. He arrived in Colorado
in the midst of, well, the beginning of the Depression, I suppose, and was a
coal miner. And I guess he had a real entrepreneurial streak, from stories he
would tell me. He already was making money then by essentially recycling. Which
it was interesting, by the way, parenthetically, going to India, I felt right
at home where they recycle everything, don’t throw anything away, and
I’d think, “God, I know this life.”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: And he would pick up cigarettes and dry them out on the stove
and reroll them and sell them you know. And I guess he made his first break,
he said, by. . . . There was a triangle of land where railroad tracks, that
apparently wasn’t used or anything, and he asked the railroad company
if he could use it. And he was living in the Alps, was well trained in cultivating
land—you know, taking rocks out and so on. And [he] cultivated that area
and started growing onions. And parlayed that into where he was actually shipping
onions, and had already started making money. And I remember once my sister
got him to sit down and go through all of the jobs he’s ever been through,
and she said she just lost track. But it was always this propelling himself
hustling, you know, never really working for somebody. And we had a restaurant,
he had grocery stores. And I guess at the point where I was born, what he was
doing was pretty interesting at the time, was in the salvage business, and he
would contract to tear down buildings, houses. You know, either buy them for
very little or just get them for nothing, and then salvage all of the material
and build houses with the material and sell off the rest of the stuff in a store
he had. And until the idea of tract housing caught on, it was a pretty good
scheme. And then parlayed that money into buying real estate and. . . . And
I remember as a child, basically what I did was sort of. . . . You know, taking
apart faucets and reconditioning them, painting them, and taking nails out of
lumber and. . . . And I sometimes think that has a lot of bearing on the art
I would do because I was. . . . It would almost be in like some sort of museum,
you know, looking at maybe two hundred different kinds of faucets, but all generically
the same, but seeing all the variations. And taking them apart, painting the
handles or what have you. And always looking at things—like “Why
is this faucet better than that faucet?” that sort of thing. And I got
a taste of the hands-on thing—you know, taking things apart, putting them
together, pai nting things, and so on. My mother babysat me by. . . . You know,
I would get something, ten cents a day, something like that in an allowance.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Here’s a pile of faucets?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, right. That’s what I would do. Right, yeah. Well,
anyway I’m saying, I don’t know if I’m [prattling, babbling]
on, but. . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: No, this is great, this is great.
JOHN BALDESSARI: You just want me to keep on going? [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, ____ like this. And I’m sitting here thinking,
“Gosh, it’s deconstruction.” [laughter]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, right. Really.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And you had a sister?
JOHN BALDESSARI: A sister. One sister.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: This is older, younger. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, she’s older.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How much older?
JOHN BALDESSARI: She is four years older, and she is living in Leonia, New Jersey,
and she went into speech pathology, and that’s what she does, and she
had gotten married, but. . . . She has two children. And her husband was an
academic, college professor in economics, and then had been in the navy, and
I think he came out with like Vice Admiral, something like that, so he. . .
. And I guess he’d just been approached to be president of a small college
when coming back from vacation in Long Island, and a car ran into them, and
he was instantly killed, and one of the sons and my sister were badly injured,
but anyway. . . . And so, yeah, she lives there and does speech pathology.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So since both of your parents were immigrants, you didn’t
know your grandparents or other. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Not on my father’s side. And I never knew why, but I
went with my mother to Copenhagen when I was fairly young. I think just prior
to school, or I must have been in the first year of school, or something like
kindergarten or first year. And maybe it was just an extended vacation, maybe
there were some marital problems, I don’t know. But apparently I. . .
. Surely then I met my grandparents, though I don’t have any memory of
them at all.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Do you have any recollection of going to Copenhagen?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, I have a few memories, yeah, but not many, so I evidently
was quite young or I have blotted it out or what have you. I’ve been back
once since. My sister is quite, you know, keeps up correspondence and visits
quite a bit, and they were. . . . Apparently the family was into importing/exporting,
and sort of upper-middle class. That’s why we could never figure out how
my mother got together with my father. Because my sister had gone back at one
time with my mother and said she was just like a different woman. You know,
just like going out to theater and opera every night, and restaurants and then
come back to San Diego just like a housewife. And she could never figure that
out either, how she could. . . . All she could say, “She must have loved
my father very much.” [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s an explanation. Do you suppose then that she
had some sort of, oh, I don’t know, cultural interests that. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, I think that’s certainly where I got. . . . There’s
some sort of ping-pong effect. My father was this sort of martinet, at least
in my mind, and. . . . I guess that was the way you raised children at the time.
You know, children were seen and not heard. Both of them being European, you
know, too. And so my mother, I always ran to for sympathy. And, yeah, if there
is any culture, she’s the one. [laughs] It was there, you know, because
we both took music lessons, my sister and I, and she played the piano. I mean,
she would go to Europe or anywhere, and she brought back a few copies of paintings.
I remember a detail of a Velasquez on the wall and a watercolor she had bought
and so on. And she’d always get novels sent from Denmark to her. And I
always remember it was really. . . . I mean, a very pleasant memory of taking
a letter opener and cutting the pages open. And I think I really got a feel
for books at that time. And, speaking about books [laughing], I always remember
one of my favorite comments of my father was, like he didn’t understand
why I paid so much money for books because he could get them for me at ten cents
each. [laughter] You know, one book was as good as another one. And so he was
the practical wing of the family. But when I say I had this sort of ping-pong
effect. . . . You know, money was always an issue, and I don’t blame him,
I guess, in a way. I mean, getting through the depression was pretty tough.
And he didn’t want me to go through that, so, I mean, money was. . . .
That’s what you did in life. You had to eat. And so when I began to be
interested in art, I’m sure that really just scared him. And I guess the
compromise was that both my parents urged me to go into architecture, because
somehow that would serve an interest of art but maybe I could build houses and
so on, what have you.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How early was that interest in art expressed on your part, and their recoil
towards architecture? Were you like in high school?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I was always good in art, yeah. But I don’t think
I really thought seriously about it until I went to college. And I only went
to college by chance because my sister had gone to the local, you know, San
Diego State University—San Diego State College, it was then. And I got
out, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and so I said, “Well,
my sister went to college, I guess I will too.” And the high school I
had gone to had no college counseling at all. I didn’t know one thing.
. . . I remember this, the one smart kid in class had gotten a scholarship to
Yale, because the literature teacher there had gone to Yale and [proposed] and
he had gone there. And that was pretty exotic. But everybody else, they either
didn’t go or I suspect. . . . In my graduating class I can think of maybe
four or five of us, we went to San Diego State College.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So this was a public school, like National City High School
or something?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, it was called Sweetwater High School. It served two cities,
one south, which is called Chula Vista. Which was sort of a little higher class
area than National City, but on the way to the border. Oh, I don’t know
if I ever told you this, but it’s kind of fun, that I’ve since found
out—that Tom Waits was from there also.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Huh.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And I actually called him up once and said “This is true?”
and he said, “Yeah.” And so we had a good chat over the phone. And
he apparently had worked in a pizza restaurant. The building in which it was,
was owned by my father.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really.
JOHN BALDESSARI: How I found out about this was that a close friend of my sister’s
was living in Chula Vista. Tom Waits was her gardener. [both chuckle] And so
I always think we’re the only two that got out of National City, either
way. And which I’ve always. . . . Because I’ve always liked his
music, you know, and I’ve always responded to it. I thought, “Oh,
that’s why!” [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [Yes], it’s a deep subject.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Anyway, so when I went to San Diego State College, I liked
my chemistry courses a lot, and so I thought, “Well, I’ll either
go into chemistry. . . .” Art seemed, “Well, yeah, I’m interested
in that.” So I think what I ended up [with] no chemistry but art classes,
and eventually some literature, philosophy, [art] classes and so on. And I got
my degree actually not even in art practice, but art education. Because my sister
said, “Well, you probably want to find some way to support yourself. Why
don’t you maybe try and go into teaching, get a teaching credential.”
And so then I switched mid, went into art education, and I got my degree in
that and simultaneously got a teaching credential. And so when I got out, started
teaching.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So that was the practical influence.
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . end of it, yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: To back up just a little bit, before going to San Diego State, what was
it like in San Diego during the. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: During it?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . during the Depression and war years? Because that’s
when I guess you had been a kid then?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, I’ve been going to a therapist so long, I
think I’ve repressed a lot of my childhood. I mean, my sister remembers
a lot and it’s very interesting. You know, I compare notes with her, and
she says, “It’s like it’s two different lives.” She
said, “I don’t remember being unhappy. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And you say, “I don’t remember being happy.”
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . .happy. [laughter] Well, money was very scarce and so
we. . . . It’s interesting now; my father would have been very fashionable
because of the totally self-sufficient. Recycled everything: the compost heap.
I remember having to separate egg shells and stuff like that. And we had chickens
and rabbits which we ate and even the the rabbit skins he sold. So everything
was utilized. And my image of my mother was. . . . And we had every conceivable
fruit tree and vegetable, and I remember my mother always in the kitchen canning
fruits and vegetables, whatever, cooking. And there was always the obligatory
Sunday outing in the car, but that was always geared to some practical end—you
know, going to this house my father wanted to see under construction or that
house. [laughs] And we always stopped off at this one place that was slightly
north called La Mesa, sort of northeast of San Diego near Grossmont. And it
was a place where you could. . . . It was a natural spring. We went with water
bottles. We’d get water-bottle water, right. And having to drink. . .
. You know, I never got the foods that my friends got. They had white bread
and bologna, and I had to get home-baked bread. [said tongue-in cheek]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs] Yuk. [also said tongue-in cheek]
JOHN BALDESSARI: And we were eating things. . . . You know, meat was always
veal. “What is veal? Why can’t we have hamburgers.” [laughing]
But now it’s all, you know, nouvelle cuisine food. You know, veal fillets
wrapped in spinach and bacon, right? Or salad frisse with bacon. And, polenta
and. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT:_____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, I mean, all of these. You know, and creme caramel and
but you know, never the foods. . . . Now, of course, it’s just all. .
. . Rabbit all the time. I cannot eat rabbit in any restaurant now, and it’s
become fashionable. I think, “No thank you.” I had it every Sunday.
Figs, forget it. We had figs all the time. And I can always remember trying
to trade my lunches with other kids at school.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So did you feel like an outsider then, in many respects?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And was it partially, or largely, because your parents were immigrants?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So there wasn’t much of an immigrant population?
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, not in. . . . My father, I mean, he spoke with an accent,
and I was always, I guess, slightly ashamed of him because of that. My mother
was pretty good at it. The one thing they did do well, though. We had a very
large piece of land; it went from one block to another. And they had this idea
that, I don’t know, that better to have the other kids come there than
us to go out to the other kids somehow, and so. . . . You know, I was pretty
lucky. Like they’d set up a volleyball net and play basketball and ping-pong
and stuff like that. And so all the kids around in your neighborhood would always
congregate there. And so that was good. And it was, in a way I suppose, that
I got kind of a childhood which would be maybe impossible now. Not too far away
would be undeveloped lands so even you. . . . I remember having a .22 rifle
and going out and go target shooting, taking my dog along, and that sort of
thing, and riding bikes, and it was fun, I guess. And let me see, I don’t
know. . . . College. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Were you conscious at all of the war? I mean San Diego being. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Very much. Oh, yeah, sure, because the constant sight were
these what they call barrage balloons. They were these blimp-like things that
they had over the cities so any low-flying planes came in, they’d get
entangled in these things.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Wow, I didn’t know that.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, and they’re into all these. . . . There’s
always like sort of Macy’s parade all these balloons in the sky, there
was these big silver blimps. And then constantly. . . . What was the name? I
can never remember it, but they’re building model airplanes at PBY, patrol
bombers. They’re an amphibious plane, two-motored, and constantly running
patrol flights over. I guess they really thought. . . . I remember having to
go through. . . . There were civil defense drills, and you had to put in, where
you had black out curtains at night, and you had to put down, and. . . . Yeah,
and then the. . . . It was a Navy town, and Marine Corps, too. There was Marine
Corps bases there. And largely it was the defense industry where ships and airplanes
were built. Yeah, in that case, very much aware. But on the other hand, I don’t,
I just. . . . I didn’t really know much other kind of life.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I remember when President Roosevelt. . . . We were sitting
outside having lunch in the garden, and my parents turned the radio on. President
Roosevelt announced that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. And I didn’t
know what that meant. I remember my parents were [really, more] serious about
it.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What’s your earliest recollection of art? Of having
an interest?
JOHN BALDESSARI: In art?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. Either in school or. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, yeah, in school, just that I. . . . I guess. . . . I
still have some drawings around here marked “A+,” “good imagination,”
and so on.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, from the very start, I guess I had some proficiency which.
. . . And so it was always one of my favorite subjects, and I was always very
good at it. But I didn’t think about it beyond that, just. . . . That
wasn’t what you did in life. I mean, it was just something that was fun.
And the same way through college. You know, it was just. . . . You know, it
was four years that I didn’t have to think about doing anything. [laughter]
And it’s more fun. And then, I guess when I. . . . And then when I got
my B.A. degree, I said, “Well, obviously what you do next is go into graduate
school.” So. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: More fun.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Right. And so I did a year at San Diego State. I really didn’t
know what I wanted to do. I mean, I stayed in art and education, and then I
had the thought I might go into art history. I thought, “Well it’s
like kind of. . . .” I enjoyed art history. I thought I would go to Berkeley,
which I did.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Did you get your B.A. in 1953?
JOHN BALDESSARI: ‘53, yeah. And then that wasn’t what I wanted either,
because it was all sort of. . . . I guess what I was really interested in was
contemporary art, and wanting to write about art, maybe being an art critic.
And it was just all sort of the basic preliminary stuff—you know, memorizing
Roman coins and this date and that date and so on. And the only person in contemporary
art was Herschel Chip, and he wasn’t that good—I mean, in terms
of contemporary art. The best art historian that made it seem exciting was James
Ackerman. But that wasn’t the field I was interested in, in renaissance
art, and so I got out of there and went back and just took my master’s
degree in painting. I got it in 1957.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: When you were at Berkeley studying art history, do you remember what courses
you took, once [it was your major]?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, Renaissance art, I think. Modern art, I guess, up through, I suppose,
Picasso, Matisse, like that, and Greek art, Roman art. You know, just basic.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Sort of a basic first year.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, basic stuff.
[Tape 1, side B]
JOHN BALDESSARI: I mean, the only good thing about it in retrospect was I began
to know how to use the library and how to find stuff, and stuff like that. And
much better grounding in art history than I would have gotten otherwise.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Did you spend any time in San Francisco at all?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Not much, pretty much in Berkeley. I know we’d go over
there occassionally, not much.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Any connection or interest in the art. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Community there? Not at all. See, my. . . . It wasn’t
until much later. . . . I mean, real artists, it was an unknown factor to me.
A real artist was. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Dead. [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: I didn’t know anybody.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I mean I didn’t know anybody. You know, they were
in books or museums, or like that. I never had. . . . Even at that point, I’d
never been into a private gallery, you know, or anything like that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So the San Francisco Art Institute and things like that
were just. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Unknown to me.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Unknown at this time. Okay, so after Berkeley, you went
back to San Diego?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I went back just to San Diego and I got the degree.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: At San Diego State?
JOHN BALDESSARI: San Diego State, yeah. Then, as immediate as I got out, one
of my instructors had taken ill, and I taught his classes at San Diego State
for one term, which gave me my real first taste of teaching. Let’s see,
then what happened? And then I got a job teaching Saturday life drawing classes
at the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery. My friend had recommended me when they were
looking for somebody. And then I started teaching in a high school. . . . Art
in a lettering class, which I was very good at.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Lettering?
JOHN BALDESSARI: [laughs] Yeah, right. And then what? Then I had signed a contract
to teach for the next year, and there was a summer course catalog from UCLA
that said that they were going to have a guest artist there, and it was Rico
Lebrun. And I’d heard about him, and he was a real artist. [laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What made him a real artist?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I don’t know, but everybody had talked about him, and
he was really very well known at the time. And so I went for a summer, went
up there and took the course.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: At UCLA?
JOHN BALDESSARI: At UCLA, and lived in one of the fraternity dorms—fraternity
houses, rather—for the summer. And did that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What was the class like?
JOHN BALDESSARI: A painting class. You would just paint every day, and then
once a week he would give a lecture. Those lectures, Chris, were standing room
only.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And people would come. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: From miles around.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, to hear this guy. But he was very dramatic and eloquent
and so on. And so. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: A large class?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah. It took up. . . . I think he had about three studios
of people _____ was going on. And I noticed that like people would drop by,
and he’d always bring them over to where I was working, and I didn’t
think too much of it other than it made me nervous. And on the last lecture,
he talked to the whole class about this one painting that I had done.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really?
