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John Baldessari

American

1931, California, United States
2020, Los Angeles, Southern California

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Why did Baldessari use appropriated imagery?

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JOHN ZAROBELL: 

What youre looking at is a picture thats sort of unmaking itself. 

 

NARRATOR: 

Since the 1960s, California artist John Baldessari has been making art that tries to separate our ideas about what were looking at from what we are actually seeing. Curator John Zarobell 

 

ZAROBELL: 

John Baldessari is a conceptual artist, really. Hes frankly, I think, a fantastic humorist, and someone whos really interested in unsettling our expectations about what art is, and what art does…  

 

NARRATOR: 

Baldessari appropriates images from existing source material, reusing and reworking them to try to change the way we see. 

 

ZAROBELL: 

So that one hand, you look at something which is a photographic reproduction—its an image, something thats recognizable, something you might see in an ad; and on the other hand, you see that these images have been painted over, theyve been generally messed with.  

 

NARRATOR: 

John Baldessari, from a lecture at SFMOMA in 1990. 

 

JOHN BALDESSARI: 

And— but trying to use this imagery in some way. But so here, you know, I do a lot of cropping. Croppings very much a fundamental issue of my work.  

So I simply want you to imagine whats there by a teaching colleague of mine, video artist Nam June Paik, told me once that what interests him most about my work was what I left out, what wasnt shown. And I took that as a complement, because thats something I work very hard at. 

 

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