John Baldessari

Photo by Catherine Opie

John Baldessari in his Santa Monica studio

Photo by Catherine Opie

Maquettes for the “Noses & Ears, Etc.” series, top, and for the posters advertising its showing in 2006 at Cristina Guerra, Lisbon

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After nearly four decades of making and teaching art in Los Angeles, John Baldessari, 77, has arguably become the éminence grise of the city’s art scene. He’s the artist most likely to be called by a New York journalist for a quote about the L.A. art world. He’s also the one most often tapped for nonprofit boards. He is a longtime board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles. Recently he joined the board of the megacollector Craig Robins’s new non-degree-granting graduate program, Art + Research, in Miami. And in May, Baldessari was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It’s true—you become an elder statesman, and I know what it’s about: It’s because I’m older, I’m tall, I have white hair,” the artist says with his characteristic deadpan. “You don’t have anything different to say than before. You just say it with more authority.”

We’re discussing the difference between being an artist and playing the public role of one while sitting at the back of his Santa Monica studio with his dog, Giotto, a Labrador mix, at his side. It’s a messy work space, which speaks to Baldessari’s creative process, as well as to the notable absence of an army of studio managers and assistants. (I met only one.) His desk is covered with piles of papers and clippings, magazines and books. So are the floors.

“If something is usable, I have a hard time throwing it away,” says the artist, whose parents recycled materials, composted waste and raised chickens and rabbits in National City, near San Diego. “I almost lost my first wife when she threw some vegetables away,” he laughs. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” (In fact, they divorced years later.)

The long worktables in the front of his studio contain more stacks, scraps and signs of work in progress. Baldessari picks up one sheet of paper with an image from his book Miracle Chips, which Steidl is releasing this month. The volume contains a series of photographs of potato chips in which Baldessari has embedded specters of people’s faces—“miracles,” if only of Photoshop technology. Some likenesses, such as Mozart’s or the Mona Lisa’s, are more easily identifiable than others.

“I’ve always treasured the news stories about someone finding a face in a taco or in a garage door, or finding the Virgin Mary in a puddle of chocolate,” Baldessari says. “It’s always the Virgin Mary, isn’t it? And then the places turn into shrines.”

On another table, a maquette of the Prada Foundation, in Milan, reveals nine rail-thin Giacometti-style figures lined up single file throughout the main exhibition hall. He imagines that Miuccia Prada, who commissioned the piece, will clothe the forms in her designs when the installation is unveiled to the public in 2009 or 2010.

“I chose Giacometti because fashion is all about skinniness,” he says, noting that the artist’s estate has not yet confirmed its approval. “There’s a sense of anorexia. And a sense that models are tortured.”

As for the placement of the figures, on one level he hopes their arrangement will evoke a runway. On another, he just likes the pattern of larger-than-life forms alternating with the columns of the cavernous space. “I guess I’m a formalist at heart,” says Baldessari. “If you looked at it from a bird’s-eye view, it would look like a Barnett Newman painting.”

Most art historians, of course, would be reluctant to call Baldessari a formalist of any sort. His usual label is Conceptual artist of a particularly witty variety. “There’s this deep humor in his work,” says the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) director Michael Govan, “a humor that opens up insights.”

And this year Baldessari’s wry brand of humor has been on display in surveys at almost every major museum in Los Angeles. The Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA had word paintings from the 1960s, such as Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell. (One tip: “Paintings with cows and hens in them collect dust.”) The Getty Museum included in its “California Video” exhibition the artist’s iconic 1971 work I will not make any more boring art, which shows him writing the sentence multiple times, like a chastened schoolboy.