JOHN BALDESSARI: And later he said, “Have you ever thought about being
an artist?” And I said, “No, not really.” And he said, “What
do you do?” and I said, “I teach,” and he said, “Well,
you really ought to think about it.” And I said, “Yeah, what’ll
I do? What do I do?” [laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What are _____?
JOHN BALDESSARI: And he said, “Why don’t you go back to being in
art school, and maybe you’ll meet people there and so on and continue
working.” And so I guess all his coterie of friends, like Bill Bryce and.
. . . What was the other guy? Howard Warshaw. There was a whole sort of Lebrun
school, you know. They were all teaching at Otis, and the guy was then. . .
. Yeah, it was Otis. Part of that was called the Jepson Art Institute. And Herb
Jepson was still teaching there, and he said, “Let me introduce you to
Herb Jepson, and maybe you can go back to school.” Which I did. And I
broke my contract and went there for a couple of years. And actually the guy
I got sort of. . . . And then I began a little bit going to galleries and so
on, and interesting. . . . And the guy I learned sort of about, got a sort of
a passion for—or an inkling of New York—was Peter Voulkos, who was
teaching there. Ceramics. But he was a big hero in the art community at the
time. But he would get these magazines from New York, and I would look at them,
and they’ve got. . . . You know, they didn’t seem very exciting,
and began to get some taste of something. And then I would. . . . Of course
all during that time, I was going to art galleries and so on. Then I dropped
out of there after a couple of years and tried. . . . I was living, I think,
in Pasadena; I’d moved out there. And I didn’t know what I wanted
to do next, and so I went back to San Diego and got a teaching job again. No,
actually, the first job I got. . . . When I got back I couldn’t get a
teaching job because I was too late, and a friend of mine got me a job as a
technical illustrator and I was. . . . Oh, God, that was the worst job I ever
had. I mean, the day was so long, and I was just drawing these stupid drawings
of Atlas missiles.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Atlas missiles?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. [laughs] And they were just like technical handbooks
for engineers, and I said, “Well, I certainly don’t want to do this.”
So then. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I just want to make sure we have the dates, chronology.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, God. What date was that?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Fifty. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah, God.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: ‘53, you graduated, and you got your B.A. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: ‘57, I got my. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: ‘57, your M.A. from San Diego State.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And then it was about two years that you were . . . ‘57,
‘59. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: So, yeah, around in there. Yeah, we’re talking about
_____.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Okay.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And then I got a teaching job in a junior high school.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In San Diego?
JOHN BALDESSARI: In San Diego. It was a ghetto school. And that was an experience.
[chuckles] But I think, in looking back, I began to. . . . I was slowly getting
some. . . . And I was painting, you know, and there were a few artists. . .
. Most of the art activity was going on at La Jolla Museum of Art. And there
was. . . . Guy Williams was teaching there. Another guy, named Don Dudley, who
is in New York now. Malcom McLaine, who is a poet up here now, and Richard Allen
Morris who’s still down there. And I began to hang out with those guys,
and Guy Williams was the real story. He had actually got a gallery in L.A.,
the David Stuart Gallery, and he was the big hero. And, you know, I think almost
every two weeks, I would drive up to L.A. and look at shows. Well, I mean, you
know, whatever the cycle was, maybe three weeks, and spend, you know. . . .
And then Guy moved up here and was teaching at Chouinard, and I would come up.
I would crash at his place, you know, and see shows and come back and. . . .
Well also, where I began to get a taste for art was I had this one class—what
you would call a remedial class—and saw the power art had for some of
these kids that otherwise were just losers. I mean, there was a language for
them somehow. And I began to really begin to tailor projects that would sort
of tap into their imagination.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Like what?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, you know, I would let them, instead of having to do the
obligatory duckies [laughing] with modeling clay, you know, they could make
monsters or racing cars. You know, just try to keep pushing them. And I got
into some pretty big arguments with the principal and supervisor and so on.
But the head supervisor, art supervisor in the city, took some interest in me.
I guess she thought I was pretty wacko, and then she hired me to be her assistant
for a while and she tried to get me to go into art supervision. And I got my
taste of that, and I didn’t think I was interested and I. . . . Then what
happened? I was. . . . Yeah, and at that time, I was sort of getting near the
top of the salary scale in terms of. . . . The salary scale in the city schools,
you go this way with degrees and units of college credits and this way in terms
of years. So I was all the way up this way. All I had to do was put in more
years, you know, I’d get the maximum salary, and I said. . . . You could
see your life charted out before you. So “This doesn’t seem very
interesting.” [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Your father would have been thrilled.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I know! I know! And so then I thought of well maybe, you know,
becoming a principal, or a school principal or whatever, and I went checking
around, asking, “What’s the attraction here?” It was always,
the results of my poll was that you just made more money. [laughs] Nobody seemed
to really like it. And I said, “Well, I guess I can’t do that.”
And I quit, and I said, “Well, I’m going just devote more time to
painting.” And so I started doing part-time jobs to support myself. The
first one was okay, and then I didn’t have enough money that way, and
I had to take another one. And eventually I had about five part-time teaching
jobs, and I said, “This is worse than when I had a full-time job.”
You know, it was this crazy life where I would teach one class, and run back
to my studio and paint for a while, and then run to another class, come back
and paint for a while, and that was my life.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Where in San Diego were you living then?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I was living at the family house. My father and my mother had
died when I was first year of college, so there was plenty of room in the place,
and so I didn’t have much rent. And I had talked my father into using
the back of a building he had owned. There was a laundromat in front, and the
back was empty, and that was my first studio. And so my life was just teaching
and painting and, you know, sharing work with Guy and Don and Richard Allen
Morris and so on. And like around the La Jolla Museum and seeing exhibits, and
so on.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Were there any particular exhibitions at the museum that
you saw that had a. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, the good thing about it is that they did have the. .
. . I can’t think of any memorable ones, but I got along with going forays
up into Los Angeles. You know, they did bring in contemporary art, so I got
to see a lot of art. And. . . . I’m trying to think, was there any? [pauses]
Not really. Although I. . . . One experience that pops to mind—and maybe
more will come to mind here—was that that whole period was—at least
for me, I don’t know how it was in the rest of the state—but what
one did was we entered these juried shows the museums put on, and there was.
. . . I mean they all had them. L.A. County had the most prestigious one. It
was called Artists of Los Angeles County and Vicinity. And they always brought
in some prestigious jurors, you know, like Clement Greenberg or. . . . And it
would always be a three-person jury. And this was the big show that everybody
aspired to. And it was fairly. . . . I guess these shows just began to dry up
for one reason or another. I know the one in the L.A. County, the conventional
wisdom is that dried it up was that more and more students would get in and
fewer teachers would get into these shows. [laughter] So it wasn’t a viable
experience _____. But. . . . And so I might. . . . If you look at my early bio
on me—a lot of it’s probably taken out by now—but it’s
all of these little shows, you know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: This museum, that. . . . You know, Six Western States, or Three
Northern States or, you know. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. A Couple Counties and a Neighborhood.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Right, you know, and just one after another. You know, you
send off your slides, and you pass that muster, and then you send off the painting,
and that was it. And I do remember taking my paintings around when I left. .
. . Not when I left Otis, but I’d taken them around after a while. I got
my father’s pickup truck, loaded them all up with paintings, took ‘em
up to L.A., hit every gallery. And just no interest at all, and came back with
my tail between my legs and didn’t do it again until the late sixties.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Do you remember what galleries you went to?
JOHN BALDESSARI: No. God, I would have to go through a list of galleries that
were around at the time. You know, all that were there. [pauses] Well, the most
prestigious one was Ferus, and of course I didn’t even dare go in there.
[laughs] You know, nobody was interested. I do remember one comment. I don’t
know why I retained it. This guy said, well, they were not exactly his cup of
tea.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [both chuckle]
JOHN BALDESSARI: So, let me see what. . . . Oh, yeah, I was talking about this
junior high school I was in and I quit. And then, in the middle of that, I had
somebody, an administrator, call me up who ran a California Youth Authority
camp up in the mountains, and he let’s the. . . . It’s an honor
camp, but if you try to escape, then you go to prison. And they have classes,
and so this guy called me up and said, you know would I come up there and teach
for a couple of months. He had to fill in; somebody had left. Probably a guy
had been shot. [chuckles] Then I realized later that the guy had simply gone
through all the personnel files and got the biggest teachers he could find.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You mean by height?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Height and weight, or whatever, right, yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: God, right. So they couldn’t push him around?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, really. Then you lived there, you know, and then on weekends
you could. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Where was this?
JOHN BALDESSARI: It was in Julian.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In Julian?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, back in the hills, yeah. And I had a general secondary
credential so I could theoretically teach other courses. And it was worse than
that junior high school job I had. You know, these kids were hoods. And, you
know, they have to have a five. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, these were the kids who had gotten thrown out of that
school.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, exactly. And they would have maybe like a five-minute
attention span in a forty-five minute class. And then there’s this sort
of epiphany that occurred, in that this little Mexican kid came up to me one
day and said would I open up the arts and crafts room at night, so I assume
he wanted to work there. And a light went on in my head, and I said, “Yeah,
you know, I’ll make a deal. If you guys sort of cool it in the academic
classes, I’ll make a tradeoff, and I’ll open the classrooms for
you at night where you can work.” It worked like a charm. And I realized
that art was more valuable for them than it was for me. [laughs] You know, that
they had just ostensibly no social values at all that I shared, yet they cared
more about art than I did. And that really had a lasting effect on me—and
I think somehow turned me around, where I really thought about being an artist
and not something one did in your spare time. Yeah. At least that’s the
way it always appears to me. And then what happened? I was teaching. . . . God,
it’s amazing _____. I think at the time. . . . San Diego Adult School,
I was teaching a class, I was teaching children’s classes at La Jolla
Museum, University extension classes in painting, and at a junior college—
College, Southwestern College—and. . . . That brings up to about ‘67
or so, I think.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: ‘67?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And then the university came into town. Well, it had
been in town, but I mean they decided to open up an art department, and they
had hired Paul Brach to be dean of the art school. And so I’d met him
at a couple functions around town—at the La Jolla Museum and so on. And
I got along okay with him, and he called me up one time and said, “Would
you like to come and teach for us?” And he said, “I’ll give
you a better salary that what you’re getting.” At that time, I’d
dropped all the other part time jobs and I was teaching full time at the Southwestern
College, figuring that was just easier on me. And he said, “I’ll
give you a studio,” and it seemed like heaven to me, you know, and I said,
“Okay.” Everybody else was from New York, and I realized later,
or even then, that it was politically shrewd for him to do it, because I had
by that time, a pretty good reputation, and that would sort of make some ties
with the art community in the vicinity. So the first year that was David Antin
and Helen and Newton Harrison. I mean, Helen wasn’t an artist then, nor
was Ellie Antin; they all came as wives. And Michael Todd in sculpture. Don
Lewellyn who was Connie Lewellyn’s husband at the time, who was teaching,
running an extension program in San Diego, and who else? Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk
, art historian. I don’t know if she’s still there or not.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Last I heard.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Is she still there?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. But that was several years ago.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. I’m trying to think who else was there. And that
was my real exposure to sort of, people from New York, and this changed my life.
And David especially. He loved what I was doing and always promoted me as the
best artist he’d seen around in California—and got me my first show
in L.A. at Molly Barnes Gallery. I had since been around again with these. .
. . That’s when I just finished these photo and photo-and-text pieces
on canvases. And I’d been around with those and nobody bit at all, and
David said, “Well, let me. . . .” He said, “I know this woman.”
And he convinced Molly to show my works between two shows like for a week.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [chuckles] Filler.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Which I. . . . You know, so I did it. And then I guess
the other show coming up after me, I guess there was some delay, so she left
it up for a longer time. So I think it’s three weeks. And that got me
my first review in Artforum. Jane Livingston was at the L.A. County Museum.
She was writing for Artforum.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: _____ [still had been her] then, in ‘67.
JOHN BALDESSARI: When were they new?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s what I’m trying to remember. It was either
‘67 or ‘68.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Around in there. _____ was here then. And the same night, Joseph
Kosuth had opened with his first show also, and so she wrote about both shows
in her review.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Where was it at? His show?
JOHN BALDESSARI: He was at Eugenia Butler Gallery, which turned out to be a
very good gallery. And the museum wanted to put a hold on two [works—Ed.]
and Maurice Tuchman put a hold on two for his own collection, and . . . nothing
ever happened. [laughs] Maurice dropped his holds and dropped all but one hold
on the L.A. County Museum. I think it was about three years later that he bought
it. And, you know Maurice of course: You know, “hot, big, yeah, you and
Warhol are next on our list.” [laughter] “Sure, Maurice.”
And then when it came down, he wanted to get it for the original price, and
so it was six hundred dollars, this piece they got. And now he claims that.
. . . I’ve heard him talk at various occasions and say I got the young
talent award that year, and I’ve always wanted to say, “Well, why
didn’t you give me the money for the award then, instead of six hundred
dollars?” [laughter] Anyway. So. . . . But then. . . . Oh, yeah. And so
that review then got me some attention in New York. Lucy Lippard had called
me up, and she was putting together a show of conceptual art, and she had contacted
me. And then David and Paul had given me various people to look up in New York,
so I went in and was showing works around and realized it was all the wrong
people to show things to. I mean, I didn’t know at the time, because I
had never met any artists really. But I was going around to mostly painters,
you know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Was this the first time you’d ever gone to New York?
JOHN BALDESSARI: As an artist. I’d gone there once before.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: As a civilian? [chuckles]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Civilian, yeah. And so I mean I’m showing my work to
all these people. I didn’t know who they were, really know who. You know,
later I knew who they were, like I think one of them. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Like who?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Like Al Held was one, and. . . . Oh, God, what was. . . . Oh,
what was it the . . . The English critic, the guy who coined art. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oh, Lawrence. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Alloway, yeah. And Gregory [Battcock] was there, and I met
him. And who were some of the others. . . . [pauses] I can’t think right
now. Nobody, you know, that were. . . . You know, all these sort of marginal
artists. And nothing happened. And I think I was hitting about. . . . And plus
this going down the gallery guide, or whatever, just on my own, and hitting
about three galleries a day. And it was pretty unnerving. I remember walking
into, I think it was Emmerich Gallery and, whoever it was, just losing it, you
know, with the artist before me. You know, “If I have to see one more
sheet of slides, I’m going to go crazy.” I just turned around and
walked out. [laughter] And then on the last day before I was going back, I went
into Richard Feigen Gallery, and I was thinking, “I don’t know anything
about this gallery,” and walked in. And the guy you may have met—I
think he’s vice president of something he’s now [at]—Michael
Findlay. And he’s the first person that really looked. He said, “Well,
these are not, these are kind of interesting.” And he said, “It’s
too bad I’ve just put on a show,” he said, “of artists using
language in their work.”
[Tape 2, side A]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. An interview
with John Baldessari on April 4, 1992, at Baldessari Studio in Santa Monica.
The interviewer is Christopher Knight, and this the second cassette. And Richard
Feigen was just about to put you in a show.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, no, no. Michael Findlay.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Michael Findlay was about to not put you in a show.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And he said, “How long are you in town?” And I
said, “Well, I’m leaving tonight.” And he said, “Well,
you know, there’s somebody that might be interested in your work, a friend
of mine, Kynaston McShine, who’s at the Jewish Museum.” And so I
ran up there, and he was out or couldn’t see me but, “Please. .
. .” You know, typical Kynaston fashion: “Please leave the material.”
[laughter] Well, I didn’t know then, of course. And then I got them back
a month later, that, “Well, thank you, but no thanks.” And then
what happened? Then I got a letter from Michael saying, could I send one piece,
or two. They were going to open up kind of a warehouse in this area called Soho.
[laughter] And where they were just going to have things there where they could
show clients and [they wondered—Ed.] if they could have a couple of pieces.
So I said, “Yeah. Sure. Of course.” And I sent them, and then they
said. . . . And then the only. . . . You know, Paula Cooper was the only gallery
there at the time, and they were the second one. And so then Michael wrote again
and said, “Well, they actually thought they might put on a show.”
