Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"Well, the only thing I'm kind of sure about is that when two things are brought into some sort of magnetic proximity, that meaning occurs. Two words, two images, two objects, whatever it is. Whether there's universality, or agreement on the meaning, I rather doubt it. That's probably pretty cultural. But it fascinates me that people want things to mean." John Baldessari, excerpted from John Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange), Guggenheim Museum.
John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931, and lives and works in Santa Monica, California. His work has been exhibited in museums such as The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and in art galleries worldwide. He has also recently curated exhibitions at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington D.C., The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.
Edited by Kit Hammonds. Text by Ashley Bickerton, Liz Craft, Meg Cranston, Julieta González, Kit Hammonds, Matt Mullican, Tony Oursler, David Salle, James Welling.
Hbk, 9 x 11 in. / 312 pgs / 66 color / 91 bw. | 2/27/2018 | Not available $60.00
Edited by Edelbert Kŕb and Peter Pakesch. Essays by Rainer Fuchs, Matt Mullican, Anne Rorimer, Marie de Brugerolle, Winfried Pauleit, Hans Dieter Huber, Klaus Hoffer, Gertrud Koch, Ann Goldstein and Christopher Williams.
Paperback, 8.75 x 11 in. / 278 pgs / 250 color / 40 bw | 6/15/2005 | Not available $50.00
Published by Walther König, Köln/Sprüth Magers. Text by Barbara Bloom, Russell Ferguson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, David Salle. Photographs by Catherine Opie.
The 30 paintings on canvas by John Baldessari (1931–2020) compiled here explore the gaps in meaning between word and image, foreground and background, photography and painting, presence and absence. Quintessentially Baldessarian in their witty, sometimes absurd pairings of objects and text, they feature imagery from film stills and found photographs, partially covered by gestural fields of white-and-black paint that direct our attention to particular elements in each scene, while obscuring others. Certain themes reveal themselves across the series, including body parts, gestures and tools. Baldessari’s final series beautifully encapsulates the thrust of his artistic project as a whole: to explore the amorphous spaces between things, people and ideas. The book features essays by Russell Ferguson, curator, author and professor at University of California, Los Angeles; Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator, critic and artistic director at Serpentine Galleries, London; and artists Barbara Bloom and David Salle; along with a portrait by artist Catherine Opie.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited with text by Matilda Olof-Ors. Text by John Baldessari, Ann-Sofi Noring, Gitte Řrskou.
Over the course of his 50-year career, John Baldessari never stopped exploring the seemingly infinite ways that words and images can be manipulated to create new layers of narrative meaning in art. Initially a more traditional painter, in the 1960s Baldessari found himself drawn to a combination of text and photography as the most effective vehicles for his creative intentions. Many of Baldessari’s pieces directly address the viewer with hand-painted questions about the nature of art: in What Is Painting (1966-68), Baldessari asks through the canvas, “Do you sense how all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side” This piece in particular seems to summarize Baldessari’s focus on the recontextualization of familiar images that would define his artistic practice for years to come.
Alongside reproductions of select work, this publication features a wide selection of Baldessari’s own writings from 1968 to 2011, providing further insight into the myriad critical ideas already conveyed in the artist’s work.Born in California, John Baldessari (1931-2020) was one of the most influential artists of the conceptual and post-conceptual movements. Baldessari taught at CalArts from 1970 to 1986 and then at UCLA until 2008, with artists such as David Salle and Mike Kelley as some of his earliest students. His commitment to “not making boring art” is evident throughout his entire oeuvre.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Kit Hammonds. Text by Ashley Bickerton, Liz Craft, Meg Cranston, Julieta González, Kit Hammonds, Matt Mullican, Tony Oursler, David Salle, James Welling.
As ludic and nonauthoritarian as John Baldessari’s art, this new monograph on the “father of conceptual art” is dedicated to his practice as an artist and a teacher, and the many ways in which they intertwine. Having been trained as an arts educator, John Baldessari (born 1931) is renowned for his work as much as for his innovative class at CalArts, Los Angeles, where he has formed many generations of artists and helped shape the West Coast art scene. Organized alphabetically, Learning to Read with John Baldessari—which accompanies a retrospective at Museo Jumex, Mexico City—includes an essay on the artist’s approaches to art-making and teaching; a biography of the artist as a teacher; artworks reproduced thematically; and stories and anecdotes from former students such as Liz Craft, Ed Henderson, Matt Mullican, Tony Oursler and David Salle, about their years at CalArts.
In Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's short film A Brief History of John Baldessari, the world-renowned conceptual artist suggests that he will be best remembered as "the guy who put dots over people's faces." Baldessari recalls: "I felt like it [the dot] leveled the playing field"--surely an ironic claim to fame in an age of self-obsession and self-celebration. Especially from the early Renaissance, when mirrors became more readily available, through today--an age of constant surveillance in which nearly every pedestrian carries some form of camera--the auto portrait has become an inevitability that, to varying degrees, finds its way into the practice of many working artists. For its 64th issue, Visionaire invites a roster of contemporary actors, entertainers and personalities to contribute a self-portrait. The participants include artists Ai Weiwei and Ed Ruscha; models Gisele Bundchen and Kate Upton; actors Scarlett Johansson and James Franco; singer Miley Cyrus; filmmaker Pedro Almodovar; fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy (Rodarte) and Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy); athlete Lionel Messi, and many more. Their self-portraits are printed in black and white, and then silkscreened with shapes and colors created by Baldessari. The resulting collection of images offers a snapshot of contemporary iconography, bridging technology and craftsmanship, high art and pop culture, digital and analogue, new and old. Visionaire No. 64: Art is available in three different editions, each themed by a color, and featuring a different selection of contributors. All of the editions are presented in a beautifully printed cloth box. The green edition includes contributions by Gisele Bündchen, Maurizio Cattelan, Drake, Julianne Moore, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Cunningham & Antonio Lopez, Neil Patrick Harris, John Waters, Lionel Messi and Yoko Ono.
In Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's short film A Brief History of John Baldessari, the world-renowned conceptual artist suggests that he will be best remembered as "the guy who put dots over people's faces." Baldessari recalls: "I felt like it [the dot] leveled the playing field"--surely an ironic claim to fame in an age of self-obsession and self-celebration. Especially from the early Renaissance, when mirrors became more readily available, through today--an age of constant surveillance in which nearly every pedestrian carries some form of camera--the auto portrait has become an inevitability that, to varying degrees, finds its way into the practice of many working artists. For its 64th issue, Visionaire invites a roster of contemporary actors, entertainers and personalities to contribute a self-portrait. The participants include artists Ai Weiwei and Ed Ruscha; models Gisele Bundchen and Kate Upton; actors Scarlett Johansson and James Franco; singer Miley Cyrus; filmmaker Pedro Almodovar; fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy (Rodarte) and Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy); athlete Lionel Messi, and many more. Their self-portraits are printed in black and white, and then silkscreened with shapes and colors created by Baldessari. The resulting collection of images offers a snapshot of contemporary iconography, bridging technology and craftsmanship, high art and pop culture, digital and analogue, new and old. Visionaire No. 64: Art is available in three different editions, each themed by a color, and featuring a different selection of contributors. All of the editions are presented in a beautifully printed cloth box. The blue edition includes contributions by Lupita Nyong'o, Ai Weiwei, Kate Upton, Dustin Hoffman, Psy, Kirsten Dunst, Kate and Laura Mulleavy with Catherine Opie, Cameron Diaz, Michael Stipe and Kaws.
In Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's short film A Brief History of John Baldessari, the world-renowned conceptual artist suggests that he will be best remembered as "the guy who put dots over people's faces." Baldessari recalls: "I felt like it [the dot] leveled the playing field"--surely an ironic claim to fame in an age of self-obsession and self-celebration. Especially from the early Renaissance, when mirrors became more readily available, through today--an age of constant surveillance in which nearly every pedestrian carries some form of camera--the auto portrait has become an inevitability that, to varying degrees, finds its way into the practice of many working artists. For its 64th issue, Visionaire invites a roster of contemporary actors, entertainers and personalities to contribute a self-portrait. The participants include artists Ai Weiwei and Ed Ruscha; models Gisele Bundchen and Kate Upton; actors Scarlett Johansson and James Franco; singer Miley Cyrus; filmmaker Pedro Almodovar; fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy (Rodarte) and Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy); athlete Lionel Messi, and many more. Their self-portraits are printed in black and white, and then silkscreened with shapes and colors created by Baldessari. The resulting collection of images offers a snapshot of contemporary iconography, bridging technology and craftsmanship, high art and pop culture, digital and analogue, new and old. Visionaire No. 64: Art is available in three different editions, each themed by a color, and featuring a different selection of contributors. All of the editions are presented in a beautifully printed cloth box. The red edition includes contributions by James Franco, Miley Cyrus, Marina Abramovic, Ranveer Singh, Yuna Kim, Karlie Kloss, Pedro Almodóvar, Drew Barrymore, G-Dragon and Ed Ruscha.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Meg Cranston, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
This second volume of JRP|Ringier’s complete John Baldessari writings traces the genesis and development of the artist’s understanding of art in the early 1960s through to the present. More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari presents Baldessari as storyteller, moralist, teacher and occasional gadfly, always concerned to accomplish what he describes as the central task of art making: to communicate in a way that people can understand. These writings address everything from matters of color in sculpture, to the dilemmas of art students in need of ideas, to the art world’s ever-conflicted relationship with money, while always returning to Baldessari’s love of language and his longstanding investigation into the tensions of word and image. With numerous never-before-published texts and facsimiles of original documents, this long-anticipated collection will prove essential reading for anyone involved in contemporary art.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Meg Cranston, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
This first volume of JRP|Ringier’s complete John Baldessari writings project traces the genesis and development of the artist’s understanding of art in the early 1960s. More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari presents Baldessari as storyteller, moralist, teacher and occasional gadfly, always concerned to accomplish what he describes as the central task of art making: to communicate in a way that people can understand. These writings address everything from matters of color in sculpture, to the dilemmas of art students in need of ideas, to the art world’s ever-conflicted relationship with money, while always returning to Baldessari’s love of language and his longstanding investigation into the tensions of word and image. With numerous never-before-published texts and facsimiles of original documents, this long-anticipated collection will prove essential reading for anyone involved in contemporary art.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Cristina Bechtler, David Campany. Text by John Baldessari, David Campany, Amy Cappellazzo, Jessica Morgan, Naomi Shohan.
PA is an annual artist’s magazine devoted to artists that use photography. For each issue, an artist is asked to invite a collaborator to engage in a dialogue about their practice. For this latest issue, American artist John Baldessari chose film set designer Naomi Shohan, and the two collaborated on a brilliant and witty elaboration of Baldessari’s treatment of found photography. The book juxtaposes Hollywood film stills from the outsider’s viewpoint--Baldessari’s take on Hollywood--with film stills from the insider’s viewpoint-- that of Shohan the set designer, who has worked on major film productions such as American Beauty, Constantine, The Replacement Killers and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Baldessari is well known for his enjoyment of collaboration, but this volume constitutes his most intriguing venture to date. Also included is a conversation with the artists by Amy Cappellazzo.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Hans Ulrich Obrist has been a staunch supporter of the Los Angeles maestro of Conceptualism John Baldessari from early on in his career. For these conversations, the artist and curator were joined by, among others, the Uruguayan artist and author Alejandro Cesarco, a friend and previous public interlocutor of Baldessari's. Baldessari himself offers readers insight into the motives and semiotics of his multimedia work and his life as an artist, always expressing himself with precision and with wit. A recurrent topic throughout these discussions is the interaction of text and image (on which so much of Baldessari's work leans), and issues such as the museum as institution, idea archives and unrealized projects, and on his career, exhibitions and retrospectives of the past few years.
John Baldessari (born 1931) is a luminary in the realms of Conceptual art and book art, and one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the last 40 years. Since his sensational Cremation Project of 1970, for which he incinerated every single painting he had made between 1953 and 1966, Baldessari's work has mined the tensions between language, image and sign-making. Baldessari unpicks the very mechanisms of media representation, and even the idea of artistic subject matter itself, using painting, photography, film/video, collage and reliefs, integrating images and text from advertising and movies into his works. Since 1980, Baldessari has worked mostly without text in serial photographs and pictures, and strategies such as overpainting, visual omissions and withheld information have increasingly taken on the earlier function of language. For this superbly designed book, Baldessari has designed a sequence of enigmatically fragmentary and geometrically emphatic images, arranged rhythmically across the volume's landscape format, that slowly accrete narrative as the reader-viewer moves through the book. These fragments, derived largely from B-movie stills, lead into a second chapter that reproduces the complete pictures. Juggling these themes of composition, information, omission and rhythm, Parse consolidates Baldessari's signature concerns into a great work of book art.
