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The American artist, John Baldessari died on 5 January 2020.
This is from his LA Times obituary:
Jan 5, 2020 John Baldessari, a gentle giant of Conceptual art whose irreverent questions about the nature of art brought him international acclaim and shaped a generation of younger artists, has died.
I met him once while visiting my BFF who was at CalArts (the CIA that’s neither culinary school or spy agency), and Baldessari was my BFF’s first faculty advisor before changing majors from art to music.
In a world that knows about Dali or Pollock, most do not probably recognize Baldessari’s work but it was in a place where and a time when Art attempted to move past its material-object paradigm and as parody, serve as cultural meta-criticism. The problem of most conceptual art is that it is philosophically delimited by the need for documentation in some mediated form. Yet such art activity remains pedagogically foundational for the discipline itself.
There are art “movements” that adopted a more textual approach to artwork, especially in terms of artworks as philosophical propositions about what makes our ability to make media-framing an aesthetic experience, for example Jenny Holzer’s artwork which we now see as a genre in political photo-projections on buildings like the group that projects commentary on Trump’s Hotel in DC.
In the latter part of his life, Baldessari’s artwork production did represent a reconciliation with the institution that is the artworld once he reached his place in its history. Once he achieved an institutional position in art history and gallery patronage, he made plenty of artworks that had commodity value.
My two favorite pieces was his taking all his old work and cremating it and also his subcontracting artwork, essentially “art directing” local genre painters to make his artwork. And then there was John Baldessari – The California Map Project – 1969, the attempt to create a “duplicate” of each letter “CALIFORNIA” in its exact pre-GPS location on a California map. Unfortunately they’re not to scale, and the artwork does seem more like an excuse to take a road trip. It would have been nice if the artworld was about pretexts for partying in the 1980s.
This is his website: www.baldessari.org
Needless to say there is a connection of such punishment to the Simpsons opening sequence.
Meanwhile:
I try to imagine that the spy CIA jokes about its dopplegangers:
The CIA Restaurant Group is a family of unique restaurants in New York, Texas and California, united by their common passion for culinary excellence and their relationship to the world-renowned Culinary Institute of America.
Esquire Magazine April 1974 “A few words with the World’s Greatest Chili Maker”