And there was a three-person show. And I could look up who the other three people
were; you wouldn’t probably know them. I don’t remember them. They
just dropped out of sight. It was a three-person show. And so I showed a selection
of image and text pieces or text pieces. I don’t know if there were any
reviews. Oh, there were, yeah! You know who my first review was?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: No.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Who was not yet an artist. Vito Acconci.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Vito Acconci reviewed that show?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Wow! Did he like it?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yes.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So that was in 1970?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. All right, and then maybe by that time I. . . . And then
I switched galleries in L.A., and I’d gone to Eugena Butler because I
just. . . . Molly Barnes was just too much for me. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Before we get too far I want to go back to something about
Rico Lebrun.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Sure, um hmm.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You said in one of his final lectures he spent the whole
time talking about a painting of yours. Do you remember that painting? I mean,
can you tell me what it was like?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, well, it was collage sort of painting, and pretty stupid
I think, looking back on it, but I mean. . . . But I could see why he liked
it, because it was a more elemental reduced form of what he was doing. He was
doing sort of collage paintings. It was just pieces of paper that I had, with
pencil or charcoal probably, had modulated the surface, so that it was bent
or modulated, curved, what have you. It was like trompe l’oeil, even though
it was flat painting. And then had arranged all of those, pasted them together
so they had some sort of flow of light and dark, and then had put over washes
of white paint so you could barely see the modulation. It was almost all white,
yet there was this modulation of a two-dimensional surface. And completely nonobjective.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Completely non-objective.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, yeah. And that was it.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And he responded to non-objective.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I guess he thought. . . . You know, that was probably where
he might, would have gone, possibly, maybe. [laughs] He was doing similar things,
but they were like these Grunewald figures.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Like Cubist Grunewald.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And the other thing that I wanted to ask you about school
days, like at Otis, I would guess, but San Diego State as well. Were there fellow
students that were of any kind of influence to you at Otis—since you were
at Otis ‘57, ‘58.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Not at San Diego State, because all the instructors there had
been students at San Diego State. [laughs] You know, it was the kind of faculty
where you would. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: They stayed on.
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . do two or three paintings a year and enter them at the
show at the San Diego Fine Art Gallery, have ‘em in an exhibit at the
San Diego, the art, the local library, or what have you, you know, like that.
And the only real artist to me was this guy, whose name was Gene Swiggett.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Gene Swiggett?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Swiggett, S-w-i-g-g-e-t-t. He’d gone to Claremont Graduate
School and had studied with Henry McFee. And Henry McFee was a, had a lot of
sort of Picasso. I don’t know if you know his paintings.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I do know his paintings. My master’s thesis was partially
McFee.
JOHN BALDESSARI: [laughs] Yeah, okay. Well, then you know how it all fits in
and how that can segue very easily into LeBrun, right, yeah. And with bits of
Tamayo in there, I suppose. And Ben Shahn, I suppose, and what have you. And
then at Otis, it was just really a classical education. I mean, just hours of
drawing from the model, sculpting from the model. And one of the painting instructors
was. . . . Oh, God, he was on the. . . . What was his name? He was on the faculty
of the
Famous Artists School and. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Of the Famous Artists School? _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. God, what’s his name? You’d know him. He
did kind of [George] Bellows-like paintings of brawling sailors and fighters,
and that sort of Ash Can school and. . . . Fletcher Martin.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Fletcher Martin.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And the school was run by. . . . Oh, what was his name?
He was very influential in art at the time. He started the Claremont graduate
school program. He was a water colorist. And he designed the Otis building and
he did all the banks. He designed the banks. [Millard Sheets—Ed.]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oh, yeah, of course and those murals.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Murals. Yeah, the Ames. . . . Arthur Ames did the murals.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: He was terrible. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, and he was. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: He was a nightmare.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, but he was very powerful in art in L.A.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yes, he had the support of. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Anyway.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: It’s going to drive me crazy till I think of it.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. It’ll pop into mind. Yeah, so it was pretty classical,
and actually I guess one of the reasons I wanted to go into art especially,
is my milieu, I guess, was Abstract expressionists—Jackson Pollock, what
have you—and I was just tired of hearing that stuff that artists can’t
draw, you know, they don’t have _____. So I just drew from the model all
the time. And I was at a student. . . . Was it a student show? Well, anyway
it was at Otis, and the head art critic at the time, Arthur. . . . No, it wouldn’t
be Arthur Miller. Who would it be? On the L.A. Times.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s Miller then.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, was it? Anyway, he said it was. . . . He singled out a
drawing of mine and he said, “It’s nice to know somebody can draw.”
And I guess that’s all I needed and I just stopped. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The power of art criticism.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I have never had a use for it since. [laughter] But somebody
had to tell me that, that I could draw. And I think that’s when I left.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Where. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, but, anyway, you were asking about fellow artists. The
only one that. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I mean was [Ed] Ruscha around or [Robert] Irwin or any of
those. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, but they were all at Chouinard. And I remember going
down to Chouinard, and the big teacher down there—I sat in a couple of
the courses, just auditing—was. . . . I can’t think of it now. He’s
still around New York painting. Reubens, Richard Reubens.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Richard Reubens.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. He was the hot teacher. And I remember my first exposure
to Irwin was walking into a class and listening for a while and it was Irwin
teaching a painting class and everybody was doing the same painting, which was
a blank field and across it like this would be a piece of twisted cloth, and
they were trying to articulate the folds in cloth. But they were all doing the
same variation of the same painting.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Hmm. [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: I guess Bob was doing his line paintings about that time. [laughs]
And I never even met any of those guys until much later. And by that. . . .
And then I left and went down to, back to San Diego. But no, but the only guy
that I can remember that you would know, and he’s a favorite of. . . .
He doesn’t show around here, but he’s a favorite of Maurice Tuckman,
because now and then he’ll have a canvas at the. . . . Norman Zammitt.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Norman Zammitt.
JOHN BALDESSARI: You know his stuff?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, [with] the [long] stripes.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. He was the best student. He could do anything.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: At Otis?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah, he was great. You know, there’s always the
best student at school. He was the best student. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So, when you were a student then, at these various and sundry
places, what artists living and/or dead were you interested in?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I. . . . From one memory, the first artist that entered
my consciousness I think was Matisse. And that was my first year of college.
I had an art orientation class, and I didn’t even know who Matisse or
Picasso were when I went to college. So this was all news to me. That’s
how little I knew. Little! I didn’t know anything about art. And I saw
Matisse, you know, I was just revolted. This isn’t art, you know. And
I remember the instructor, the head of the department, a guy who was very well
known in art down. . . . I mean in social circles. Everett G. Jackson, and he.
. . . “Mr. Baldessari,” he said, “I’ll bet you really
fall in love with him at the end of this course.” I said, “Bullshit!”
you know, and I did. [both chuckle] And eventually, when I got to teaching myself
how to paint, I would copy Matisses. And Cezanne was a big influence on me,
I think, and Giotto, and then Ben Shawn, I think for a while and then [Grant].
. . . And sort of segue into. . . . And then somehow I got into surrealism,
from that to Dada artists, and then to Duchamp and like that, I think. That’s
sort of where I ended up. But I think my influence is really a lot of painting
until I began to see the possibilities of getting beyond that. But, I mean,
art was painting; painting was art when I went to school. There wasn’t
anything beyond it.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How would you. . . . I don’t want this to sound like
a stupid question, but it will. [laughter] How would you characterize the artistic
scene and/or situation in San Diego when you were going to school? In San Diego
and Los Angeles.
JOHN BALDESSARI: What period of time?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Like ‘55 to maybe early sixties, ‘62, ‘63.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, the only contemporary art one would see would be at La
Jolla Museum.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Who would go to the museum?
JOHN BALDESSARI: The La Jolla Museum?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I mean who would, aside from you and the few artists that
you. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, people living in La Jolla, you know. [laughs] I mean,
it was. . . You know, because I guess it was a vacation home for a lot of people
living in New York, or what have you. I mean, my memory is like there being
stock market brokers on almost every corner. You know, and Rancho Santa Fe.
So I guess, this was imported culture for them. At the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery,
there wasn’t too much. And they too would have their big local show as
did the La Jolla Museum, a juried show. But the really hip place was La Jolla,
the La Jolla Museum. And there was an art community, but no private galleries,
and before I left there was. . . . And I forget his name was, but he was kind
of hip. He started the gallery when some of us began showing downtown. But all
the galleries were in L.A. And I guess when Guy [Williams—Ed.] got the
show at David Stuart Gallery, he went up to teach at, he got a job at Chouinard,
and his wife then went to work for David Stewart. I mean, director, whatever.
But no, I mean, art was in L.A.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So, when you came to L.A., what did the art situation seem
like?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, the most. . . . I mean, the two prestigious galleries,
I guess, there were Ferus and Felix Landau Galleries, as I recall.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: But Ferus to you felt like a closed club?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah. I mean, I was this novice. I didn’t know anything.
And then there got to be other. . . . And then there was another hip gallery
that started at the time, Rolf Nelson Gallery. Oh yeah, and Nick Wilder and.
. . . And actually at that point, I should say something. Nick Wilder was very
supportive of me when I first, with these canvas pieces. And he said, “I
don’t know what you’re doing, but there’s somebody I know
who might be interested in them,” which turned out to be Dick Bellamy.
And so I put up all my things in Guy Williams’s studio, and when Dick
Bellamy came into town, I took him over to see them, and he didn’t say
anything, but he stayed a long time and looked and looked and looked. And he
said, “I’m not quite sure what you’re up to either, but there
are some artists in New York that you might feel you have some connection with.”
And so he gave me a whole list, and it turned out to be this. . . . It was like,
Verdun Graham, you know, Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, [________—Ed.] Mueller,
and some. . . . And that’s how I met all those guys. And I found people
that thought a lot similarly like I had.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How aware were you before you went to New York in ‘68,
‘69 whenever that was, how aware were you of developments that were happening
in New York with Pop and that whole scene?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I guess. . . . You know, I was getting ARTnews, and seeing
things. Oh, another influential gallery, shows that made a lot of impression
on me, were Virginia Dwan Galleries. She had a lot of different Pop artists.
I remember Yves Klein’s show making a lot of impression on me because
it just defied everything I knew about art.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And what was in that show?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Just monochrome blue paintings, all the same size. I said,
“This can’t be art.” You know, but in the analysis it snapped
my. . . . It snapped something there. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And what about Europe? Was there any awareness of. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, okay, yeah. My connection with Europe was that. . . . Well,
the first thing that comes to mind that somebody along the line said, “Your
work is more European.” I don’t know who it was that told me that.
I didn’t even know what that meant. But anyway, it did register; I remember
that. And, yeah. Michael Findlay said, “There is a critic that’s
based here in New York that is a critic for the Frankfurter Allegemeine. . .
.” Al-uh-guh-mine, is that the way you say it?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Allegemaine, yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: “. . . and he’s written, wrote about your first
show and wrote about your second show, and would like to meet you.” So
next time I was in the city, we got together, and we hit it off, and he said.
. . . He had been writing about my work in the paper in Germany, and he said,
“There’s a friend of mine who is just starting a gallery, I’d
gone to school with, and I think he’d be interested in maybe showing your
work. Would you like to meet him?” “Sure.” Turned out to be
Konrad Fisher. And then that got to be my. . . . Well, actually it wasn’t
my first show. It was Art in _____.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, [Amsterdam].
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Okay, so that’s like 1970-something when you _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Around in there, yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In the sixties, it seems that it’s like your information
about what art was and where it was and all of that was progressively getting
larger, I mean, as well as opening up. At what point did—if it did—did
Europe enter that equation? I mean, just as some kind of. . . . Oh look, a cute
mouse. [literally]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Ohh. [laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I mean, did you have any knowledge, aside from the occasional
show at Virginia Dwan?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: _____ European during the sixties?
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, all my art information was sort of imported. I would buy
art journals and so on from Europe and so on. Sure, yeah. But only in a second-hand
way. No actually seeing stuff unless it came to L.A. or occasionally New York.
Not even New York. Yeah it would be in L.A. And there were, like from Europe.
. . . Other than Klein, I guess there wouldn’t be any _____. I’d
have to check. I mean, who would have. . . . Well, I do remember the Duchamp
show at the Pasadena Museum. I was very impressed by that. A big impact. I mean,
actually seeing that stuff instead of, you know, reading about it.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Seeing the original. [laughs] Original canvas.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, actually, I think, I’ve always had this theory
that a lot of progress. . . . Well, I don’t know if you talk about progress
nowadays, but changes in art history come about from misinformation. Of, you
know, some artist in the Midwest, you know, reproduction, and not understanding
somebody’s work and spinning off from there in a completely oblique fashion
that probably wouldn’t have happened if he or she saw the original work.
And I think a lot of my life is importing information to National City, and
San Diego, and so on via journals, you know. So probably a lot of it was what
I assumed the work to be, and not what it was. And so getting a tape that might
not have occurred—although this is speculation—that might not have
occurred if I actually had seen the work or had been around when there was not
_____ generated.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Okay, in the sixties the scene in Los Angeles was beginning
to get some attention.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Um hmm.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: But you were still in San Diego, sort of seeing it from
afar.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Um hmm. Yeah, what held sway in L.A. was what we now, what
was called the finish-fetish people, and that just doesn’t interest me.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You had no interest in it.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Not a bit, not a bit. And actually, that was the one big obsession
with me when I got the job at Cal Arts, was to bring in an alternative aesthetic
to L.A. I mean, I had aspirations that large. [laughter] You know, I really,
I just thought it was all stupid. And I was hired to teach painting at Cal Arts.
And I said, “Listen, I’m not going to teach painting.” And
I said, “Can I teach something a little bit more along the lines of what
I’m doing?”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What was it about the “Cool School” that bugged
the hell out of you. [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Gosh, its impenetrability, I think, something. . . . It just.
. . . [pause] I remember reading articles of Don Judd, you know in The Nation
at the time. And, I mean, I liked his works a lot, so it wasn’t about
that kind of impenetrability. It just seemed stupid. [laughs] Which I think
I’ve turned out to be right about; it was stupid. [laughter] My instincts
were good. It just seemed to be a dead end.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So while that “stupid” stuff was going on, you
were in San Diego locked in a dark room making photo-emulsion paintings. Tell
me about how that came about, how the photo emulsion paintings. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I think I’ve said it in Coosje [van Bruggen]’s
books, but I just. . . . I was at the end of my tether so to speak. And, well,
I guess another epiphany or sorts. I just said, “I wonder what’d
happen if you just gave people what they ostensibly want?” Which is not
a lot of paint smeared around. [laughs] They want to recognize things. And I
said what, you know, just take people what they are. I guess, they do read.
I guess maybe that was too big an assumption, but. . . . “Magazines, newspapers,”
I said, “Well, I’ll make it look like that.” Either text,
you know, or text and _____.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Photo and a caption.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, one of that. That simple, yeah. I said, “I wonder
if that could be art?”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: It seems like such a leap, though.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, but you’ve got to realize where I was. I mean it
was a cultural desert, number one. I’m in a building, in a room. . . .
I mean, there no windows, just a door, surrounded by books and magazines. That
could have been anywhere, you know. And it just, by process of trying this and
put this and this and this, you know, it’s just by an evolution, I got
to that point. I said, “Well, why not? Let’s try this.” I
mean, it didn’t seem like a leap at the time, you know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I mean, it just seemed like the next step. I was very excited
about it. The first one I did was a text piece, and I had it up on my wall,
and I said, “That. . . .” I mean, aside from doing what I wanted
to do, I said, “It actually looks pretty good.” [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Beauty.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, God, that word again. But, you know, _____it held the wall.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. And at the time that you were doing this, were you
conscious of other related work?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, see, again, you’ve got to consider the milieu.
If I were like in L.A., and had to show that to a friend there, I would be scared
to death, you see.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And had what?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I would have been scared to death to having to show it to friends.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oh, I see. Oh, so you had no one to show it to, so it didn’t
matter.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I would be laughed at.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Uh huh.
JOHN BALDESSARI: You know, and so there were just those few buddies I had, you
know, I could say, “Hey, you want to see something really crazy lookin’?”
You know, they’d say, “Hey, that’s great. Let’s have
a beer,” you know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What was their response? I mean, Richard Allen Morris and
Al [________—Ed.]?
JOHN BALDESSARI: You know, we did have a great sort of camaraderie like, “What
the hell, just do what you want to do.” I mean, there wasn’t any
censuring going on. And I think at that time, who I was really probably showing
my works to was Richard. We were pretty close. Guy had since been up in L.A.,
and Don [Llewellyn—Ed.] had moved to New York. And there was this sort
of cowboy artist I sort of knew, and we were sitting around, and we liked to
_____. We would do western scenes, and that sort of like. . . . I mean, see,
there was not, this really didn’t matter. So I mean that. . . . And I
didn’t care either, you know. You know, in my mind, I was never going
to get a show. I was never going to get out of teaching high school or community
college, and since I’d since gotten married, and I was just going to.
. . . You know, there it is again.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: This is very _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And that was going to be my life, you know. I was going to
have kids and teach and do art. And so why shouldn’t I do what I wanted
to do. I guess the real turning point was getting this job at UCSD, and then
dramatically shifting my. . . .
