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.

For a permanent-collection show, moca took as its centerpiece, catalogue cover and exhibition title Baldessari’s This Is Not to Be Looked At, 1966–68. Widely read as a send-up of Minimalist art, this wink of a work displays a silkscreened image of an Artforum cover featuring a painting by Frank Stella under which Baldessari had a sign painter render the title’s instruction.

Baldessari began his career in the 1960s as a painter, then in 1970 took the rather theatrical and Duchampian step of cremating all his paintings (he folded some of the ashes into cookie dough and displayed the baked goods at New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of the 1970 survey “Information”). From that time on, he was known for a certain fluidity and hybridity in his art, working at the intersection of photography and painting, and of image and word. “He always loved text as a kind of image,” explains the poet David Antin, an early friend of Baldessari’s. “He would use a line of text in such an isolated way, as if it were a painting.”

Often the artist’s combinations of photographs and text creates a sense of narrative as well, if only by magnifying the most subtle or uneventful of events. The Pencil Story, 1972–73, for example, juxtaposes two shots of a pencil—the first dull, the second sharp. Beneath the pair, a caption reads: “I had this old pencil on the dashboard of my car for a long time. Every time I saw it, I felt uncomfortable, since its point was so dull and dirty. I always intended to sharpen it and finally couldn’t bear it any longer and did sharpen it. I’m not sure, but I think this has something to do with art.”

The pencil has recently come back into Baldessari’s work, and sharper than ever: In his clever design for LACMA’s new logo, one is held beside a distant image of a palm tree as if to measure it—although on paper they oddly appear the same size. Above reads the acronym LACMA with the first and last letters underlined.

“We asked him to work with us on the logo because he is one of the most extraordinary graphic artists, in the way he deals with flat images,” says Govan. “And this idea was brilliant. This simple decision turns L.A. into something graphic, active.”

In the 1980s, Baldessari focused on making artworks by combining and often cropping found images, usually news photos or Hollywood B-movie stills. On top of these compositions, he often used perfect, solid circles of vinyl paint to block out key spots. In Seashells, Tridents, Frames, 1988, owned by Eli Broad, for instance, blue and black spots eclipse, respectively, a woman’s and a man’s head.

The power of such pieces, he likes to say, stems from what gets left out as much as from what is left in. “A Shakespeare teacher of mine once said that a term paper should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject, short enough to be interesting,” he says. “I think art should be the same way.”

Or in terms of his own work: “We always look at the faces in photographs,” he says, “but by covering up the faces you could see the figures more clearly. You could see how they were dressed, how they were standing, how they were interacting.”

It was not a quantum jump to move from these photo collages to the nose images—typically photographic fragments floating on colorful but otherwise blank faces—that now appear on posters on his studio walls, in prints on his desk and even in the form of a rubbery key chain tacked to his bulletin board. Baldessari began this series three years ago.

“I noticed that you get isolated eyeballs in art, and you get lips, like with the famous Man Ray, but nobody has done noses,” he says. A fan of absurdity in literature as well as in life, he also cites as inspiration Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 short story “The Nose,” about a bureaucrat who wakes up one day to discover that this feature is missing from his face. Baldessari has expanded the scope of the series in “Noses & Ears, Etc.,” which has appeared at Cristina Guerra, in Lisbon; Marian Goodman, in New York and Paris; and Margo Leavin, in L.A.

For his current show, at Marian Goodman, he has moved on to yet other body parts, isolated eyes and brows. He’s calling the series “Raised Eyebrows/Furrowed Foreheads.”

“I think it’s appropriate for our time, because people are worried now—about the world, about gasoline prices, about everything,” he says.

Two colorful photo collages pinned to his studio wall give a sense of his vision for this series, showing the furrows above the brow carved out and the brow itself literally raised in relief. No noses, lips or ears are visible. When asked about the medium of the final piece, he says: “The way I look at it, it’s painting and photography and sculpture. I’m always interested in merging things.”

The Marian Goodman show runs through January 10, 2009, a year that will also see the first leg of a major retrospective. It starts at the Tate Modern next October and travels to LACMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. His Prada exhibition is also tentatively slated for 2009.

So how does he keep up with everything? He says his studio manager helps to deflect requests. He also works out four times a week. “I used to think of myself as a brain, but it dawned on me years ago that I have to take care of my body too,” he says.

It helps that he stopped teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, three years ago and is trying to cut back on work travel. “People ask if I’m planning a vacation,” he says. “I say that any day I don’t have to spend in a hotel is a vacation.

“Every day it’s constant in my mind to stay focused on my job doing art,” he adds. “Everything else proceeds out of it. You can’t let the tail wag the dog.”   "In The Studio: John Baldessari" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.