Published by Kerber. Edited by Martin Hentschel. Text by John C. Welchman.
Commissioned to produce an installation for Mies van der Rohe's Museum Haus Lange, John Baldessari decided to “rub the building up the wrong way” with humorous interventions.
Published by Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco-Legion of Honor/Jordan Schnitzer Family. Text by Hunter Drohojowska-Philip.
Conceptual art veteran John Baldessari (born 1931) began making prints in the mid-1970s, and has placed printmaking at the center of his appropriative practice, in which found photographs of people are amended with colorful dots that blot out the heads of the subjects, redirecting the viewer's attention towards marginal detail. “In my work,” he says, “I found that I could be the master of my own universe and control what people see and pay attention to.” For Baldessari, keen as he is to minimize or erase his own manual presence, printmaking also helps to flatten out these collaged additions and interventions, heightening their sense of estrangement and beguiling anonymity. Many of Baldessari's prints series have been extremely influential, such as the 1970s Raw Prints series, for which he amended photos of Santa Monica mallgoers with abstracted shapes printed above the images that replicate details from them; this series was pivotal in democratizing photo-based prints in the art world. Since then, Baldessari has gone on to collaborate with some of the world's great printmakers, such as Brooke Alexander, Gemini G.E.L., Cirrus Editions, Edition Jacob Samuel, Mixographia and Crown Point Press. An essential volume in any contemporary art library, this first full survey of Baldessari's four-decade printmaking career is the definitive volume on the prints, and boasts 140 color plates alongside testimonies from his printmaking collaborators.
PUBLISHER Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco-Legion of Honor/Jordan Schnitzer Family
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 10 x 12 in. / 160 pgs / 140 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 4/30/2010 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 91
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781935202103TRADE List Price: $59.95 CAD $79.00 GBP £52.99
Retrospective--a collaborative project by John Baldessari, the legendary California conceptualist, and Alejandro Cesarco, a Uruguayan, Brooklyn-based artist born in 1975--uses the act of looking back as a framing device and a narrative mode. Implicit in the work is a concern for the consequences of retelling and representing the past in the present.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by John C. Welchman, Stefan Gronert, Christina Vegh.
Highly influential artist and teacher John Baldessari became known in late 1960s Southern California as a conceptual painter, and since then he has worked in a variety of other media, including photography, artist books, video and printmaking. Baldessari has engaged the theme of music off and on throughout his career, but until now, those investigations haven’t been seen in one cohesive volume. With more than 50 color images of paintings, photographs, videos and mixed media works spanning from 1970 through 2007, this compendium illustrates Baldessari’s complex relationship with text, image and sound, examining the centrality of music in his oeuvre. Featuring pieces such as the important 1972 video work, “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” in which he set Sol LeWitt’s theoretical reflections on art to music, this connoisseur’s essential also includes many lesser-known and recent works--like a 2006 drum kit print with a yellow face over-painted in yellow and blue and a 2007 print series, Noses & Ears, Etc.
Published by JRP|Ringier/BDV Bureau des videos. Edited by Nicolas Trembley.
Title (1972), 4 Short Films (1971), and 6 Colorful Inside Jobs (1977), three seminal but rarely seen films by the groundbreaking west coast Conceptualist John Baldessari, are assembled here for the first time on DVD. The films are built around the same principles as the artist's photographic work, and Baldessari's obsession with the non-link, with fragmentation and gaps, is all the more striking in moving pictures. His images do not arrive in a narrative progression, but appear as a succession of near-still, suspended moments, autonomous but integrated, for which it is up to the spectator to build a structure. Title is one of Baldessari's most radical projects, a juxtaposition of minimal images without hierarchy or direction, and particularly pointedly so because the subject is a conventional film, broken into its component parts. First come the objects, the characters, the landscapes, then the frames associating two shapes, and finally the start of an action, of a dialogue. Baldessari's splicing and categorizing reveals the tricks of cinematic space-time. Six Colorful Inside Jobs shows a room being painted in six different colors, each corresponding to a day of the week, leaving the artist a comic figure, and 4 Short Films is the product of a similar ironic twist, a free and absurd association between time, matter and objects. An essential document.
