John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He attended San Diego State University and did post-graduate work at Otis Art Institute, Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA from 1970 – 1988 and the University of California at Los Angeles from 1996 – 2007. Baldessari’s artwork has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions and in over 1000 group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His projects include artist books, videos, films, billboards and public works. His awards and honors include the 2014 National Medal of Arts Award, an award from the International Print Center New York in 2016, memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the BACA International 2008, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by La Biennale di Venezia and the City of Goslar Kaiserring in 2012. Baldessari is known for his quote speaking of ” I will not make anymore bring art”, throughout his work he wanted to break free from the artistic conventions at the time of what was expected of art, and show that anything can form and turn into art. A series of his work was called ‘ throwing three balls in the air to get a striaght line’ This is interesting especially at the time, his work is based so much off chance and effects of time. His work is dependent on nothing, he wants to form art and create new ideas from aspects which he and no one else can control, and I personally believe this is what is most interesting about his work. This work took around thirty-six attempts for himself to achieve.

The images above are form a moving image video piece of his, in which he points at different aspects of his body repeatedly saying’ this is art’. His clear denotations of wanting to break free of conventional fine art is transparent. His unique body movement and the development of black and white, is another aspect of his work I believe would be interesting to look into. It is although his work is a fighting and creation of new art yet using the most basic concepts of how to photograph himself. Much of his images too create connotations of typologies. He has said “I guess a lot of it’s just lashing out, because I didn’t know how to be an artist, and all this time spent alone in the dark in these studios and importing my culture and constant questions. I’d say, ‘Well, why is this art? Why isn’t that art?'” his changing of conventional art had an enormous dynamic on what it is to create art. His basic mediums of placing colours over someones face, or capturing a specific moment of time. Baldessari has always been conscious of the power of choice in artistic practice – like choosing to paint something red rather than blue, for example. Here, he carefully associates the choice of arm movements with the artistic choices that a painter or sculptor may make, concluding that choice is a form of art in itself. But he also confronts one of the fascinating problems that unpinned the work of many early Conceptual artists: how much can art be reduced and simplified before it stops being art at all? Baldessari offers no definitive answer, but he suggests that the gap between art and the ordinary, between art and life, may be imperceptible.

his artistic influences prompt links to very popular, public means of communication functioned, and it could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. 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 coloured dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating. The aim of what I want to capture from his work is the aspect f unpredictability, and how it doesn’t matter with photography what your outcomes are, as much as you should always experiment within how to find new creative methods.