Movies: John Baldessari

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes....

Presented without commentary, this film reveals the thinking behind the work of John Baldessari over the course of his career, and provides clues to the understanding of the artist's paintings, photographic work and books....

In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, int...

In Walking Forward-Running Past, Baldessari ingeniously employs photography and video to examine and ultimately deconstruct film. In this conceptual exercise, he tapes up photographic film stills of himself walking toward the camera—coming closer wit...

Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor. Through the gradual integration of cinematic techniques—motion, color, sound, acting...

Seen from a bird's eye view, a figure paints the walls and floor of a windowless room six times in six days, using each of the primary and secondary colors....

John Baldessari is today known as one of the leading conceptual artists of his generation, using found or appropriated images and exploring the associative power of language. Like many experimental artists Baldessari began his career in the more trad...

'Folding Hat' is a deadpan conceptual exercise that represents a dashed attempt to rescue an object from the meaning assigned to it. Whistling an aria from The Barber of Seville, Baldessari bends and folds a simple hat into numerous configurations. H...

In a sly twist on the methodology of the 18th-century "philosophes" who classified the laws and history of the world in massive encyclopedias, Baldessari devises and then subverts his own system for cataloguing the world. In a matter-of-fact tone, he...

From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s (b.1931) varied work has been seminal in the field of conceptual art. Integrating semiology and mass media imagery, he empl...

Baldessari introduces eight news photos to Ed Henderson — ranging in subject matter from geese at the zoo to an accidental electrocution — and asks him to identify them. Henderson's associative responses suggest the projection of unconscious desires ...

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase "I will not make any more...

A short film by John Baldessari...

A film by John Baldessari...

A film by John Baldessari...

Baldessari has commented that he is "less interested in the form art takes than the meaning an image evokes." In Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks for Photographs, he explores the relation between what is heard and what is seen, appropriating delibe...

“[A] rather perverse exercise in futility,” this tape documents Baldessari’s response to Joseph Beuys’s influential performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Baldessari’s approach here is characteristically subtle and ironic, involving ord...

Baldessari has Ed Henderson examine obscure movie stills and attempt to reconstruct the films' narratives....

Contemporaneous to his best-known video works, these Super-8mm films represent Baldessari's conceptual engagement with motion picture film, pointing to the technical strengths and weaknesses of the celluloid medium relative to video, such as the supe...

Script is the opposite of an improvisational exercise. Seven couples, all amateurs, are handed pages from random movie scripts and instructed to enact the absurd text through force of imagination, without direction or knowledge of what the others are...