The American conceptual artist John Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He has influenced several generations of younger artists, and since the 1960s, has consistently renegotiated his own working practice – from his earlier text paintings to reworkings of old film stills.  His work is primarily regarded as an extended humorous meditation on the nature of art itself; he is notorious for cremating his own paintings, commissioning others to make his artwork, and admonishing himself to make no more boring art.

In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography and abandoned painting altogether, makng a diverse range of media . He has created thousands of works that demonstrate the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. 

“You know, when you’re sitting in a dentist office or doctor’s office, and you look in a magazine and, and you go, ‘What was that?’ I would like people to have that feeling, you know, that, ‘Wait, what did I just see?’ ” Baldessari says with a laugh. Like with the colored dots pasted onto photographs — they’re actually price stickers. Over the years he’d been collecting black-and-white news images — pictures of people at various civic occasions.

“I just got so tired of looking at these faces,” Baldessari says — faces of mayors shaking hands with firefighters, faces of local officials at ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating

Using two found photographs, one color, one black-and-white, and eradicating the faces in both photos with his trademark dots and color silhouette techniques, Baldessari presents two protagonists, one implicitly heroic, the other not so much. Wearing a military uniform, arms crossed, sitting upright, the hero figure is carried on the shoulders of a crowd of celebratory men, draped in streamers and balloons. The scale of the image, together with the grandeur of his pose, invoke history painting, as well as movies about World War II.  The second section is marked with orange painted lines, echoing the orange and blue painted streamers that festoon the hero’s celebration, yet here the painted lines represent lines of fracture—fissures—which show how this world is coming apart, as if under the strain of its own contradictions.

“If you can’t see their face, you’re going to look at how they’re dressed, maybe their stance, their surroundings,” he explains.

Defining of his practice was an embrace of humour, and a tendency towards producing art that, while it may appeal to more cultivated sensibility, is also accessible. For example, in his video I Am Making Art 1971 we see him repeatedly reciting the title as he raises one arm after the other consecutively.

A crucial development in Baldessari’s work was the introduction of text to his paintings. It marked, for him, the realization that images and texts behave in similar ways – both using codes to convey their messages.

Much of Baldessari’s work from the 1980s participates in a dialogue with a number of his contemporaries who were exploring questions of sexual identity and representation through photography and text. Baldessari’s interest in making the gaze explicit, in a number of works from this period, such as Man and Woman with Bridge (1984) and Spaces Between (Close to Remote) (1986), belongs to this historical moment. During this period, Baldessari also produced a series of works that explicitly deal with issues of masculinity and representation. Arguably, he shifts away from the category of Conceptual art to take up some of the political and aesthetic concerns of a younger generation

John Baldessari: Talking Art (talking about his career)

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/john-baldessari-talking-art