More than any other artist of his generation, the Los Angeles-based Conceptual artist John Baldessari explores the relationship between reading and seeing, between language and image. In this small, provocative artist's book, Baldessari presents 16 supposedly evocative colors along with the names that they were given by the American paint companies that produced them. Across from each solid colored left-hand page, the right page offers the color's title, creating a concrete poem in four parts. For example, in part one, "Organic Order" stands beside a mulchy green, "Creative Thinker" is paired with a deep purple, "Avant Garde" goes with mustard yellow, and "Abstract" is across from sea-green. Further on we learn that warm peachy-pink stands for "Love and Happiness," while warm pinky-peach represents "Beautiful in My Eyes." Source companies include Pratt & Lambert, Benjamin Moore and Pantone.
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Edelbert Kŕb and Peter Pakesch. Essays by Rainer Fuchs, Matt Mullican, Anne Rorimer, Marie de Brugerolle, Winfried Pauleit, Hans Dieter Huber, Klaus Hoffer, Gertrud Koch, Ann Goldstein and Christopher Williams.
Burning his early paintings and producing his 1970 Cremation Project, John Baldessari embarked on a new quest to explore the relationships between painting and language, images and text, originality and authorship. This overview of his works up to the early 1980s, encompassing film, photography, and painting, show him rooting around with characteristic humor and poignancy.
PUBLISHER Walther König, Köln
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.75 x 11 in. / 278 pgs / 250 color / 40 bw
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2005 p. 170
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883759388SDNR30 List Price: $50.00 CAD $60.00
Published by Walther König, Köln. Artwork by John Baldessari.
Weighing what is art and what is not art and piling both on a canvas has been John Baldessari's seesaw practice throughout his career. Over the past 20 years, as this retrospective shows, his narrative and formal experiments have had a sophistication and playfulness in his use of manipulated imagery and, most recently, painterly color that remain vitally questioning. A companion volume, available seperately, covers the years before 1984.
PUBLISHER Walther König, Köln
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.75 x 11 in. / 200 pgs / 120 color / 80 bw
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2005 p. 170
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9783883759371SDNR30 List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications. Essays by Tracey Bashkoff, John Hanhardt, Frederic Tuten and Russell Ferguson.
The American artist John Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s, combining Pop art's use of mass media imagery with Conceptual art's use of language to create a unique body of work that has become a hallmark of postmodern art. Early in his career, Baldessari began incorporating images and text utilized by the advertising and movie industries into his photo-based art. He appropriated pictures and movie stills, juxtaposing, editing and cropping them in conjunction with written texts. The resulting montage of photography and language often counters the narrative associations suggested by the isolated scenes and offers a greater plurality of meanings. The layered, often humorous compositions carry disparate connotations, underscoring how relative meaning can be. Throughout his long and celebrated career, Baldessari has continued to play with and critique popular culture, and over time he has increased the scale and visual impact of his work. This publication looks at new works Baldessari created on commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim.
John Baldessari
Learning to Read with John Baldessari
Visionaire No. 64: Art, Baldessari Green Edition
Visionaire No. 64: Art, Baldessari Blue Edition
Visionaire No. 64: Art, Baldessari Red Edition
More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari
More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari
PA: John Baldessari in Collaboration with Naomi Shohan
Hans Ulrich Obrist & John Baldessari: The Conversation Series Volume 18
John Baldessari: Parse
John Baldessari: Brick Bldg, Lg Windows W/Xlent Views, Partially Furnished, Renowned Architect
John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation
John Baldessari & Alejandro Cesarco: Retrospective
John Baldessari: Music
John Baldessari: Films Transferred to Video 1972-1977
John Baldessari: Prima Facie
John Baldessari: A Different Kind Of Order
John Baldessari: Life's Balance 1984-2004
John Baldessari
John Baldessari & Lawrence Weiner: The Metaphor Problem Again
John Baldessari: While Something Is Happening Here, Something Else Is Happening There
John Baldessari: National City