[Tape 2, side B]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . .say then, that whatever career ambitions developed.
. . . I mean, the realization that it was possible to be an artist in the bigger
world, that in a way that came after the fact. I mean, you sort of stumbled
into this situation. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And certain things began to happen and. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Art was always something. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . _____ began to look back and say suddenly I have this
career ambition.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, I didn’t know. I mean, for years I couldn’t
use the word artist. First, my problem was I thought it meant Art with a capital
“A”, and then I began to tell myself, “Well, with a small
“A” it’s just like something you do. And sometimes it’s
done well, but most times not so well. It’s like a plumber. It doesn’t
mean you’re a good plumber, just you’re a plumber.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs] Right.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And so then I was a little bit more easy with the term. But
even then I wouldn’t say to people. . . . I said I taught. Yeah, and so
eventually, it. . . . It’s a little bit like that old saw about life is
what happens to you when you’re doing something else. All of a sudden,
I was an artist, you know. I mean, I had to admit it.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: When did you admit it to yourself? I mean, when did you
start to think of yourself as an artist?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I don’t know that it was any single point. [pauses] I
mean, it all got pretty unsettling, you know, where I got hired at UCSD, and
I said well, “Why would anybody hire me?” And here were all these
people from New York, and they were, you know. . . . Well, not necessarily that
all the faculty was fairly well known. David Antin had a growing reputation
as a critic, I think. And I guess he was my closest friend. I enjoyed him, but
nobody knew about Helen and Newton [Harrison.], nobody knew about. . . . Well,
Mike Todd came from New York, but he was sort of, had done a few shows. And
I guess the hottest artist was Paul Brach. He had shown at the Jewish Museum
with his abstract painting show. [laughing] And he would bring out. . . . he
knew a lot of people so he would bring out. . . . Like Roy Lichtenstein would
come out a do a gig or what have you. I knew Roy Lichtenstein was a real artist
and. . . . Actually, I mean, a lot of the people I really was interested were
the poets they would bring out, and I had never met real poets either, and that
was fun. And the first show that David [________] did was a big Fluxus show.
I had never had really seen any of that stuff before. And so I think, yeah,
right around in there and then maybe my first show, you know—Molly Barnes
and Feigen—and this writeup with Jane Livingston, I guess it was right
around in there that it all, “Something’s happening here.”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You just mentioned poetry. Where did your interest in poetry,
philosophy, reading. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: I don’t know. Probably from my mother. Maybe. . . . It’s
a suspicion, again, that this would get me out of the world I was in, you know.
It was a way again of beginning to live in your head, rather than living in
National City. [laughs] Probably that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And so all of these things were coming together and the
photo-emulsion paintings were being made. How did the decision to “cremate
your life” come about?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, that was interesting. Well, by that time I had switched
duty. I was in another empty building of my father’s, which was a movie
theatre, and he couldn’t rent it out. It didn’t have a level floor.
And I said, “Could I use that?” He said, “Sure.” So
I moved in there, and I was painting and painting, and I guess again, another
epiphany. [laughs] My life is just a string of epiphanies. [said tongue in cheek—Trans.]
[laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, right.
JOHN BALDESSARI: But, again, sitting all alone in this big theatre, no windows
again. It was sealed off. And this was in Lincoln Acres, California, which you’ve
probably never heard of.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Lincoln Acres?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Where’s that?
JOHN BALDESSARI: This is a little squalid place out sandwiched between National
City and Chula Vista.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I’ve never heard of it.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And you’re not likely to. Anyway, then there’s
this. . . . My father built on speculation this movie theatre for these operators,
and then all the movie business went bust, you know, with television coming
out, and it was a single-use building. So it just was there empty. So I would
drive out there, that would be my studio, and I’d close the door, and
that was my world, this semi-lighted space. But the good thing about it was
I could have all my paintings up around, and I could look at them. See what
I’ve done and what looked good, and what didn’t look good, [stank].
And all of a sudden, this epiphany again. And all of a sudden it just sort of
hit me that am I gonna do, my whole life is going to, rearranging things in
a rectangle. [laughter] “Yeah, if I keep on doing like this, I am. And
I’m gonna have this bloody building full.” And then I was more and
more aware of art could be something else. You know, having done these canvas
works, beginning to go into them I mean at the time, in the midst of them. And
it seemed like that was leading me to an area that was beyond painting. I mean,
I remember a very conscious thing was that I, that the only signal that they
would be art is, that was known, was that they’d be on canvas. I mean,
I had this idea that, well, it doesn’t matter what’s on the surface,
it’s that it reads as art because it’s on stretcher bars and canvas.
People accept it as art, and then beyond that it’s what you do inside
of it. And I realized that anybody could do those things. I could even, you
know, I could even have them done. And of course the next series of works I
did were commissioned paintings. And then I realized that I was in some other
ballgame at that time. And that, having done all these paintings, I was on the
wrong track. And I just might as well start a new life and get it behind me.
I had a lot of games. There’s a list here somewhere I’ve got around
here of all the things I was going to do with them. One of the. . . . It had
to do with fragmentation and atomization, one of the plans, I think where I
was going to photograph them all and make microdots out of them. Like in the
spy novel hide them between stamps and send them to my friends. [laughs] But
you get the idea. I wanted to decimate things and live. . . . You know, like
I mentioned living in my mind. You know, I didn’t need all of this residue.
I didn’t need this big theatre right now. It was the wrong way to go,
and I just had to do something that demonstrated that. And so I decided to make
a ritualized act out of it. And the only way I can explain it was it’s
like dieting. You have to do something dramatic, or otherwise it’s not
going to happen. And that’s why I did it.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: When you decided to burn, to cremate your past work, you
didn’t get rid of everything.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, here are the conditions I imposed on myself. Everything
up and to these text-and-image pieces, I considered, where I didn’t really
do it with my own hand. . . . And all that. . . . Everything I had in my own
possession. Obviously there are some works that survived. Not a lot I might
add. I think my sister has two or three. I actually have one that I found in
some boxes. I can show it to you.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I’d like to see it.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, okay. [moving away from microphone] Well, Motherwell actually
had it in a show. You might have seen it [inaudible] Yeah, there is a collage
I had done in ‘61, looked pretty Motherwellian.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, it is. It’s Motherwell and Diebenkorn.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, and it’s just _____.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yes.
JOHN BALDESSARI: _____ something else. [inaudible]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So these are the only two that you have.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Oh, I have slides of [mostly] all that stuff.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Chris, I have to go to the john for a second _____.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, go ahead.
[Interruption in taping]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: When you did the cremation piece and, as you describe it,
it was a sort of ritualized death and you went through all the steps, and you
placed a notice in the newspaper in the San Diego Union. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yes, right, yes.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . announcing the death of your former life, you had
to go to the newspaper office to place this notice. What did they say when you
filled out the form. I mean, how did they respond to this?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, just completely flat.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Just blank.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. It was under a legal notices section. I put it in as
a legal notice. “On such and such a date, this act was committed.”
And I had a notarized statement made up which I brought in. I said, “I
just want this printed.”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And notarized. And the notary didn’t say anything?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Just perfectly normal.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. The only good thing about it all. Well, I shouldn’t
say good, but amusing. First I thought it was just, I mean, it was going to
be totally conceptual that everybody was going to turn me down _____ crematorium.
And I think I’d done three or four, and I finally found this one. And
maybe they were just hard up, you know. They said, yeah, they would do it, but
after hours. [laughter] And now I know what I started to say. And they guy that
physically did the cremating turned out to be an art major in college.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really, great.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And so he thought I was completely wacko, but there was this
camaraderie, in that we were both involved in art. And so he would bring out.
. . . I guess trying to find something that would weld a bond, or whatever,
you know, he’d bring out like. . . . I remember him bringing out this
whole box of things that wouldn’t burn, during the cremating. You know
pins in the legs, and so on like that. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Major [dental] fillings.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, I guess, did you read this lately now that the
silicon breast implants won’t cremate?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: No.
JOHN BALDESSARI: They just said they gum up all the machinery. And now. . .
.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And explode?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, now they have, if you want to get cremated and have an
[implant], you have to sign—or your heirs or whatever—have to swear
that you haven’t had breast implants, or if you have any they have to
be removed before you can be cremated. [laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, that seems like a good enough to stop. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Stop right there with that, at that note.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: For today. Horrible.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah, and the other good thing. I don’t know if you’re.
. . . I think it was in the MOCA show, but, anyway, for the ashes I chose an
urn that was in the shape of a book, but that just seemed fitting to have in
that show.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What did you do with all the rest of the ashes? Because
there must have been a heck of a lot more ashes than were in the book.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I think they’re at [Sonnabend] right now or something
_____ in storage.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You mean, so you do have them all?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs] You do!
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, and I think. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: There must be boxes and boxes.
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, no, no, actually not. It’s either. . . . What was
it? Seven or nine and a half, or seven and a half. Anyway I could look it up.
And the box is just a silver box, that wide, about that long, and about like
that [high.].
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: About so long.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And that’s for one adult body, and then I had one child-size
[body] he also used for amputated limbs. But it came to either seven and a half
or nine and a half was my total output. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So what’s going to happen to your remains? Will they
be sprinkled over the National Gallery?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, well, no, I did do the one extension. I guess I had a.
. . . That was another crazy thought I had at the time. And I actually think
Coosje maybe talked about it in that book, about I had this reoccurring [sic]
dream of an airplane being disassembled, something like that, and all its component
parts, and then the metal of the parts being reduced—you know, going back
into the earth and so on and coming out of the earth and going back into this
big silver airplane again. And I began, I guess, looking at art that way. You
know, the pigment sticking out of the earth, and the tubes, and on the canvas
were the plants and so on, stretcher bars were trees and so on, and then going
back again. So I had the same idea for these ashes. I was being reductive. And
then I made these cookies out of them, actually, after, and then people would
eat the cookies, and they would be [shat, shot] out into the ground again, and
_____ renew this whole loop again. And I guess it was some. . . . I think it
came about because I began doing serial work this other time too. And I always
would go into a museum and look at paintings like frames in a film and wondering
what the frame was that might have been before it, you know, or after it. Or
if it became a wide angle shot, what would, what was, how did the artist see
beyond the frame, and so on. And really going about at it in a sort of cinematic
photographic way, and I guess it was just a vague irritation of the frozen-moment
idea. And I said, “Well, there are a lot of other moments that could have
been frozen, why this one?” [laughs] Or something like that. And just
thinking that. . . . I guess, just restless, you know. I mean like, “Why
this, rather than that one?”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: It also sounds a lot like little Johnny Baldessari pulling
nails out of. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Disassembling. Maybe, yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, dissassembling and sorting out water faucets.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I guess a lot of it’s just lashing
out, because I didn’t know how to be an artist, and all this time spent
alone in the dark in these studios and importing my culture and constant questions.
I’d say, “Well, why is this art? Why isn’t that art?”
And I guess, yeah, that just [felt, filled] a lot of this, that, like, well.
. . . I mean, these stupid questions that we all ask ourselves: “Who makes
art? Why is it art?” and so on. “Why is it not art?”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So what did it feel like when you were at the crematorium
burning this stuff up? Was it. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, kind of exhilirating. I didn’t feel sad at all.
Yeah, I just felt like getting rid of a lot of baggage, I guess—you know,
that I was off on some new life.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And then you went back to this movie theatre and it was
empty.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Yeah. And then I didn’t. . . . I mean then the
physicality of the thing was very little, and I got more into art as books,
films, video, that didn’t take any space.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And how long after the cremation piece did you move to Los
Angeles?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Probably within a year. Seventy. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Within a year.
JOHN BALDESSARI: It seems like that. Like I was at UCSD from ‘68 to ‘70.
Went to L.A. in ‘70, so it the cremation would have been around ‘68,
‘69, I guess, somewhere, ‘70.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. I think I wrote it down somewhere. It was the summer.
. . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. I’d have to check. So I’m sure that was.
. . . I don’t know whether that was hand in glove, but I just think it’s
all been together, like L.A. would be a new life and everything, you know, just
start out afresh, _____. Yeah, I remember I was just. . . . I remember John
Coplans who was then head of the Pasadena Museum. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The Pasadena Museum.
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . coming to my gallery on the behest of, I think it was
Paul Brach, and looking around in just utter bewilderment.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Coming to where?
JOHN BALDESSARI: To my studio and looking at these things.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In San Diego?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. He was at a lecture gig down there, I guess, at the university.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: After the cremation?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Uhhh. . . . I’m not sure. But I remember I was specifically
showing him these pieces.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The photo emulsions.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. I mean, I hadn’t. . . . They were done. . . . I
hadn’t cremated all of these things yet. They had happened, and I cremated
things afterward and it seemed like I was on this new path. I just always remember
the thing that he said. He just looked around for a long time and he said, “I
can’t show these.” And then I guess he. . . . I can’t be so
naive to think that that wasn’t a hope or something, but I mean that [had]
never come up. I said, “Well, thank you for looking.” Yeah, so I
mean, I’ve gotta say I owe a lot to David Antin for giving me confidence
in what I was doing. He was my first believer, so to speak.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Is there any aspect of anything we’ve covered today
that you want to add something to? Tomorrow we’ll move on to the. . .
.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, the cookie recipe. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The cookie recipe. Canvas cookies.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I actually did. . . . I got it someplace. I didn’t
make up the recipe. It was just a standard cookie recipe, but in it says, “ashes,
one cup,” whatever. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Chocolate chips. Did they have chocolate chips?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, that would [made it] very famous, right, to have some.
. . .
[Tape 3, side A ]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I have to do my intro here. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, an interview with John Baldessari on April 5, 1992, at Baldessari
Studio in Santa Monica. The interviewer is Christopher Knight and this is cassette
number three. Do you remember the sentence you were on.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Hah! Where did I leave off? I didn’t mark my place. [laughs]
Where were we?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: We were. . . . It was circa 1970, and in 1970 is when you
came to. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Cal Arts.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . to teach. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is,
when you finally moved to Los Angeles permanently from San Diego, how would
you describe the art scene that you found here at that moment?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, on one hand, I mean, I would rather have art to look
at—any art—rather than no art. I mean, there’s always some
nourishment to be found—even a square inch of a canvas that might look
good. On the other hand, I felt very much out of step, and not a lot of art
around me to encourage my own convictions. So my own convictions came from things
I had read and assumptions I had made out of my reading and looking and that
sort of thing. But nevertheless I kept looking, and I suppose amongst artists
that appealed to me and I suppose are pretty much the same ones that appeal
to me now. I mean, certainly Ed Ruscha and Bob Irwin, and. . . . In some oblique
way Ed Kienholz, because he just seemed so far afield from everybody. I mean
it’s the phenomenon that sort of interested me. And that he left town,
that didn’t surprise me.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Didn’t surprise you, why?
JOHN BALDESSARI: That he left L.A.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, why? Why didn’t it surprise you?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, because I don’t think there really was any. . .
. I just felt he could have got more support in Europe for what he was doing.
And I think that may have happened. It looks like it’s probably happened;
I don’t know. And the stuff that was touted, you may. . . . Even. . .
. Well, not. . . . I don’t think I’ve gotten over it, but it’s
that sort of thing like that, you know, maybe at three o’clock in the
morning, you’d have flashes, “Well, could I possibly be wrong?”
[laughter] I mean, if it is, we’re in deep trouble, you know, but that’s
hindsight. But I mean I just couldn’t understand all the acclaim. You
know, like people, you know, I’d sort of group ‘em together, call
‘em the Venice Artists with Racine. And which is an interesting. . . .
Just parenthetically, I think it’s interesting that, important that artists
get out of L.A. because otherwise they can make assumptions like that. Well,
you know, if Billy Al Bengston is the best artist in the world, then I must,
I should aspire to that or, you know, that’s a model, or something like
that. But then you begin to travel, and you see that that art doesn’t
have much currency any other place in the world, and you realize it’s
all about who the gatekeepers are. But that was pretty early on, and I didn’t
have that insight. I just felt that this didn’t make much sense to me,
you know, so. . . . And then it became that sort of second generation of the
Dill brothers and [Chuck—Ed.] Arnoldi, and that still didn’t make
any sense to me. And then I always thought Ed was a sort of interesting figure
in that he had no less attention, but he could also, he was also a good artist,
and that always sort of puzzled me. [laughs] That didn’t puzzle me, but
I was always fascinated by it, and it still fascinates me that he can have that
universal appeal. And so, I think, yeah, it was Ed, principally, and Bob Irwin
that I think probably I held in highest regard. And then trying to. . . . And
the shows that came into town. I remember Warhol’s show at Irving Blum
greatly influenced me. So, you know, those soup cans lined up in a row, and.
. . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Which would have been earlier than 1970.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And also at that time, I shouldn’t neglect the.
. . . Maybe it was. . . . My dates are pretty bad, but Pasadena Museum. I guess
they were still there.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: They were still there, until ‘71 I think.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, some pretty good shows there—Don Judd and again
Warhol. And the influence of [this, just] Walter Hopps being around; I thought
he was very good.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Did you meet him then?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I didn’t know him until later. And what else? I think
the first show at L.A. County Museum that Maurice Tuchman did had a great impact
on me.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Which? The sculpture or. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, New York sculpture. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oh, New York painting?
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . painting, sculpture, whatever, you know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The abstract [expressionists].
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, because I was able to see a lot of work. But, as I mentioned
to you yesterday, one of the things that was in my mind when I was at Cal Arts
that. . . . Well, I felt that it wouldn’t do any good to replicate that
aesthetic in any way and I. . . . To try to convey . . . start creating the
conditions for some alternative aesthetic, and then I began to immediately get
myself in charge of the visiting artists’ program. [laughter] Which I
had also admit, which I. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Was that. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, go ahead.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I was just going to say, is that something you learned from
David Antin?
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, actually I found out, I devised that technique when I was
at Southwestern Junior College, and I ran a very vigorous visiting artists program
there. Mostly people from L.A.; I think totally. But, I mean, pretty good for
a junior college at that time. You know, we had Sam Francis down there once
and Big Daddy Roth and Maurice Tuchman, for what he was worth, but nobody knew
about him then. You know, he was pretty hot and heavy, but that [the Getty],
Maurice, Morris. And various L.A. artists coming down. And I saw the value of
having artists around as models. You know, it seems like such a simple equation,
but it hadn’t dawned on anybody. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: If you’ve never had one, I suppose it’s _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And I think that. . . . You know, I had mentioned yesterday
that not having artists as models, and that I was early thirties before I met
a practicing artist, and Rico LeBrun at that, I could see the need for it. [laughter]
Yes, and I did the same thing at U.C.S.D. I had a whole list of artists coming
out there. And David [________—Ed.] and I worked very well back to back,
because he was inviting a lot of poets. And so it was a pretty exciting program.
And then the same thing at Cal Arts.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Can you explain what your interest was in Irwin’s
work at that time was? The connection with Ruscha seems very clear.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, minimalism, that always interests me. I mentioned yesterday,
I followed the writings of Don Judd in The Nation, subscribe to it particularly
for that reason.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: For Judd.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. I mean, if you consider the absurdity of the situation
this guy teaching high school, whatever, down in National City, subscribing
to The Nation to read Don Judd, it is pretty bizarre. [laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: But I was very taken the first time I saw this work of his
at the Green Gallery in New York, and, I don’t know, maybe it’s
just my alter ego or something like that, but I’ve been very much influenced
by him. You know, if one can call it that, but. . . . Reductivism or whatever
you want to call it. And for that reason Irwin did interest me. And I suppose
that my teacher side would respond to his thoroughness side, I suppose.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: At Cal Arts, can you describe the program? Because Cal Arts
was relatively raw then. [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, it’s easy to go back now and try to sort
out the chaos, but at the time it seemed totally chaotic.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Where was it in 1970?
JOHN BALDESSARI: In Burbank. It was the Catholic girl’s school. Villa
Cabrini.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Villa Cabrini?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Because the building wasn’t finished. And then
it was a near disaster because of the earthquake, and the earthquake stopped
right at the golf course right next to Cal Arts. The building wasn’t harmed,
and we were able to open then the next year. But. . . . I don’t even know
where to begin. I just remembered. . . . I think the first thing that comes
to mind. . . . Well, let me start with the first day, let’s say. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s a good place.
JOHN BALDESSARI: We drove up with Max Kozloff, who was on the first faculty,
and we drove into the parking lot and we looked around, and I would say ninety
percent of the plates were New York and New Jersey. And then you realize that
this was going to be a sort of total import of New York culture in California.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Faculty or students or both?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I guess, you know. [probably means both—Trans.]
And then we both laughed about it and said, “Well, here we go,”
you know. Well, I mean, what had happened, in fact, was that the various teachers—I
mean the various deans—were mostly out of New York and they got teachers
that they knew, mostly from New York, and the teachers brought their graduate
students, mostly, and so. . . . This was also a time when new schools were popping
up, I don’t know how many a year. And there was this band of nomad-like
students and teachers that would go from one hip school to the next hip school.
And I think what it was, that Cal Arts was the next hip school to migrate to.
And so they all descended. [laughter] And there was just all this hype around,
you know: Who’s going to be the next Black Mountain College in alternative
education, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So there was a lot of underground
word about it. And I think every crazy in the world descended the first year.
There was just utter chaos. But out of chaos, quite often there’s a lot
of order going on. It’s order that one should distrust usually.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Um hmm.
JOHN BALDESSARI: But you could. . . . In thinking again about the first year,
you begin to see the handwriting on the wall what was going to happen, because
there was a great deal of excitement for a moment, where it looked like [Herbert—Ed.]
Marcuse was going to come up and join the faculty from UCSD. And he was willing.
And the trustees said no. They didn’t want all the bad, bad rep.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Bad _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And so you could see the beginning of the end, sort of
right there.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: _____ trustees.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I mean, looking back. You couldn’t have seen it then,
of course. Another thing, rather, that was very hard for me to come to grips
with is that coming from teaching situations that evaluated students with grades,
all of a sudden you’re in a situation where there’s no grades. And
it was always sort of a given, and you realize how much classes depend on grades
as sort of like a punishment, you know. And here. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: _____ to keep people in line.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, exactly. And so. . . . There was no curriculum. One didn’t
assign, let’s say, class problems or what have you, and there was no reason
for a student to stay in your class if he or she didn’t want to. Well,
I mean, we know now. All of a sudden, a few contracts weren’t renewed
because nobody would go to the teacher’s classes. “Well, I think
the person’s boring,” or “Too much of an autocrat,”
or for whatever reasons, right, you know. And so that was unusual. And then
there was a lot of money around that first year. Every class that—we were
on a quarter system—every class got pin money of fifteen hundred dollars.
It doesn’t sound like a lot, but. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Again, that would go a long way.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, yeah. This is per class, you see, for incidentals.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Incidentals.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Plus there was a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year fund, student
administrated, to give grants to students for projects that might take unusual
expense. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Wow.
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . that they could make, put in application for. The equipment
we had was unbelievable. I remember porta-packs—you know, portable video
cameras—that’s what they called [them] at the time. Which are pretty
unusual, period. You know, we had twenty-five of them. And students could check
them out. And the equipment policy was so lax, there was incredible rip-off.
There was just no monitoring of. . . . Allen Kaprow actually. . . . In the shop,
he noticed this guy was just building this giant box, and you didn’t pay
much attention to it. And each day he walked by, and then one day he sort of
looked in, and this guy was filling it full of equipment he was just going to
mail back to where he came from. [laughter] And so there’s a lot of loss
that way, but in a way the best reading of that you can be, it’s like
if a book is stolen from a library, it’s great, you know, it’s being
put to use. And it was supposed to be cross-disciplinary, but the architecture
of the school just really inhibits that, because it’s all corridors and
doors and so on. Inasmuch as it was encouraged, I don’t think it was ever
that successful. I think it’s a little scary for students to try to [collapse]
into another school. Although there seemed to be sort of tradeoffs going on.
Like if a student wanted to learn something in the film school, he would hang
out over there—or she—and begin to trade things. Like the student
might do some sets, whatever, and the tradeoff would be that you would get to
use a camera and _____ crew or something like that, _____ a film, those sorts
of things, tradeoffs going on. Another good thing was that the place was open
around the clock, so you didn’t have to turn on creativity at eight o’clock
in the morning and stop at five. We were very relaxed about living in the studio
and sort of winked at it, so students that had very little money could just
live and work in the same space. See we had studio space for everyone, and every
graduate student had a scholarship, pretty much.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: About how many art students were in it?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I think roughly about, oh, maybe a hundred to a hundred and
thirty were tops. Of those maybe thirty, thirty-five would be graduate students.
There was no curriculum, as I had mentioned, and I even suggested—and
we tried it for one year—that students could propose any course that they
thought would be necessary, and we would find an instructor for it. That met
with moderate success, and I guess students were still authoritatively bound.
[laughs] Feeling that adults knew best. And we had some unusual courses. I think
one of the most bizarre ones that comes to mind was a course on joint-rolling.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Joint-rolling?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, we actually had it listed.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: And we had another one taught by a sociologist who was of the
Critical Studies faculty, that the class was in session anytime that he encountered
a student on campus. So in other words no fixed time. Rather Socratic. [laughter]
I don’t know, what. . . ?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How did the infamous Post Studio class. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah, I had mentioned yesterday that I was hired as a painter,
and was a bit frustrated. You know, I really didn’t want to do that, and
there were other painters, that, you know, they had been hired.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You hadn’t been painting for five years at that point.
JOHN BALDESSARI: No. No. Yeah. But I guess they didn’t know what else
to call me. [laughs] And so I went to Paul [Brach?—Trans.] and I said,
“Listen, this is really kind of silly and makes me uncomfortable. Can
I devise a class where, that’s more in keeping with what things I’m
thinking about?” And he said, “Sure, make me a proposal.”
And I thought about it and thought about it, and tried to bring some structure
into it, and I thought about calling it conceptual art, but that seemed too
narrow and too prescribed. And then I think I owe the phrase, the title “Post
Studio,” to Carl Andre. I know I didn’t coin it. But it seemed to
be more broadly inclusive, that it would just sort of indicate people not daubing
away at canvases or chipping away at stone, that there might be some other kind
of class situation. And so I elected to use that. And it seemed to work.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So how was the class organized?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Structured?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Basically, the way I ran. . . . [crash in the background, which
is ignored by the interview participants] I tried to give them sort of a brief
history of contemporary art and _____, and then trying to bring it up to these
issues that developed me, so they could see that the things I was interested
in didn’t come out of the blue sky—that there was some continuity
to it all. So liberal use of slides and a lot of use of overhead projectors
instead of books. And since I was on the road a lot in Europe and New York and
[in] _____ and then doing shows, I would bring back catalogs, magazines, and
talk about the stuff I’d seen. And so the students had probably the quickest
access to information of any art school in the U.S., I would wager. They didn’t
have to wait for it to come into the magazines. And plus the visiting artists.
I would have at least one or two a week talking there. And field trips. But
not necessarily art related, you know: going into the things that, introduce
them to culture, let’s say in the broadest sense. You know, like going
to Forest Lawn, or the Hollywood Wax Museum, or what have you. And a lot of
times just anything to get out of the studio. One of my tricks was just that
we’d have a map up on the wall, and somebody would just throw a dart at
the map, and we would go there that day. [laughter] They could take their _____
cameras and still cameras, and so whatever they wanted in just staying out there.
Try to do art around where we were.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Was the availability of equipment at Cal Arts influential
in your own work?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yes, of course. Because like, I mean, this is one of the reasons
students and teachers align themselves with an institution where they have access,
right? Yeah, sure, so I had access to video equipment, film equipment, and so
on, sure.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And you hadn’t done any of that before Cal Arts? Video
especially.
JOHN BALDESSARI: No video. I started video there, yeah. And film.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What colleagues on the faculty—either permanent faculty
or guest/visiting faculty—were of particular import to you?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I literally, by that time, I sort of was the sort of
Cupid between the art world and Cal Arts. Or the pimp. Or whatever you call
it. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Cupid or pimp.
JOHN BALDESSARI: You know, so everybody I met that seemed interesting I invited
to come out in any way they could, and trying, would not sort of take no for
an answer. If they’d say “Well, I can only come out for a day,”
I’d say, “Come for a day.” But if they didn’t have enough
money, I would arrange other gigs around town for them, with other colleagues
or what have you. I guess the most reticent one was Sol Lewitt. He said no,
he didn’t want to go to any teaching institution. And I said, “Well,
how about we could meet in a local bar?” He said, “Oh, that would
be fine.” So we just sort of hang out in the local bar all day and talk
to him, drank beer. But I mean, that was the whole mistake I could [see, say]
schools were making, you know, one, if they even thought about artists, they
would have to be there on their terms.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, right. Five, six hours.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I always, I just figured the important thing was to get the
artist at all costs. I mean, any that you could manage or any way you could
do it. So I mean I would pick them up at the airport; I would find places for
them to stay. You know, anything. Yeah, I was a pimp, if you think about it.
[laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And who among students that you had were—if there
were any—who were important to your work?
JOHN BALDESSARI: To my work?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: That’s probably hard to. . . . There was a certain group
of artists that we. . . . And then a lot of them sort of moved down here, where
I was living, which was also good. And then also I encouraged them to get places
where they could have studios as well, so that began to happen. And then when
that began to happen, I began to schedule classes, and at first each week a
different studio, so we could meet and see the work that was going on and what
have you. And then, there was this tradeoff I told you of people working on
various people’s work. So I would help on students work when they needed
help and vice versa, and. . . . Oh, and the other important thing, too, is an
attitude I tried to develop, was that you were an artist when you walked in
the door. Not a. . . . Wed’ sort of break down this relationship of student
and teacher, in that we just had more years on them, that was all, but we fully
accepted them as an artist, and that helped a lot too. So, the teaching didn’t
stop with, when the end, when the day was over, class was over, or what have
you. I mean students either would be visiting me or I would be visiting them.
You know, drinking parties, what have you. So, God, I know, like. . . . Well
David Salle, for one, moved right down here. And Jim Welling and Matt Mullican
immediately come to mind.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Is there any specific relationship or types of relationships
that you see between your work as a teacher and your work as an artist?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I should preface what I’m saying that we were I
remember Max Kozloff once said to me that “If anybody that goes to an
artist to find out about an artist’s work is a damn fool.” [laughter]
You know, I’ve always thought about that. You know, and at a certain point,
you know, artists do have blinders on of course.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yes.
[Tape 3, side B]
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . was, for this reason. The reason I got into teaching
was that it was the closest thing I could be doing making a living, to art.
Albeit it wasn’t art. I mean, you know, I wasn’t actually teaching.
And then I just, I decided, “Well listen, it looks like I’m going
to be doing this most of my life, and I’m going to have fun doing it,”
and so I decided to make it as much like art as I could, given the parameters
of the teaching situation. And so I finally think it came to a point like that,
that one will loop back on through the other, that my art would be sort of an
example or illustrative or a metaphor, for what things I was dealing with in
class. And I was going at my class much like I would do art, which was basically
trying to be as [formed] as possible, but open to chance. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You know, I think specifically of. . . . I don’t know
if I have the right name of the tape, but the Teaching a Plant the Alphabet.
Is that what it’s called?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The first time I saw that tape it was. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: The stupidest idea in the world.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: It was a long time ago. No, but the first I thought was,
“I wonder which of his students was the plant?” [laughter]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, that’s another tape called Teaching a Vegetable the Alphabet.
[laughter]
No. Well, the whole idea. . . . We [encountered] Cal Arts so that. . . . You
know, what do you do in an art school? And you say, “Well, what courses
are necessary to teach?” is question begging in a way, because you can
say, “Well, can art be taught at all?” you know, and I prefer to
say, “No, it can’t. It can’t be taught.” You can set
up a situation where art might happen, but I think that’s the closest.
And then I can jump from there into saying, “Well, if art can’t
be taught, maybe it would be a good idea to have people that call themselves
artists around. And something, some chemistry, might happen.” And then
the third thing would be that to be as non-tradition bound, or dealing with
_____ raw teaching as possible, and just be very pragmatic, whatever works.
You know, and if one thing doesn’t work, try another thing. I mean, my
idea was always you haven’t taught until you see the light in their eyes.
I mean, whatever. Extend your hand, whenever you. . . . You make a point, you
know. That’s what you do. Otherwise, you’re like the missionaries,
delivering the gospel and leaving. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Trading it to the _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In, let’s see, 1971, was when you had your first shows in Europe.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, one other point, Chris, but I guess that was covered in having artists
there, that would be very. . . . And this I don’t think is any axiom,
but I think you’ve got to have an artist, practicing artist, teaching
art. But, you know, there have been plenty of exceptions where there have been
really good art teachers who don’t do art, so I can’t say that’s
it any universal.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Have there?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I thought of this guy, Herb Jepson, at Otis; he was really
inspirational to a lot of artists—and to me. I mean, he was limited, but
I didn’t know he was limited until later. I mean, it was enough for me
at the time. I suppose if he had more to give, I could have absorbed more, but
there was. . . . I found him very inspiring, I’ve got to say. But you
think of the countless art departments where that notion isn’t really
used at all. They’re academics first, and then they’re artists.
