Artist report - John Baldessari

John Baldessari is a conceptual artist. He’s well-known for incorporating texts and photography into canvases in the mid 1960s. Baldessari also works on printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. Other than making arts, he also worked as an art teacher for almost 30 years since 1959. Places he taught including San Diego school system, UCSD, CalArts and UCLA.

As a conceptual artist and as an educator, Baldessari always tried to convey the idea of making art based on how one perceives art is; art doesn’t necessarily mean a drawing or a painting with a particular concept or idea. Notably, in his project “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” in 1971, he asked students at Nova Sotia College of Art & Design to voluntarily enter his “a form of classroom punishment”: he asked the students to write the sentence “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”. To his surprise, the students wrote the sentence covered all over the walls. He described his works as

[my artworks are] what I thought art should be, not what somebody else would think art would be. Received wisdom is what you would get in school. And so a lot of my work was about questioning this received wisdom.