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Trajectory

National City, California (USA), 1931

Ever since he burned his pictorial works in the late seventies in a ritual act of renouncement of the formalism and self-expression that had characterised the post-war period, especially abstract expressionism, John Baldessari's name has been associated with conceptual art.
From that moment on, he became interested in the interconnections between images, always photography, and words. His first works along these lines were Pure Beauty (1966-1968) and An Artist (1966-1968), an allegorical series of casual photographs upon which he wrote texts related to art history.

He later abandoned strictly conceptual presuppositions and devoted himself entirely to imagery. His interest in television and cinema imagery converted him into one of the pioneers of 'image appropriation'. One of his first series and among the most renowned was The violent space (1975-1976), which he produced by deploying still photos of film scenes, using them in his eagerness not to create anything artistic. He worked with them compiling a sort of image dictionary, or rather, a language with which to make phrases and paragraphs, giving rise to this series produced with all the violent images he was able to rescue from film stills. This type of material was one of Baldessari's favourites, and he used it frequently in his works until the decade of the nineties.

Another of Baldessari's paradigmatic works is the video Folding Hat (1970). The tape shows a half-an-hour sequence, a close-up of the artist holding a hat that he squeezes and flattens as if it were a toy. Although at first glance it may not seem so, this is a work intrinsically linked to the medium of video, for these actions are developed through the interaction of the artist and the camera.

When Baldessari began using television and video images, he clearly contributed to breaking down the distinctions between high and low culture. His interest in having his works reach a non-specialised audience led him to create pieces such as Stream of violence: From Front to Torrent (The beginnings) (1966). Consisting of five large-scale panels with black-and-white photographs superimposed with a silk-screened red band and hung on the façade of a building in Los Angeles.

The post-modern and didactic characteristics inundating many of his works are clearly exemplified in the Goya Series (1997), in which he repeated the structure of mythic works from art history with his well-known black-and-white cuttings.
His works can be found in the world's finest museums and they have been very influential for succeeding generations of artists, such as the neo-conceptualists of the eighties and other 'appropriationists'. His labour as professor, begun in the seventies and continuing at present, has been very important and widely recognised by critics and students alike, the latter of which he had write one hundred times over, "I will not make any more boring art, I will not make any more boring art." C. D.