*modified from an email to K. Gardner*
This past Wednesday I had the pleasure of seeing J. Baldessari talk, and he said some things and I thought this is good…
So he starts out as a painter, “I got the sneaking suspicion that there was now more to art than painting…” he burns his paintings in a crematorium, and makes a bronze plaque for himself may 1953-march 1966…and then starts on a new conceptual vain…very cleansing for sure…but a big risk.
BUT here’s where I was really floored… “Fundamentally, to be an artist, you have to make a choice…art is just a series of decisions and choices” then he continued…”what to leave in and take out” and then he showed a series of works where he blanked out books, faces, and a whole bunch of other things…and that editing *FOR* content has been with him since… Katie has told me so many times that artists make decisions…and that’s it…soooooo right, as it doesn’t matter about objects, etc…as long as the decision making process is sound…To him “language gives structural theory”, and text and image are both equal in his mind…
He was saying that Nam Jun Paik, when they taught at Cal Arts together, told him that “what’s interesting in your work is what’s not there”
Also you always say about making good ink drawings, it’s confidence…he said the same thing, and the way he deals with it is pretty simple he states “The point is to make the drawing look better than the piece of paper.”