John Baldessari was a leading Californian conceptual artist. Painting was important to his early work, but by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce text and pre-existing images to create riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting. In the 1970’s, he abandoned his interest in painting and began to make a diverse range of media, though his interests were based on the photographic image. Conceptual art has shaped his interest in exploring how photographic images communicate. However, he works with light humor and materials and motifs that reflect the influence of pop art. He works with pre-existing images, arranging them in a way to suggest a narrative. He seems to distort his images – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots; this all forces us to ask how and what the image is communicating.

The image above is part of Baldessari’s approach to conceptual art during the 1970’s. This photo is of 6 people who seem to be dressed smart and professional. The image portrays normality, as it is a simple image of 5 men and 1 women that are staring out the window. Baldessari liked to incorporate into various features into his work, such as leaving us with questions about what the image is communicating and showing or trying to tell us. This aspect of the photo, where all the models seem to all be bunched near the slanted window creates this sense of uncertainty and leaves us wondering what are they all so attached on looking at? What is so interesting about what they can possibly see out the window? Additionally, Baldessari was interested in using parts of pop art in his work, as well as collaging his images with unrelated art or other images to block out objects or faces (as he has done in the image above). He has made these models faces invisible – so we don’t know what they look like, what their facial expressions are displaying, if they are talking with each other or where they are looking. Instead, he has used coloured dots to cover their faces which is similar to aspects of pop art, such as artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol., who use small coloured dots to make up their images. Again, this makes the us as an audience of his work, consider all these different factors that he his hiding from us. This is what makes his art and photographic images so intriguing, and why I was influenced to do something on a similar level to Baldessari.