And so I think you teach. . . . Students learn by watching a model or doing
art, and then they can see that you’re having the same trouble that they’re
having, that they’re not being stupid. You know, that you work and work
and work, and now and then some art comes out. And that artists are human and
fallible, and so on, and then it becomes something that students can aspire
to, and say, “Well,” you know, “I can do that.” But
otherwise, it’s pretty. . . . You know, you get this idea that artists
are made in heaven or something like that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Was being in Valencia sort of—I mean a rather isolated situation.
. . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: I think that was the one big mistake they made, because I think
students need to be in a city where they have access to the world of art. So
that became very hermetic. Yeah, we had to make incredible. . . . I mean the
amount of stuff that students could get there: a twenty-four hour film program,
music going on of all shapes and forms, theatre. I mean, there’s no way
one could partake of all of it. But still, you’re in this box, and outside
of the box, there’s not much. And so, you know, we had two full-time psychologists,
people flipping out all the time.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really?!
JOHN BALDESSARI: Couldn’t take it, yeah. I think that was a mistake. But
I think that. . . . You now, it’s a Disney idea. You go to some godforsaken
place and then let the real estate grow around you. [laughter]. That’s
what happened. Not a good idea. I think like Chicago Art Institute is ideal.
Especially where you’re back to back with a museum. Or Minneapolis College
of Art and Design, where you’re back to back and in the city. And you
need cheap restaurants and cheap housing, cheap food.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, what is it about the urban milieu that’s necessary
for the school?
JOHN BALDESSARI: That’s what I say. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Aside from. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, that?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I mean, psychically speaking?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, psychically, you [can] become part of some fabric of life and not
in a laboratory.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Okay, in 1971 is when you had your first show in Europe,
in Amsterdam.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yes. [Art in Project, Art in Project].
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Art in Project called Conception.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Um hmm.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Can you talk about that show a bit?
JOHN BALDESSARI: There was a series of eight-by-ten, black-and-white photographs
in a ring binder open on a table. And. . . . [pauses] I’m trying to think.
. . . They were all photographs. . . . There was a caption I had torn out of
a newspaper. Jesus. I can look it up for you. Art. . . . I’ll have to
look it up for you. Anyway, and so this torn out fragment of newspaper was placed
upon some usually flat visual material and. . . . Oh, yeah, it said “Art
Disaster.”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Art disaster?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And I don’t know what the hell it was referring
to but I just, I loved the idea about it. And I had just torn it out of a newspaper,
and I had it around for a long time. And then I’d collected, over a period
of time, examples of art—directions in art, whatever you might call it—I
didn’t think were very profitable to follow. [laughs] We’re back
[to, with] the Venice art scene again. And I just dropped that on each example,
and then I rephotographed it. And it was just a series of these photographs.
And I don’t know if anybody every got it at all. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So it said “Art Disaster” over a picture?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Yeah, of something illustrating the tendency in art that
I thought was a dead end. But it wasn’t an example of that kind of art;
it was something that would conjure that up. I mean, what can I give you as
an example? Oh, there might be a very, let’s say, drawing from a textbook—I
would save a lot of drawings when I was teaching high school or junior high
school—but let’s say just the very ruler and pencil drawinf, isometric
drawing [of, or] something. And that could be referred to, minimal art, let’s
say, like that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So it wasn’t a feature of. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: [So, It was] something dealing with pure language or what have you. It would
be illustrative, or conjure up, possibly, if you were knowledgeable about art.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And what other artists were in the show?
JOHN BALDESSARI: But it was very Ad Reinhardtish when I got through with it.
There wasn’t anything left that was worthwhile following. [laughter] You
know, I sort of dismissed everything.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Scorched earth.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Dismissed everything. [laughing]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You didn’t neglect anything.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Anyway, that was my first show.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What other artists were in the exhibition? And did you go to Amsterdam?
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, it was just a one-person show.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oh, that was just one person.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Um hmm. And did you. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah, and the announcement: it was great. It was just one of those old
photographs from the forties or fifties, some guy in floor-to-ceiling library
stacks. He’s up on a ladder taking a book out of from the top stack, and
then over that it said “Art Disaster.”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So that show was in 1970 or ‘71? I can go check it.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, probably then.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I did jot down that in 1972 you had nine exhibitions in
Europe.
JOHN BALDESSARI: You’re kidding.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Uh uh. Nine solo. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Jesus Christ. Nah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. I counted. . . . It’s in the retrospective by
_____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Jesus Christ. Well, I can explain that. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Do!
JOHN BALDESSARI: No. What it was, Chris. . . . And I mentioned Konrad Fischer
and his first gallery, although he had moved into a space by the time I hit
him, was in his apartment. And most of these guys were just all, you know, literally
putting out a shingle, so to speak. Like, “I’ll be an art dealer.
Why not?” And they all sort of knew of each other. So you showed with
one, you showed with ‘em all. You know, it was just the whole circuit
one followed.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, it said, Belgium, London, Bonn, Paris. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yes. I didn’t realize there was that many.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . Florence, Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Brussels again, and Rome.
JOHN BALDESSARI: That’s why I was so tired all the time. I really had
never counted them.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Did you go to Europe for any of these shows?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Every one of them.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: For every one of them?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You were tired, my God.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, that was another time I almost got fired. I’d
done a show in—two shows—and the last one, I don’t know where
it was, and then Paris. And then [Lucio, Luccio] [Malio, Maleo] from Modern
Art Agency in Napoli, I thought that was to be my third show. But the way we
had arranged it, he would just come and get the work in Paris and bring it back.
And I had the announcement all layed out for him and everything. And he said,
“No, no, you must come. You don’t understand. I am art. I am contemporary
art in Naples and it’s a big deal. You know, a lot of people coming to
the opening.” And I said, “[Lucci], you don’t understand.
I’ve got a job and I’ve been away and I really have to be back.”
But we figured out I could get there for the opening, and catch a plane the
next morning and get back to my desk. So, we went down and we did the show,
and it’s true. It’s just like, there must have been a thousand people
at the opening. And I caught a plane at sun[rise]. . . . The sun had not even
arisen and we were going to the airport at three-thirty in the morning, and
the sun was rising over Pompeii, and got a plane to, Jesus, to Rome, to Paris,
New York, L.A., and was at my desk for enrollment the first day of school, nine
o’clock in the morning, and I said, “You know, this is fucking crazy.
I don’t need this.” And then I had to take off for another gig on
the weekend, and I just got one of my graduate students to cover my classes,
and Paul was really pissed. He said, “You’ve been away for two weeks
and you leave again?” And he said, “You gotta stop this.”
I pushed it a little bit too hard that time. But that gives you an idea of my
life.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. In 1972, then, was really the first time you spent a lot of time in
Europe. You’d been before, you said.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, but not. . . . That was the first sort of art, yeah.
So the first time was all new to me.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So how would you characterize the art situation in Europe that you encountered
in that year?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well. . . . [pauses] Well, the best thing about it was meeting
artists that were interested in something similar that I was, or I had read
about, or what have you. So amongst this group of artists, there was a lot of
excitement, or maybe I made it exciting. I don’t know what, but. . . .
And I think it was a very important time for many artists, because air fares
were cheap, and then these dealers had the idea. . . . And I think, actually.
. . . I don’t know if Konrad started it, but you bring the artist over,
and you do the work there, rather than shipping art. And so what you ship is
actually the artist. And that was incredibly valuable for me—and in turn
valuable for Cal Arts—because I would bring back all, you know, full of
excitement, conversations I had back to Cal Arts and pass it on and share all
the information. So it was a heady time, and I think I’ve not experienced
it since.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So the idea of shipping the artist instead of the art would, [can only]
have been possible with conceptual art.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, and. . . . Well, I remember Seth Siegalaub when he was,
he always made a joke was, “Yeah, when I have to ship a show, I just go
down to the post office with it under my arm.” [laughs] So I mean, I think
a lot of. . . . Well, Lucy Lippard’s term “dematerialization of
art,”you know, really, it got—I can’t think of the word I’m
using—but transferred. I mean, art became the artist so to speak. I mean,
there was something being shipped.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. It’s interesting then that in the seventies.
. . . I tend to think of the seventies in this country as sort of the decade
of the local artist. I mean, the whole regionalist, you know, this kind of attempt
to make, to construct a regionalist aesthetic and. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, and then I would get back into L.A., and, you know, you
could understand my getting conflicted, because I had no feeling for anything
going on at all, but enough of a developing ego where I could believe in myself
more and more. I think that was certainly bolstered by people that thought similarly
so I didn’t feel so crazy anymore. And from strength in numbers yeah,
it got easy. But I would remember never—or very seldom—getting invited
to all the big art parties, and I remember. . . . Who was it? The big party-givers
were the Grinsteins and the Butlers. It was where they both had big houses and
a lot of money and a lot of drugs and. . . . [laughs] But like people I would
know that would be art stars visiting from New York, they would come back. .
. . I remember one of them—was it Larry Wiener or somebody?—and
he was laughing and said, “They don’t even know what you do.”
Oh, yeah, and I remember one time I picked up Daniel Buren at the airport and.
. . . You see, every artist that. . . . You know, nobody had any money, so everybody
stayed at our house. . . . Not my sister. My daughter says she got the greatest
art education, that she met every contemporary artist when she was a child.
And anyway I picked up Buren, and he’d already been out here once before,
and so we were having lunch at my house, and I’m on the phone with somebody
and actually getting one of those call interruptions—you know, the emergency
phone call you got. “What can this be?” It’s Elyse Grinstein.
And she says “Is Daniel Buren there?” and I said, “Yes.”
And she said, “Well, you bring him over here right now.” It was
an order. She thought I had abducted him or something. “And why would
anybody like that want to have anything to do with me?” [laughs] So it
was constantly like that. And I think it’s ironic now that I’m doing
prints there but. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s [right].
JOHN BALDESSARI: Anyway but I got a sense of humor about it all. [siren passing by outside]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Sort of following along that line. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: And it really continued. . . . I mean, sorry [for interrupting],
it really continued up until the time when I had my show at Margo [Leavin].
. . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In 1984.
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . in ‘84. You know Margo said, “Listen, I don’t
know how to market you.” I think she was mostly doing it because I think
she was getting a big push from Alexis Smith and Lynda Benglis and Oldenburgs,
and so on. She had so little faith in me, I’ve got to say, that I had
to bring in my own photographer to photograph the show.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And she left town during the show and so on.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, I did. . . . I was also counting other things. Between 1960 and 1984,
you had three shows in galleries in Los Angeles and twenty-six shows in galleries
in Europe.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Jesus. I didn’t know I’d had. . . . I mean I knew
how many shows I had in L.A. That’s not too hard to count. One, two. .
. . [laughs] Yeah, the second one was Jim Corcoran, and I had a big argument
with Illeana [Sonnabend]. I said, “He doesn’t want to show me.”
And she said, “No, no, he really likes your work.” I said, “Illiana,
now look, come on.” He says, “It’s a trade-out with Leo.”
You know, because he had. . . . First show was [Bob.] Morris and then I think
the Bechers and I was the third one. And then, “No, no, he really, really
does like your work.” So I finally did it, and I’m still not convinced
he liked my work. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And that was 1976.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was very nice and very gracious. I don’t think
he knew at all what I was doing. Although I tend to veer a little bit in that
direction because I am convinced he shows things he really does like—you
know, because his space is so bizzare he must like it. You know, it’s
not like he chose it in some canonical way.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: No.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Anyway.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And there are probably lots of reasons.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, true, true. But at the time, I mean, I was a little bit
better, because I had an offer from Larry Gagosian also and Corcoran and Margo.
And I guess Corcoran, I just seemed to be too flaky for him. I have no idea
how _____. And Larry, he had the idea that art. . . . It was more about selling,
and less about art, really. As long as he was selling something, art just happened
to be there. [laughs] And I had the idea that he could vanish in the middle
of the night. And Margot, while less exciting, I had the feeling that she was
committed to what she was doing. It’s a little less exciting gallery now
than it was. I thought she was doing pretty well at the time. But anyway, that
was my reason for my choice.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: During this time, during the seventies and during the eighties—I mean,
this does fit in with what you were just saying—what relative—or
relevant rather—friendships, of artists or dealers and collectors or.
. . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: From what? Seventies through eighties?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, from seventies. Particularly the seventies, let’s say. I mean
like Lawrence Wiener, for instance.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Lawrence became very good friend. Paula Cooper. Elan Wingate. And I think
a lot of my social mileiu, too, were. . . . You know, I said working with students.
So they were really the people I ate and drank with and so on. And then I was
on the road so much. It’s not so much. . . . My social life is pretty
much taken up with, one, doing my own art and people just coming through town.
So you have dinner with this person, dinner with that person, so not too much
time to. . . . But looking back in years, I think Marcia Tucker was another
one. Geez, I don’t know; I’m trying to think here. [Seth, Sep] Siegeloff,
Lucy Lippard—they were a couple at the time. I’m sure there are
others.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How did your relationship with Illiana Sonnabend begin?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Um. . . . [laughs] This is a great story. I’m glad you
asked me. I was in Cologne at a show called Prospect, which was a rather interesting
show that I think Konrad Fischer was behind primarily, but the show, sort of
new tendencies in art each year. No, I’m sorry. I got it confused. That
was Project. Prospect was sort of a. . . . It was another one. This was put
on in Cologne, and it was sort of anticipatory for one of the Documentas, I
forget which one. I mean, pretty much the show was. . . . People who were in
that show were going to be in Documenta, or so it seemed. And she. . . . I was
in Konrad Fischer’s booth at the Art Fair in Cologne—it was on at
the same time—and she came up to me and introduced herself, and said,
“Would you consider showing with me?” And I thought she meant Paris.
And I guess I was just so kind of exhausted, I said, “Well, you know,
I’m really, I don’t know if I’m able to talk about it now,
but. . . .” And she said, “Well, will you be through to New York?”
I said, “Yes. That’ll be my next stop.” She said, “Well,
can we have a meeting and talk about it there?” And I said, “Yeah.
I’ll do that.” And by that. . . . I didn’t have any representation
in New York also, since Feigen had closed down, and so I really thought, “Well,
in Paris and France that could be okay.” I mean, I was covered in other
cities, so to speak. So I got there and every. . . . Michael Sonnabend was there,
Illiana, Antonio [Homem—Ed.]. Elan Wingate had just joined the gallery.
And that’s when they had their gallery uptown. They hadn’t opened
it downtown; they were across from the Whitney. And God knows who; everyone
was there. It was kind of a shock. I had thought it was just going to be Illiana
and myself. And so I remember them asking me where I was showing. They asked
me where I was showing in Europe, what galleries I was in, and I named them
off. And Michael was acerbically saying, “Well, where do you show in Iceland?”
[laughter] Well, what it was was they wanted the whole enchilada, so to speak.
You know, that it couldn’t be just New York or Paris, like that. They
wanted to be my primary gallery. So that was a big [cincher] to me, and I said,
“Well, I have commitments to do shows with these other galleries, and
you’ll have to honor them. And then I guess I had the sort of naive idea
that things would work out, which they did [for, with one of] the other galleries.
[laughs] Because I said, “Well, can we work cooperatively with Sonnabend,
and it was like, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Because, you
know, she had an incredible reputation at the time as being this really tough
woman and the most powerful dealer in Europe, and so they wanted nothing to
do with her. It was about power, you know, and they were not going to. . . .
You know, “You either, you have to make up your mind. You show with us
or her, but you can’t do both.” So I lost Art in Project. I lost
Konrad. I pretty much lost ‘em all, I think. I really did. And. . . .
[Tape 4, side A]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . an interview with John Baldessari on April 5, 1992, at Baldessari
Studio in Santa Monica. The interviewer is Christopher Knight and this is cassette
number four.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, I was naive enough to think that some sort of alliance
or compromise had or could have been worked out, and they weren’t. And
so I lost. . . . Well, I mean [MTL, Empty El] Gallery in Brussels that—I
mean, he was in a bad car accident, so that was automatically out of the picture.
And Art in Project refused to do it. Konrad, I continued with for a little bit.
I don’t know where else. [Joselli, Guselli] Gallery, I stopped with him
because I found out he was selling my work under the table, and so I just cut
off relationships with him. And it was about. . . . Yeah. And I think the reason
I did it [moved without thinking to the new gallery—Ed.] was I’m
just not a good business person, and the idea of dealing with all the logistics
of different galleries, I just didn’t have the head for it. So, well,
it seems like it’s better to have works at one gallery, and they can do
all of the logistical stuff, and I just want to do the art, and [which I have]
continued to present. And I have lost shows for various reasons over the years
because, one, she’s so powerful they don’t want to accede to her,
or the percentages allowed are so little that they’re just not profitable
for the galleries _____ _____. But I think in all it’s been okay.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, it doesn’t seem to have slowed down the number
of shows that you were doing.
