John Baldessari, Who Gave Conceptual Art a Dose of Wit, Is Dead at 88
Through his hybrid works and teaching—at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970 to 1988 and at UCLA's Department of Art, from 1996 to 2005—he helped build the Los Angeles art scene, mentoring contemporary artists including David Salle, Tony Oursler, Matt Mullican, Jack Goldstein, Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, James Welling, Meg Cranston, Liz Larner, Mungo Thomson, Kerry Tribe, Elliott Hundley and Analia Saban.
"LOS ANGELES — John Baldessari, the influential conceptual artist who helped transform Los Angeles into a global art capital through his witty image-making and decades of teaching there, died on Thursday at his home in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88.
John Baldessari in 2016 with new work in his studio in Venice, Calif. His death was confirmed on Sunday by Virginia Gatelein, his studio manager and the chairwoman of his foundation. No cause was given.
Mr. Baldessari started as a semiabstract painter in the 1950s but grew so disenchanted with his own handiwork — as well as the very notion of handiwork — that in 1970 he decided to take his paintings to a San Diego funeral home and cremate them. He was ready to embrace a wide range of mediums: videos, photography, prints, sculpture, text-based art, installations and, yes, paintings, but most of all hybrid forms of these, like text painting.
While so much early conceptual art tended toward the cold and cerebral, Mr. Baldessari’s was infused with a droll sense of humor. He employed a sort of Dada irony and sometimes colorful Pop Art splashes — blue was his favorite color — to rescue conceptual art from what he saw as its high-minded self-seriousness.
At the same time, Mr. Baldessari helped build the Los Angeles art scene through his teaching, most notably at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970 to 1988 and at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1996 to 2005.
A small sampling of his former students reads like a who’s who of contemporary artists: David Salle, Tony Oursler, Matt Mullican, Jack Goldstein, Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, James Welling, Meg Cranston, Liz Larner, Mungo Thomson, Kerry Tribe, Elliott Hundley and Analia Saban.
With the possible exception of Ed Ruscha, who also works at the intersection of photography, painting and text, no artist in Los Angeles had done as much to foster the city’s contemporary art scene as Mr. Baldessari."— Jori Finkel, Jan. 5, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the New York Times website.
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