[JOHN BALDESSARI] I'm always interested in things that we don't call art,
and I'd say, "Well, why not?
I mean, why--you know, what could I do this to make it art?
How could I change people's minds?
[machine humming]
I am making art. I am making art.
You know, I love it. Like--like, you know, all of
a sudden, because I said it's art, somebody believes me.
What interests me in life is the absurdity in life.
[laughs]
[door closes]
- Hey, John. - Hi, Marie.
- Okay, I got these new ones. - Oh, good.
- A couple of them... - Good.
- that I have some questions about. I'll put them up.
- Art making is about making a choice.
For me, it was like you choose one thing over another:
this color over that color or this object over that object
or– you know, on and on and on.
And you have to make a choice.
-Okay, so the questions that I had about these ones are,
I know that you want these framed individually, but do you
also want these framed individually, or are they just
gonna be one print that's framed in one frame?
-They'll be in a single frame. -Okay.
-Well, maybe not now but later, you know, I have other
questions that we could talk about, yeah.
-Okay. No problem.
-My emergence in the art world:
I was linked with conceptual art, minimal art.
never quite totally subscribed
to it; I thought it was a little boring.
But there were a lot of things I didn't want to shed,
and one of them was being tasteful.
That's one of the reasons I gave up painting, because it was all
about being tasteful: you know, the right red next to the right
blue, and you're very carefully mixing the colors.
I just decided to be
very systematic about it and use the color wheel.
Yeah, I like the guy– the green guy.
He might be too green. I don't know.
-Oh, yeah? - I'm still thinking about it.
- Yeah, a little toxic green. - Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know. Anything else?
My father was Catholic. My mother was Lutheran.
I went to a Methodist church. That was the local church.
I certainly got a love of literature, reading the bible,
You know, the King James version.
And I got a real sense of moral obligation, and I think
that's why I was a later starter in art, because I–
art didn't seem to do anybody any good that I could see.
It didn't heal bones.
It didn't help people find shelter or whatever.
And I wanted to be a social worker, I think.
Got to say, I owe it to my sister.
I got my degree in art, and she said,
"Well, how are you gonna support yourself?"
[chuckles]
So I got a teaching credential.
Teaching is about communication. Lecturing doesn't do it.
You have to see the light in the students' eyes that they get it.
And if you don't see the light, then you try another approach
and another approach until they get it.
And then I realized that art was about communication.
I was learning how to communicate by teaching.
And– and then the art infected
my classroom teaching, trying to be inventive there.
And in effect, I was saying, "the art I do is what I'm
talking about in the classroom, and vice versa."
You know, they're interchangeable.
One thing– I was trying to teach students how to look.
I said, "If you're looking at two things, don't look at them;
look between them...
because there's that stuff too. That's– this is important." But we prioritize.
We– you know, if I'm looking at this wall over here, it's normal
to look at something pinned to the wall.
I'm not looking at the space
between those two things. But that's very important.
Words are just a way we
communicate, images are a way we communicate, and I couldn't
figure out why they had to be in different baskets.
I think in my multiple-image pieces,
I probably have this idea that there's a word behind them.
I'm probably building like a writer or a poet builds
with words.
-John came to my studio at UCLA,
and we had a meeting, and he said, "I have an opportunity
for you," which was very exciting,
I mean, just to hear that, right?
Like, I was like–
You know, I knew some of my classmates were maybe working
for him, doing a little painting or working doing a little
Photoshop for him or something like that.
And I said, "Wow, okay, what is it?"
And he's like, "Well, I just got this dog, and I need someone to walk him."
[laughing]
And I said, "Okay." I'm like, "Let me think about it."
He knew I was having a little
trouble at school, you know, like, with my work and going
through a little grad school crisis in terms of ideas and so on.
So he said, "Okay, every Monday, you have to bring work to me."
And so we began.
I think he taught me to be human when it comes to the work.
You know, there is something very humble about the way he works.
He comes here every morning at the same time.
He shows you how, you know, it's a long process.
I mean, it's a lifetime commitment to the work.
- In the early years, I would
just make work, and it would be shipped to the gallery.
And then one would spend three
or four days moving works around and seeing how one spoke to the
other, how the size of one work would relate to the size of the other,
you know, all of those problems that would make hanging
one work next to another less good than another hanging.
[chuckles]
And I would always ship more work than I needed because you
never know what you're going to need.
I did a retrospective show
that started at the Museum of Contemporary art in Los Angeles.
And I saw how they had a model ad worked with everything,
and I said, "Well, why don't I do that?"
This is a model of the
Haus Lange by Mies Van Der Rohe In Krefeld, Germany.
One of the principle things I'm
doing with the Mies Van Der Rohe Haus is to use his materials in
a way that would be more than he would have used them.
And the principle material here is brick, which he wasn't
particularly fond of.
Curiously, he did work in his
father's brickyard, so he did have some familiarity with the material.
All of the outside walls, where
there's a window, they're covered up with fake brick.
So you will see no windows whatsoever.
And Mies Van Der Rohe was very careful in framing the views of the garden.
Where there is a window in
the walls, there will be substituted views of the
Pacific Ocean and landscape in Southern California.
But in front of each window,
there'll be one Mies Van Der Rohe chair where you can sit and
contemplate the view.
Then in one wall, I'm having
manufactured as an addition a couch in the shape of an ear,
flanked left and right by two upturned noses as sconces
so that you'll either have light or flowers coming out of the nostrils.
So I figured it's everything that tMies Van Der Rohe would hate.
And rather than glorify Mies Van Der Rohe–
He's had enough glorification-- I just thought I would, you know,
poke a little fun of him, do reverse Mies Van Der Rohe.
Actually, I started using stills
from movies not because they were from the movies;
I could get the pictures cheaply.
For me, it's using this data bank of images
people carry around in their head, and then playing and
rearranging those images for them.
A lot of photographs I had bought would be from newspapers.
And they would be local celebrities, whatever:
The major, the fire chief, some dignitary.
And a lot them, they would be
pointing to things, shaking hands, smiling at the–
You know, it's a photo op, you know, kind of thing.
Standing with the president; that sort of thing.
And I was attracted but repulsed
by these, and I realized why I was repulsed by them was that
I was there, isolated in my studio, and these people were
making decisions that would probably affect me, and,
you know, I was not doing anything about it.
And that was one of the arguments I had with art in the
first places, that, you know, it's not doing anything.
I was using these price
stickers, and I just put them over the faces, and I said,
"Wow."
The phrase I keep using is, it leveled the playing field.
All of a sudden, they had no
power on me and really saw them for what they were.
They were replaceable even though the person changes.
I think my idea is this:
not so much structure that it's inhibiting–
I mean, that's there's no wiggle room–
but not so loose that it could be anything.
I guess it's like a corral.
It's a corral around your idea:
That you can move but not too much.
And it's that limited movement that promotes creativity.
I've been working over the years with various body parts.
I think I started out with noses.
And then ears. Then noses and ears.
And now I'm doing foreheads with furrows
and eyebrows.
You know, you always come back
to the same idea but from a different direction.
Yeah, we're gonna do dog eyebrows next.