'I do think a lot of dumb humor is incredibly profound at the same time. An antisophistication can be kind of refreshing.'
For a very long time, John Baldessari had the distinction of being the tallest serious artist in the world . To paraphrase the writer A.J. Liebling, he was taller than anyone more serious, and more serious than anyone taller. As was inevitable, Baldessari’s hegemony in the height department has now been challenged by a handful of younger artists.
BALDESSARI: Yeah, it does. It’s human desire to be understood. And we always feel we’re not understood. When I read things about myself, it’s like I’m reading about this other artist—”Oh, this guy sounds interesting or not so interesting”—but I never think it’s about me. So there’s that. But, yeah, those works with dots in front of the faces—I did them for two or three years, and then it becomes a kind of branding, like Warhol or Lichtenstein.
SALLE: But I think that’s what great comedians do, great comic writers, great comic actors. They just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it’s funny.SALLE: It seems your work makes use of the classic materials of the humorist: irony, inversion, mistaken identity, trading places, taking one thing for another thing, recombining malapropisms, solecisms, deliberate understatement—all those devices that are the foundation of humor also play a role in your work.
BALDESSARI: In a very broad, general way, I side with Richard. I do think ultimately these ideas of copyright have to crumble. I think what Richard should have done was paid the guy first. A fair price—I mean, why not? SALLE: In the ’60s and early ’70s, when you, along with a few other people, were inventing conceptual art, what did you think you were doing? What did you think it’s future would be?came later. It’s a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever. No, back then, I had abandoned painting because I thought there was something else out there. It wasn’t a notion unique to me.
BALDESSARI: I thought National City was the end of the road. But then I realized that nobody was looking over my shoulder there. Nobody cared. I could do whatever I wanted. So I began to explore just for me what, in the Cartesian fashion, are the bedrock issues of art. I said, “Well, the way art is understood right now, it’s painting or sculpture. If we talk about painting, what constitutes a painting? Paint on canvas—that’s all it has to be.
BALDESSARI: I did. My mental image of the generic Abstract Expressionist painter is stripped down at the waist with a big brush in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. That period was male-dominated, okay. And then a paradigm shift comes with Jasper Johns and the image of a painter is different. Maybe it’s a guy in a tux holding a martini. And there’s a whole shift toward feminism. Most of my friends are women—that might say something.
BALDESSARI: I remember when one prominent artist came out and I had an argument with him because I considered the people I work with not as students but as young artists. He said, “Not students?” I said, “Listen, when they’re our age, they might be a lot better artists than we are.” They’re artists. Keeping that wall as low as possible between instructor and student was really helpful, because I think we all believed something could happen.
BALDESSARI: I think that’s the panic we all have, isn’t it? And I’m particularly vulnerable because I get bored so easily. I’m not a one-idea artist. I have to keep on pushing. I tell myself, “Well, it’s time to turn on the popcorn machine.”BALDESSARI: Your art comes out of your art, too. If you’re smart, you abandon the things that didn’t work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to be successful. A lot of ideas don’t translate very well into art.
SALLE: I hadn’t heard you say that before. That’s how I think of teaching, too. The engine’s not running so hot—we bring it into the shop and do the diagnostics. Your bio says you’ve had more than 200 one-man shows. Do you think that’s a record?SALLE: Leo [Castelli] used to say, “Some artists like to say no and some artists like to say yes.” You’re obviously an artist who likes to say yes. People ask you to do a show, you say, “Let me see if I can fit it in my schedule.
SALLE: So it was instinct about you as a person. That makes sense. The writer James Salter said that one of the nice things about life was that you got to rearrange the pantheon-raise up or demote certain individuals. Is there any artist you would move down to the basement for a while?] Yeah, there are a lot—and a lot to move up. I always thought that Richard Artschwager wasn’t high up enough.
BALDESSARI: No, I don’t think so. Actually, I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast. I still kind of feel like that, but I’m going to do what I do, so it doesn’t really matter. I always have felt that I have been sort of out of step … Marching to the beat of a different drummer sounds too romantic.
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