John Baldessari

Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring photography and appropriated images.

I was drawn to his work after watching a very well made video, which is a work of art in itself...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU7V4GyEuXA

As mentioned in the video he burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. Although contrary to the video it is reported that the ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies and placed into an urn, and the resulting art installation consists of a bronze commemorative plaque with the destroyed paintings' birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies. Through the ritual of cremation Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle.




In some works Baldessari places dots of different colours on people’s faces in existing/appropriated photographs. By doing this, he erases the individuality of the people and forces the viewer to look elsewhere on the photo. Apparently his coloured dots also refer to specific codes: red/dangerous, green/safe, blue/platonic, and yellow/crazy.



Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series (1966-1968), which paired photographic images with lines of text from an amateur photography book, aiming at the violation of a set of compositional rules
In one of the works, Baldessari had himself photographed in front of a palm precisely so that it would appear that the tree were growing out of his head.




Baldessari's pieces "Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries)" and "Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)" are early examples of post-conceptual art. They combine the impossible task of balancing order and chaos. I like the concept for this, the process needed to complete the task, and the element of chance in the result,


Tying in with our current psychogeography project, another great concept of Baldessari's was the photographic California Map Project (1969). This time he created physical forms that resembled the letters in "California" geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed.



In "Double Bill" (above), a 2012 series of large inkjet prints, Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger with Max Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions. Baldessari names only one of his two artistic “collaborators” on each canvas’s lower edge, such as …AND MANET or …AND DUCHAMP.

References:
http://www.baldessari.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baldessari
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU7V4GyEuXA
http://www.photoeye.com/Auctions/Auction.cfm?id=5210
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/4454