Baldessari, Adventures and Evasions

Baldessari, whose retrospective just left the Met in January, was recently in conversation with Fred Tutten, an author and professor on the relationship between art and literature. Poor Tutten tried valiantly to have Baldessari say something meaningful on his preferred readings, or offer suggestions to young artists but Baldessari slyly avoided it with amusing anecdotes and a modesty that belied his wicked sense of humor.

He shared a parable from one of his books of the young artist who has finished school. He asks his teachers for advice on how to succeed and they encourage him to visit gallerists and show his work. He arrives in New York and displays his slides to everyone who will sit still long enough to look at them. Repeatedly he is told, you are too provincial, we are looking for art history, for meaning, for statements about the world today. Going to museums in his spare time, he paints, and copies, and draws, and thinks about art and only art until the poor young man collapses. After a long sleep, he valiantly tries again and takes around his slides once more. This time the gallerists seeing a half-starved, penniless man whose age was hidden by the pallor of his skin said, ah! you are historical. Moral of the story: historical mispronounced sounds like hysterical.

But he did say that he learned something in that period. He discovered that he was in fact a closet minimalist. The important thing was to keep the work as lean as possible, trim off the fat, leave only the meat. The trick is, of course, in learning how not to take a slice too much which then kills the work.

He is a film noir addict and may have gotten more excited talking about film than anything else over the course of the evening talk. In preparation for a graduation talk he must give soon, he considered simply reading a list of film noir titles and saying: this is me. Among his favorite film noir character names is Rick. Some days he would tell himself: Be like George Raft. Robert Mitchum would work too. He thought anyone could learn a lot by watching how Goddard in particular edited his films, bemoaning sound and color for having destroyed film. Look at Fritz Lang in Germany and then Hollywood! When films added sound and color they became about storylines rather than visual effects, and the writer became more important to the loss of the original wonder of the medium.

It had never occurred to him to be an artist. Growing up in what was nicely called a service community south of San Diego, his mother an upper class Danish woman who had books shipped to her and a father who had been an Italian peasant and never really tried to learn English, he went to college on the advice of his sister since his high-school certainly did not have college counseling and his parents were uncertain on the procedure. Interested in how language worked, given the effort he seemed to have to make to have his father understand anything he said, but then considering himself a failed writer, he wound-up in an art history program at UC Berkeley. Someone in the graduate program asked him why he wanted to write about art when he could make art. Not coming from a world where that made any sense, he was surprised enough by the notion to consider it. And had to face the fact that what he did better than anything else was make art. As long as he thought of the job as Artist, it seemed impossible, but if he lowered the case to the simple task of being an artist then he could consider it a job. After all a plumber is just a plumber, he explained, and the important thing is to do the job. Either you are good at your job or not.

How good he was at his job was not apparent to the world immediately. For many years he had to teach to earn a living, and after pausing briefly, continued to say that anything he says about teaching has to be understood in the context that he always did it for the money–just as he had worked at a building supply company, or built houses, or produced technical illustrations. But in the end teaching seemed the most fun because he never knew what would happen that day. Tutten interrupted at this point to share his own story of being halfway through his PhD, looking down the hard road of writing his dissertation, and asking Susan Sontag if he should really keep going. Sontag replied there were three reasons to keep teaching: June, July, and August. He finished the degree and Baldessari jumped in to say that the summers allowed him to produce work with the security of some pay when otherwise there was none.

Along the way Dr. Seuss, known to him as his friend Theodore Geisel, asked Baldessari to help him start an art program for kids. Knowing nothing about children, he decided to read up on educational psychology but then wondered at its accuracy. So he figured he would find out. Told that children do not succeed at small, articulate activities, he brought in a bag of confetti and asked them to draw their hands and arms on the small colorful pieces of paper, which they did without great anxiety. Told they could not sustain endurance activities, he brought in a roll of adding paper and let the kids they could rip off as long a piece as they chose with the warning that they would have to cover the entire piece. One young boy pulled, and pulled, and pulled a piece that must have been several yards long. He drew, and drew through the morning, and after lunch drew, and drew some more, until towards the late afternoon starting to flag, he started writing, concluding with "ending now thanks to the pencil..."

People like to discuss the humor in Baldessari's work but he certainly does not, saying "if I thought I was funny, I'd be a flop". There is indeed an attitude that if you look at your own work too closely, you will lose the element that is happening without you and Baldessari seems to fall into that group. Having to look at student portfolios during his years as a teacher, he noted that those students who could talk at great length about their own work, whose speeches suggested they knew enough already, inevitably presented work that fell completely flat, failing in their flailing. The lack of uncertainty is helpful to the work. Cervantes for example, leaves him wondering if he was kidding or not.

But it does not matter what you read to become "richer, more complex" as Tutten asked him yet again for suggestions. Read fortunes and fortune cookies, he replied. Everything is important. There isn't a hierarchy of information; it is all information you can use. If you want to write, write; if you want to make art, do it. An artist needs something to trigger the mind, to confuse. Tutten trying to put a positive spin on it suggested, "to make things more interesting." Baldessari rejecting the positive spin, said again, "The job of the artist is to confuse."

On which point, he successfully bewildered Tutten, and hopefully a great many in the audience too, whose questions he then equally successfully evaded.