John Baldessari: Recycling Images | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #093: While sifting through boxes of film stills in his Santa Monica studio, artist John Baldessari talks about being a pack rat and discusses his attitude towards appropriating images.

Synthesizing photomontage, painting, and language, Baldessari's deadpan visual juxtapositions equate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He upends commonly held expectations of how images function, often by drawing the viewers attention to minor details, absences, or the spaces between things.

Learn more about John Baldessari: http://www.art21.org/artists/john-baldessari

VIDEO | Producer: 
Wesley Miller & 
Nick Ravich

. Interview: 
Susan Sollins

. Camera: 
Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue & 
Paulo Padilha. 

Artwork Courtesy: 
John Baldessari.

My early assistants would throw out some paper and I would take it out of the trash.

"Why are you throwing this away, you're gonna use it."

When I was going to school, you had to write on both sides of the paper on the same paper.

So yea, I'm a pack rat, "Ah, I could use that somehow."

I saw a lot of that in India, how people there would recycle anything.

And make something new out of it. You see it a lot in folk art.

I probably got my... My first lesson probably came from the shredders.

You know, you are picking up stuff out of the street, and I would pick up photographs from the street.

Well, I think if somebody wanted to borrow an imagery and use it, I would be flattered.

Ha, here's something I worked on.

I really just don't think imageries should be owned, including my own.

If it's part of our world, it's like owning words. How could you own words? I mean it's stuff to use.

She was retouched, like... [chuckles]