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, but there are shows that I could have done, or that I would
have liked to have done. I mean, I’m very sad that I have not been able
to continue my relationship with Konrad. And actually I thought about a year
ago we had worked something out, and he said, “It’s okay. Let’s
just do it and I’ll work through her.” And then, I don’t know,
something happened. And he said, “No, I just can’t do it.”
I’ve always liked Konrad as a friend as well so. . . . And Art in Projects,
I don’t know if I regret that so much. I mean, they’re very good
I think but then they’ve become a very fancy gallery also, too, and so.
. . . And in London, I was showing there with Jack Wendler who ran Art Bulletin
and Lisson, the gallery I show with now. And he had asked me, actually, a day
after Jack, and I said, “I can’t do it,” but then after I
left Jack I, after some hiatus, I joined Lisson Gallery, and that’s worked
out okay. And in Paris, I just recently switched galleries there. I’m
with [Chantal Couselle]. I just did the first show _____ this year. And so I’m
gradually sort of. . . . And then Brooke Alexander and John Weber and [Public
Tobey] have their gallery in Madrid, which I’ve been showing at, and I
have another Gallery in Brussels now. So I’ve sort of built it back up
again.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Have any of the dealers that you’ve worked with, or been friendly
with, been important in other than a business sense or a management sense? I
mean people you’ve talked to about work.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, you know, I’ve usually had this attitude about
dealers. That if I can’t enjoy going out to dinner with them, I really
don’t want them as a dealer—I mean, as opposed to this idea that
a good dealer is somebody who sells your work. Because a lot of dealers for
years didn’t sell anything, and that they would do it repeatedly and not
make any money! They’re either crazy or we have a good relationship. Like
Peter [Packkesh, Pakesh], he’s been a. . . . That’s another big
gallery I have. I don’t think he’s sold but one or two works over
our relationship, and he continues to [do showings, be showing]. And very supportive
in arranging this and arranging that for me, and so on. Yeah, so that’s
been very important with me. And actually the reason I think for dropping the
gallery I had in Paris, [Larish, Larsj] Sullivan. Because while [they, he] had
a lot of money and everything, it just didn’t seem the gallery for me.
It was something Illiana had arranged. It just didn’t feel comfortable,
and I left. I ended up going to a gallery where I felt more sympathy with the
person. Yeah, so that’s been very crucial. And dealers. . . . You know,
I mentioned Elan Wingate. He went to have his own gallery, and [we’re
living at the ocean], and we’re very. . . . You know, we talked quite
regularly on the phone and still very good friends. Brooke Alexander has become
a good friend. Marian Goodman. And I continue to work with them now as well
in New York. Paula Cooper, I’ve never shown there but she’s always
been a good friend and very supportive of me, and has arranged sales, bought
work herself, and she’s having various group shows and things.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The retrospective last year—or two years ago, 1990—a
number of artists say. . . . This may even be somewhat of a cliche, but a number
of artists say that doing a retrospective is a rather terrifying thing. Ed Ruscha
being sort of the classic example. . . . I don’t want no retrospective
[the title of a Ruscha drawing—Ed.]. What kind of impact did that show
have on you? Doing that exhibition?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, it’s good that you bring it up, because I’m
just beginning to think about it now. And I kind of pre-date it actually to
when I took my departure from Cal Arts, where I had gotten the Guggenheim after
many, many, many years. I don’t know if I ever told you that story.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: No. What?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I had applied for years and never gotten it—not that I should
have but. . . .
But I religiously would apply, and I got so paranoid one time, I accused them
of never opening the stuff I had sent them. [laughter] I swear to God that _____
still I believe it _____. So then I stopped for several years, but I would always
write recommendations for people, you know, with the proviso, I said, “Listen,
I’ve never got one. I’d be glad to write one for you.” And
then one year, I was writing them out again, and I thought, “Well, why
don’t I try it again.” So I applied, and after some months a letter
came, and I didn’t even open it. I said, “Well, rejected again.”
I was just so conditioned to rejection from them. And then at Cal Arts, I ran
into Bob Fitzpatrick, and he said, “Congratulations.” I said, “For
what?” And he said, “Well, you got a Guggenheim.” And I said,
“No, I didn’t.” And he said, “Yes, I got an announcement
of it.” And he looked at me like I was being disingenuous. And I said,
“Are you sure?” And he said, “Yes,” still looking at
me rather strangely. So I went home and opened the letter and yeah. So, then
I immediately made my resignation and said I was. . . . [Chancellor] Laurentino
said, “Well, this is rather short notice. Won’t you finish out the
academic year?” And I said, “No. I’m leaving. I’m outta
here.” [laughs] And I guess what I’m saying. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: This was after twenty years?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, God, yeah, yeah. The reason I brought it up, it seems like
it’s been like this sort of, like in a jet plane since I walked out the
door, and I’ve just now landed. So it started. . . . I mean, that gave
me the time to work and the time to work generated more exhibitions, so it sort
of went like that. And now I’m beginning to think about it all. Because
it’s like another chapter closed. Yeah, I think it’s [like, right],
again, you know, just always out of breath. Putting in incredible hours, getting
up before dawn to work, and working late at night, and terrible traveling schedules,
and, you know, just non-stop. And it just. . . . I think that’s one of
the reasons why, when this India thing came up, I said that’s perfect
timing. The last stop will be over, and let’s go there. Of course, I couldn’t
stop. I kept working; every day the same schedule. But at least I got out of
the, you know, a different culture where I could begin to think a little bit.
And I guess I’m into that now. I have to. . . . It’s sort of like,
you know, having, you know, I’ll have to, you know, chapter two what else,
what else, you know, where you reinvent yourself. Whatever it takes. I don’t
know, you know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Did seeing twenty some odd years worth of work together change the way you
saw your. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I’m sure it must. I’m sure it must, because
one of the. . . . At the time, you know, I loved Coosje [curator of the retrospective—Ed.]
a lot, but she’s so anal and so fastidious. I would be on the phone four
or five times a day with her, and an average phone call would be half an hour
to an hour. She’s such a fact checker. And so I’m glad it happened.
My life is documented. [chuckles] And that was something I had let sli. . .
. Well, I started to say let slide. It was a knowledgeable decision. Every time
I had a prospect of a catalog, I said, “Can I use the budget to do an
artist’s book?” And so I really didn’t have that many catalogs,
you see. And anytime anybody would want to see the documentation, I’d
have to go through my not-very-well-organized slides, or whatever. I could really
see the value of something like that, so I did give it a lot of time. And I’m
glad it was not a museum job because they can’t give that much time and
effort. She worked four years on it, and so everything is checked and cross
checked for accuracy. And so it was worth it. But about the value of seeing
all my work together, yeah. I was reading about Motherwell that he had once
rented out a huge loft with the express purpose of just putting up all his work
around to look at it for a few months. And in fact that’s what a retrospective
does. You have a big space where you can put your work up and look at it. [chuckles]
And you can see certain things, you know, working, that grow certain dead ends,
stupid mistakes, things that you could push further, and so on. Yeah, so that’s
the big payoff.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Were there any real surprises, in doing it?
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. No, but
just the surprise of just seeing the arc of your life, you know, and like that.
And that’s frightening, but rewarding also. I could have never gotten
that picture just going through my slide tray, or whatever. [laughter] And also
having to evaluate work for inclusion in the show. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . and saying this goes out or this goes in or what have
you. You know, those are tough and hard decisions. And you have to really think
about _____ _____ pieces. Who goes in the lifeboat, who doesn’t, I suppose.
[laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: The selection of the retrospective seemed coherent until the mid 1980s.
It seemed almost coincident with the market. You know what I mean? To have been
selected in a really coherent way just until the point in the mid eighties when
the market exploded, and then one of the considerations that seemed to enter
the retrospective was who owned the work.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Um hmm.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I mean, this was the perception I had. Is that. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: That was a constant fight of mine and Coosje’s. And again, a bit schizoid
of me I suppose, because I had Mary Jane [Jacob—Ed.] and Coosje, both
at first, and so there was incredible pressure from the [museum] to have works
in, you know, people that they are courting, and the boards of trustees and
so on. And a source of constant friction, yeah. Also, I think a lot of the,
I mean a lot of the. . . . It shows a record of my non-sales up until then.
[laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: It did, really.
JOHN BALDESSARI: This is the reason I taught. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: But it meant. . . . I mean. . . . I’m sorry [for interrupting—Ed.],
but. . . . Yeah, and that’s a good point about the mechanics of the museum.
Everything’s not truth and beauty, and there’s a lot of pressure
to do things you don’t want to do.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah. And it’s a mistake to pretend otherwise.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And you realize. . . . I mean, in my darkest moments,
it becomes very clear that the artist is expendable. I mean, if not you, somebody
else. These things are going to go on. And, you know, that you actually hear
Mary Jane on the phone or Koshalek, you know, “You take my show, because
I took your show,” or “I’ll give you this show, you’ll
take that show.” I mean, these constant trade-offs and to pretend otherwise
is naive.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yes.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, yeah. And this is stuff that students should know, you
know. And I try to, I’ve always tried to. . . . I mean, I didn’t
have that experience when I was teaching at Cal Arts, but I do try to pass on
all that kind of stuff when I can. So it’s not about some all-knowing
beneficent God up there that makes the decisions. [laughs] [some loud crunching
noises here]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: A couple of things that I’m just curious as to how
you think about them in terms of art and your work. Humor, for instance. Humor
has been a really important element of at least the post-cremation work. I don’t
know if that’s a. . . . I don’t know whether you’re making
fun of ab-ex [Abstract Expressionist—Ed.] paintings or not.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I’ve always sort of looked at it as I don’t
work intentionally for humor. Like, let’s say, I think like Bill Wegman
would do—that I think what the humor that’s there comes from seeing
the world awry or slightly off kilter, or it’s balancing on one foot,
or what have you. Trying to see the world anew, with fresh eyes, or what have
you, non-conventional eyes. And pretty much the same technique I would use in
teaching—trying to challenge everything conventional that was [handed].
I mean, actually, I taught a course at Hunter [College] one summer, where I
just. . . . I began the course by having the students list all the things they
were told, or they assumed to be sort of rules in art. And then we just examined
every one of them. But I think it’s that. [pauses] And I guess my mind
is such that it sees connections everywhere, or sees a subtext to everything,
or what have you. And I think a lot of that comes out in a way as humor. But
it’s nothing I intend. I think what I intend, as corny as it may sound,
is something what perhaps like a good writer, good poet, intends. They’re
trying to get a relationship between two words that’s not far-fetched,
but not too flabby either, but just the right kind of tension where some new
meaning is evoked or created. And quite often things can sound kind of, can
sound humorous when that happens. [chuckles] Sure.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Another one. Art historical [references].
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I. . . . Maybe I’m the worst one to ask on that
one. I mean the first time I even thought about that was actually, was Alex
Smith, who said, “You know, I can look at your work and I can see the
whole history of art in it.” And I thought about it for a long time, and
I said, “Well, I guess, maybe, as a result of that’s my world—teaching
art and knowing about art—and I guess that stuff’s going to leak
out, that’s going to be a part of what I talk about, I suppose.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: But there are also. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: But I never thought about it before she said that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Because there are, I mean, clearly conscious examples of. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: In the very early work, yeah, I think that, yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Death, vanitas.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Oh yeah, like that, yeah. But see how I replied there. I said, “Oh,
yeah, that.”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oh, yeah, that. [chuckling]
JOHN BALDESSARI: But that’s not art history. Yeah, but it is. Yeah, you’re right.
See, I just assume this is stuff that’s just general knowledge.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And one thing that is probably from left field, but the coincidence between
your retrospective and the Sigmar Polke retrospective. Has his work in any way
been important to you?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I’ve known Sigmar since Documenta Five, I guess is where
I first met him, and always loved him and appreciated him. I never saw so much
work as when he was, you know, up until just recently. Yeah, sure, I knew of
his work, obviously. Did it consciously influence me in any way? [pauses] Probably.
I mean, not in any knowledgeable way. What I was going to say was something
kind of bizarre, but maybe in some circuitous route. You know, being interested
in some artist that was influenced by him, you know, something like that, maybe.
I don’t know. I mean, I could imagine maybe Warhol being in some way,
you know. You know, probably I learned. . . . I was going to say, I learned
more from Warhol than from Polke, but it’s quite possible Warhol learned
a lot from Polke, you see, also. I mean artists at its best level are in conversation
with each other, and you’re commenting each other’s work, so. .
. . Maybe I’m picking up from this person over there, or here, who knows.
But he’s certainly always been an artist I respected highly.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Because when I saw his show I had never seen that much of his work all together
either.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, it’s amazing how little has been known.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And one of the first things I saw—and I’m sure it’s because
I’d been thinking about your work—was not his possible influence
on you, but vice versa, from the photoemulsion things. Because I can’t
think of another. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Again, I don’t know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . .think of another painter who’s used that sort of photo _____.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, I don’t know. I know that, of all the artists I
met—and a lot of them I met around the Documenta Five—I always enjoyed
talking to Sigmar, because he seemed to be as crazy as me. [laughter] You know,
and the conversations I valued a lot. I mean, because his mind seemed like it
was, “Anything is possible.” “You want to do it? Just do it.”
And that sounds so hackneyed, but when you consider, like. . . . I always loved
something Seth [Siegelogg] had said to me. He said, “Artists are always
talking about being free and everything,” he said, “the bank tellers
are freer than artists.” [laughter] And you think about it, you know,
artists are very anal and tight-ass. You know, “You can’t do that.”
I remember when I first encountered that in New York, when I would say something
and, “No, you can’t do that.” The reason they’re saying
you can’t do it. It wouldn’t fit neatly in art history. I said,
“Well, does that mean you shouldn’t do it?”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s probably the reason to do it.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. But I mean it’s that kind of thinking. And when you think, “Well,
if anybody should be free, it should be artists.” But you find out they’re
the most constrained. And he was great. I always loved him just for that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Of artists since the sixties, you’ve mentioned Warhol,
which seems clear. What other artists have there been who have been. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, strangely enough—you’ll probably maybe laugh at this one—Sol
Lewitt.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oh, ho ho ho. [fake laughter]
JOHN BALDESSARI: [chuckles at CK’s fake laughter]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Why?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, as a person and an artist. I mean, he seems to have.
. . . I mean, really inspirational to me, you know, that [he has] no attitude
at all, and just does what he does. And he seems to be so clear about what he
does. Which I’ve always liked. He’s so egalitarian about what he
does. I mean, he doesn’t worry about he’s getting too many prints
out on the market or what have you. He just does whatever he. . . . “Fine,
let there be too many prints.” [laughs] And he’s just always working.
He’s always doing it. And certainly you like some things better than others,
and certainly. . . . I think it’s. . . . There’s something I like
about him totally. It’s not like certain works. I mean, he doesn’t
certainly have the richness of, let’s say somebody like Polke, but I guess
what I like about him, he has this total clarity about what he’s doing—whether
you like it or not. And he’s not going to. . . . I guess he’s the
obverse of Polke. There are not going to be any great surprises. But what I
love is the sort of methodicalness. He explores every avenue of what he does.
And then his incredible generosity to artists, and the whole list of people
he’s helped out, and with no particular glamour. The second book I did,
[Artist’s Book, artist’s book], I found out he had funded it. And
I didn’t find out until years later.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: How? How did that. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, we were both showing at the Castelli Gallery, and I guess
he heard I was doing [it], and wanted to do [it], or whatever, and he came up
with the money rather than the gallery, to do it. He financed Conrad [Fisher??—Ed.]
and Carl Andre both. He just leaves their, oh god, a lot of them, you know,
sales with Conrad just so he’d have money to operate on. And a lot of
things I will never know about, but. . . . I know, like Lizzie Borden, when
she first started making films, [ran, rented] her out of what you call it, editing
tables, steel _____ _____. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I don’t know.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Anyway, they’re quite expensive to rent. And just as
long as she wanted it. Bought [Bye]’s work—I mean, as we know, how
[various artists, great his art is]. A lot of artists over the years, he’s
loaned some money, and I think it’s just admirable, as a model of an artist.
And he’s not there, like in the press, at every party or whatever. I mean,
he has a very quiet life. So in that way I guess he’s been very influential
upon me. I suppose probably the person, artist I talked to the most is Lawrence
Wiener, I suppose, over the years.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And how was that significant?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I guess, we were always at. . . . I mean, we sort of
emerged at the same time. And there’s something in our personalities,
I guess, whatever. You know, of all of the sort of early artists, conceptual
artists, I probably talked to him the most. I mean, I used to be with Dan Graham
artist or Bob [Berg, Berry, Perry] or what have you. Very little with Kosuth.
But Mel Bochner, and so on. But I guess the most lasting has been Larry, which
I think is really strange because he has a lot of personal characteristics of
things I loathe. [laughs] But there’s something about him that I. . .
.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Do you want to specify those?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, that he’s backbiting. Always putting down people.
And always exhaustively talking about “This show I did, that show, I did.
. . .” People he’s impressed or what have you. And it’s just
all this stuff I don’t care about. Or his sexual conquests. But there’s
something about what he does. . . .
Tape 4, side B
JOHN BALDESSARI: . . . _____, and he’s down, he’s negative. There’s
always a cabal out to do him in, or what have you, and just all the things I
despise. And I thought, “Well, why do I even talk to you?” But on
the other hand, there’s something kind about him, generous, and he’s
incredibly well-read, and learned, and that, I respond to. So, I guess, you
don’t change people. [chuckles]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Nuts. [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: _____.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [Alas.] I have a list.
JOHN BALDESSARI: [laughter] Yeah, “a list of people I will never have
a Chinaman’s chance in hell in changing.” What next?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Any others? I mean any other artists. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh. [pauses]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: . . . or museum people or collectors who’ve been.
. . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Collectors. I’ve only in the last two years decided that
collectors, there could be some of them could be good people. [laughter] And
they weren’t ogres. That’s a little new for me. I don’t know.
I don’t have very many friends. I mean, I have a Rolodex full of acquaintances.
But I guess, I think what it was happened, Chris, over the years, that I just
come down to a few people that I consider are friends, and that’s about
it. Yeah, and I think pretty much, like if I go to New York, recently I hide
out a lot. And people I will look up. . . . Well, Illiana, Antonio, Paula Cooper,
Elan. . . . And then there’ll be Brooke and Marion, so it’s all.
. . . Larry. Let’s see, who else? That’s about it. God, what a dull
life. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s a pretty good list.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Now I’m depressed.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, we were just going to move into personal life and
family, so. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, okay. All right.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You were married?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And separated. And the seperation took a long time. I
was living apart for a long time.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You were married when and. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: God, I’m sorry, _____ _____ I’m bad on dates.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s why you’re seperated today; you don’t
remember that anniversary.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t even remember when I got
married, and I don’t remember when I got divorced. I could look up the
specific date. At least I got. . . . I got married, I would say roughly. . .
. That would have been when? [pauses, thinking] I suppose, around ‘65
in there, something like that. I could check. And separated I think about four
years ago—I mean legally, but I’d been living apart much longer.
And I have two children. A daughter who is twenty-eight? and a son who’s
twenty-five.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And what are their names and where do they live?
JOHN BALDESSARI: My daughter’s name is Anna and my son’s name is
Tony. And my son is in his third art school: Cal Arts, Art Center, and Otis.
And I think he’s dropping out of Otis now. And my daughter had gone to
Berkeley, as a Regent Scholar in math and physics—she was pretty bright—and
got up to graduation, and decided she didn’t want to go on with it. And
then dropped out and worked, waitress, [art store], waitress, and then she came
to Cal Arts for a while. Thought she might try that. Dropped out after a term,
went back to Berkeley. And she went and she took some courses in art history.
Now she’s in an art school in the city, this thing I can’t even
think of. . . . Taking courses in graphic arts, photography, design, and thinks
she might go into graphic arts. And my son is somewhere between graphic arts
and fine arts.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And the last question is what is conceptual art?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Oh, God, Chris.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [fiendish laugh]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I think, now, you know, as we talk—I don’t
know if you’ll agree—but I think it’s a rather meaningless
term. Something like, what is impressionism? Or what is expression, whatever.
It made some sense at the time, but when you try to pin it down, you really
can’t. Or it could be like we all know what we mean when we talk about
a painting or drawing, but then when you define it, you can’t. I suppose
I would continue to define it as those kinds of pursuits in art that aren’t
clearly definable as painting. Although, actually, there again, I get in a trap
right away. There certainly is conceptual painting. And I guess. . . . You know,
I’m backing myself into a corner. It could be that kind of art where one
instinctively feels or surmises that it’s more about some idea than it
is the making of it. Maybe that’s the distinction. It’s less about
hands on and making, than it is about conveying some sort of idea or attitude
or concept. Could that be it? I mean, I don’t know.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs]
JOHN BALDESSARI: For every definition I come up with, I can think of exceptions.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, what’s been the principal significance or significances
of the phenomenon of conceptualism? Because it is one of those things that has
so infiltrated all kinds of art practice.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I see. Yeah. Well, to me, it would seem that its most enduring
benefit has been breaking the stranglehold of what art is or could be. I mentioned
yesterday that when I was a freshman in college, I didn’t even know who
Picasso or Matisse were, and when I graduated, that art could be anything other
than traditional painting or traditional sculpture was uncomprehensible to me.
And that’s what art was. And I think that attitude, pretty much I got
it all through school, even in Berkeley, that that’s what art was. And
only my own dissatisfaction or inquisitiveness or restlessness or boredom got
me to push it further and begin to. . . . It’s led me into [dye] art,
and from there you can begin to make jumps and leaps, and that it doesn’t
have to be just daubing paint on a canvas.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Slopping paint on a canvas _____ should add to that. [chuckles]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, and. . . . Yeah, I know I would get for years,
you know, I mean, that I would show up at some university, and they would say,
“Oh, you’re the guy who is anti-painting.” And I’d always
have to correct it and say, “No, I just believe that art could be more
than painting.”
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, yeah, in a certain way the parameters of painting
have defined the direction of your work.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: It’s like, “not that.”
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. And I love, now, that we have the term neo-conceptualist
about. And we sort of know what that means, but then you start to define it,
and it doesn’t mean anything, of course, but you take a plunge at it.
And how the definitions have shifted, that I guess the widest umbrella seems
to be the term sculpture. Everything fits under that. [laughter] There’s
nothing that isn’t, right?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: I mean, I remember the first time, just me encountering physically
a painting as object, not as illusion—or at least in my own mind—was
I guess when Stella made those big, thick stretcher bars. I remember asking
him later—I don’t know whether he was being disingenuous, to this
day—about his ideas of making an object out of the painting, and he said,
“No, no, no. I didn’t have any idea like that at all. I just. .
. . The stretcher bars just had to be strong. We just had to use wider material.”
Does he tell the truth? I don’t know. I mean, Michael Fried and people
made a whole lot of it, like this was all a conceptual plan. He denies it. I
don’t know. At least to me he did.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Well, I suppose it’s one of those things where the
way in which their work is received is as important as the intentionality behind
it.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: In terms of where it leads.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, and how it’s read. And I think a lot of art history
evolves that way. You know, you think you’re doing one thing, and a whole
other thing comes out of it, yet you had no idea what was going to happen. I
mean, you know, I’d be frank enough to admit that. You know, I’ve
done works that I think are going to knock people on their ass, and just not
even a yawn. And I’ll just do something in an off-handed way and “Wow!”
[laughs] Well, you know, who can tell? I guess one would be a millionaire if
he figured those things out. Luckily it’s not _____ _____ good to try.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [pauses] I don’t know how to phrase this, but maybe
I’ll phrase it. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: No, go ahead just. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: No, I’m trying to. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Sneak up behind it.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, it’s a. . . . [pauses]
JOHN BALDESSARI: [pours water] You want more water?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, let me have a little, thanks. [pauses] Do you at all
see the retrospective as in any way a kind of ritual that has any similarity
to The Cremation.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, that’s an interesting observation. Hadn’t
thought about it until now, but I think you may be on to something. Yeah, it’s
a summation of something. I thought it was great and somebody, maybe Ralph Rugoff,
said I should do it again. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [Fugg, Fuck]. [uproarious laughter]
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, but yeah, there is that sort of. . . . You know, I did
say earlier, didn’t I, like it’s the closing of a chapter.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And certainly of the. . . . Yeah, I think there’s a distinct
parallel there. You’re right. You’re right. In this way, it was
sort of imposed from without in some way. I’m not saying I wasn’t
a willing collaborator, but I mean I didn’t come up with the idea for
a retrospective; somebody else did, in that sense. And it does tie something
up in a package, so to speak. And in some ways suggests a period. I mean, a
point where it may not have happened otherwise.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I suppose one of the big differences would be that what
would be your relationship to that body of work, as opposed to the first cremation,
your relation to that body of work was like disgust with it, in a certain way,
whereas I doubt that you’re disgusted by this body of work.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, it does, but it does wrap it up in some conceptual mode.
I mean, I could go on, I guess, searching for parallels. Let’s say, when
I was cremating everything, I was sort of saying goodbye to it, and looking
at things one last time. And there’d be that last image in my mind, so
to speak, and with the retrospective, I’m seeing things in different venues,
different spaces, and it’s almost like I’m saying goodbye, too.
Because I’m not one to get out slides and look at them, you know, like
fond memories. [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: “Memories, of the time we left behind. . . .”
JOHN BALDESSARI: And so there was a whole education for me, having to look up
things and make decisions about things and evaluate things, and I found myself
actually in some heated arguments with Mary Jane and Coosje, which I. . . .
Normally, I think my attitude would be, “Well, this is work that I did,
and I’m responsible for, so it really doesn’t matter.” But
I actually did get into some pretty big arguments about pieces that they wanted
to leave out for it seemed to me other than reasons. . . . You know, it would
be like balance of the show, or size of the wall, or things like that. Or this
collector wouldn’t lend it, or blah, blah, blah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What do you think have been the most significant works that
you’ve done?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, I don’t know about recently. It’s hindsight.
I mean, the more distance you have the more things fade in your memory. But
two pieces had always seemed to me to be watershed works for myself—or
pivotal or seminal or whatever. I think the first one was this one call. . .
. There was the text-on-canvas one about a geranium, _____ geranium. And I think
what did it, how that one turned a corner for me, was that the other ones were
more cerebral, and this one became a little bit more poetic somehow, and more
common, more ordinary, more banal. But in it being banal, you know, interesting.
And that, somehow that did something for me. And the next one that did something
for me was the one called Concerning Diachronic and Synchronic Time. And I think
the reason that one holds some sway for me is that, one, that there’s
some sort of magical transformation occurring that I want to convince you of
and myself of. And the other one is—and probably even more important—you
know how you get that while something is happening here, something is also happening
over there. And it’s impossible to keep all those things in your mind,
but one should try to do it. And I think that’s maybe a reason that quite
often my work looks, the parts look so disparate, but I’m trying to convince
myself that while this is happening, this is also happening, and this is also
happening, and they’re related in my mind in some way, which I could describe,
but I think drives sometimes other people a bit crazy.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I wrote down. . . . What did I write down? “Alienated
fragments linked to the whole.”
JOHN BALDESSARI: [laughs] Um hmm. Yeah, one could say that. yeah. And it’s
a little bit. . . . I think, you know, for a while. . . . And actually I did
some pieces called “Space Between,” or “Spaces Between,”
but I was actually, what brought them. . . . When I would just be talking, I
would look between things rather than at things, just to get myself in the habit
of not looking in the conventional way. Or I suppose I get to draw the strange
expressions on my face, but I mean try to be simultan[eous], you know, like
looking at one eye over there and looking at one eye over here, in some way,
and trying to see them as a whole, rather than just looking at one thing, two
eyes focused on one thing. But it’s all in how we look at the world. I
remember when I was teaching at U.C.S.D., like there was a. . . . We had these
courses we always jokingly—or maybe I did—jokingly refer to as an
“art dip.” You know, you took the student in the philosophy department,
and dipped them a little bit in art. Or whatever, you know. And I figured that
most kids probably had a camera, probably didn’t have art supplies. And
rather than make them buy a lot of art supplies, I could probably do the same
thing with a camera. And so one of the first exercises I would give would have
them find a reproduction of the most maddening piece of art that they could
find, that they thought would have the least to do with reality, and go out
and try to find with their camera a counterpart for it. And they almost all
succeeded, and the lesson would be to them, it’s just how you see the
world. It’s not about art not being real in any way. So if it were, let’s
say, a black Ad Reinhardt, of course it’s pretty easy to photograph something
black. But they can realize that that can’t be interesting. They’ve
never looked at an asphalt street before that long. [laughs] You know, something
you don’t look at. But it’s no less interesting to an artist.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: So are you going to start painting now?
JOHN BALDESSARI: I don’t know. I guess the next thing I’m going
to do is see what I could do with all this stuff from India, what will come
out of it. And I’ve been thinking a lot and reading a lot and thinking
about what I want to do next. I mean, I don’t want to replicate myself,
that’s for sure. So it’s all about the unknown so to speak. So we’ll
see. I mean, I don’t know. I think the thing that does help me a lot,
I get bored kind of easily, and then so I just try to. . . . So I figure what
bores me is going to bore other people. [chuckles] Or I just have a higher level
of boredom. And which is fun because. . . . I mean, one of the games I used
to play with myself down in my studio down in National City was just sit and
look at stuff in my studio and ask myself, “Well, why could that be art,
and why couldn’t. . . .” You know, “how do I make art out
of that.” And obviously I had my own rules. And then I would ask myself,
“Well, why do I say that can’t be? What keeps me from letting that
be somehow turned into art in some way?” And usually, we get, at least
I get into a trap, and I suspect a lot of artists do, that things can be art,
is that somehow that if they’ve appeared or figured or triggered art before
it. You know, I can look at this stuff stacked up over here, these bits of cardboard,
and I can say, “Yeah, that could be art,” but the reason it could
be art is because I’ve seen art look like that.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, sure.
JOHN BALDESSARI: And when I get to something, a place where I haven’t
seen art look like that, then my sensor comes in and says, “Well, I guess
that can’t be art.” But that’s exactly the point where you
should begin to think about it, and [what goes on there].
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: I don’t have any more questions, unless. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: Too much art history can be a dangerous thing. [laughter] Which,
you know, you must encounter this all the time, that how little art history,
a lot of artists have—I mean, what they’ve seen. I mean, the first
time that hit me was when I was at Cal Arts and when Don Judd came out about
these articles in Artforum. It was a series of four articles and. . . . God,
that’s been a long time. I don’t know when those came out. Anyway,
and I was lecturing, talking about them in this class, and I saw all these vacant
looks. And all of a sudden I said, it hit me. I said, they didn’t know
who Don Judd was.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Oops.
JOHN BALDESSARI: You know, and I just assumed that they did because we’re
usually so good at apprising students of what’s going on.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: What’s the first work of art you remember seeing?
I mean, when you were a coherent person who. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: That’s question[able—Ed.]. . . . [laughs]
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: _____ _____. You know, that made an impact on you, in the
flesh. I don’t mean in reproduction or something, but because it probably.
. . . I doubt that it was at San Diego Fine Arts College. Maybe it was.
JOHN BALDESSARI: You mean the real thing?
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Yeah, the real thing.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Not a reproduction. Hmm. Yeah, that’s a tough one because
so much art, you know, when you see you’re seeing first in reproduction.
Oh, I know what, yeah. Actually, yeah. This is. . . . Yeah. Usually I’m
pretty cerebral but I remember seeing Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie
and tears came in my eyes, I was so overwhelmed.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Really?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. I was so impressed.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And what was it about. . . .
JOHN BALDESSARI: It just. . . . I don’t. . . . God, I mean it just seemed
so right. I mean, the way the paint was put down. And it’s somehow like
everything I wanted to do, everything I ]thought, felt] right about art. You
know, it’s like sort of feeling this incredible feeling of validation,
you know, with all the opposite I didn’t feel about Venice art. You know,
I said, “All this is getting incredible applause, so what’s wrong
with me? Am I sick? Am I strange? Or insensitive or whatever. And I saw that,
and it just like knocked back on my heels.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Have you ever been to the Arena Chapel?
JOHN BALDESSARI: Giotto, yeah. It was a long. . . . Yeah. But I finally saw
that. Yeah.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That’s the only time tears have come to my eyes.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, I mean, tears came to my eyes when I saw a reproduction!
[laughter] That’s what I was saying, you know. I mean, yeah, that’s,
that. . . .
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: That just [scrubbed, grabbed] my mind.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, I think that. . . . Well, I had to teach art history
once, and you know usually how you generally go from cave painting up to the
Renaissance, Renaissance to the modern, you know, two semesters. So I started
the second semester, and I think I spent two weeks on Giotto. I said, “Whoops.”
[laughs] Yeah, but then Giotto and Matisse are my two. I mean, for me it’s
just like all you need to know about art is right there. If I had to choose
one over the other, I’d probably take Giotto, but a lot of incredible
things Matisse does with color just amazes me.
CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: You must be looking forward to the. . . .
END OF INTERVIEW
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with John Baldessari, 1992 Apr. 4-5, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
