John Baldessari

"Well, the only thing I'm kind of sure about is that when two things are brought into some sort of magnetic proximity, that meaning occurs. Two words, two images, two objects, whatever it is. Whether there's universality, or agreement on the meaning, I rather doubt it. That's probably pretty cultural. But it fascinates me that people want things to mean."
John Baldessari, excerpted from John Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (With Orange), Guggenheim Museum.

John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931, and lives and works in Santa Monica, California. His work has been exhibited in museums such as The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and in art galleries worldwide. He has also recently curated exhibitions at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington D.C., The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT JOHN BALDESSARI
Edited by Meg Cranston, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783037642566 | US $29.95
Pub Date: 6/30/2013
Forthcoming

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED

MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT JOHN BALDESSARI
Edited by Meg Cranston, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783037641927 | US $29.95
Pub Date: 6/30/2013
Forthcoming

ACTIVE BACKLIST

PA: JOHN BALDESSARI IN COLLABORATION WITH NAOMI SHOHAN
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783037642528 | US $29.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2012
Active | In stock

JOHN BALDESSARI: PARSE
Edited by Beatrix Ruf.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783037641170 | US $95.00
Pub Date: 8/31/2010
Active | In stock

JOHN BALDESSARI: A PRINT RETROSPECTIVE FROM THE COLLECTIONS OF JORDAN D. SCHNITZER AND HIS FAMILY FOUNDATION
Text by Hunter Drohojowska-Philip.
FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO-LEGION OF HONOR/JORDAN SCHNITZER FAMILY
ISBN: 9781935202103 | US $59.95
Pub Date: 4/30/2010
Active | Awaiting stock

JOHN BALDESSARI: BRICK BLDG, LG WINDOWS W/XLENT VIEWS, PARTIALLY FURNISHED, RENOWNED ARCHITECT
Edited by Martin Hentschel. Text by John C. Welchman.
KERBER
ISBN: 9783866783065 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 6/30/2010
Active | In stock

HANS ULRICH OBRIST & JOHN BALDESSARI: THE CONVERSATION SERIES VOLUME 18
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783865605009 | US $26.00
Pub Date: 2/28/2010
Active | In stock

JOHN BALDESSARI: MUSIC
Edited by John C. Welchman, Stefan Gronert, Christina Vegh.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783865602480 | US $48.00
Pub Date: 1/15/2008
Active | In stock

JOHN BALDESSARI & ALEJANDRO CESARCO: RETROSPECTIVE
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783865603449 | US $19.95
Pub Date: 3/1/2008
Active | Awaiting stock

JOHN BALDESSARI: PRIMA FACIE
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783865600882 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 2/1/2007
Active | Awaiting stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

JOHN BALDESSARI: FILMS TRANSFERRED TO VIDEO 1972-1977
Edited by Nicolas Trembley.
JRP|RINGIER/BDV BUREAU DES VIDEOS
ISBN: 9783905770094 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2007
Out of print | Not available

JOHN BALDESSARI: LIFE'S BALANCE 1984-2004
Artwork by John Baldessari.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883759371 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 6/15/2005
Out of print | Not available

JOHN BALDESSARI: A DIFFERENT KIND OF ORDER
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883759388 | US $50.00
Pub Date: 6/15/2005
Out of print | Not available

JOHN BALDESSARI
Essays by Tracey Bashkoff, John Hanhardt, Frederic Tuten and Russell Ferguson.
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
ISBN: 9780892073177 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 1/2/2005
Out of print | Not available

JOHN BALDESSARI: WHILE SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE, SOMETHING ELSE IS HAPPENING THERE
Contributions by Meg Cranston, Diedrich Diederichsen, Thomas Weski.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883753966 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 3/2/2000
Out of print | Not available

JOHN BALDESSARI & LAWRENCE WEINER: THE METAPHOR PROBLEM AGAIN
Artwork by John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner.
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783883754048 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 3/2/2000
Out of print | Not available

JOHN BALDESSARI: TWO GESTURES AND ONE MARK
Artwork by John Baldessari.
OKTAGON
ISBN: 9783896110459 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 2/2/1999
Out of print | Not available

JOHN BALDESSARI: NATIONAL CITY
Artwork by John Baldessari. Contributions by Andrea Hales. Text by Hugh Davies, Anne Rorimer.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO
ISBN: 9780934418492 | US $24.95
Pub Date: 2/2/1997
Out of print | Not available

John Baldessari

In his essay, "God Knows: The Prints of John Baldessari," published in A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp writes, "Despite the artist's personal modesty, he is today acclaimed as one of the most important figures of the postwar era, as deserving of his place in art history as his personal heroes, Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian. And even Marcel Duchamp." Featured image is "Studio," photo offset lithograph with color screenprint, 1988.

More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari

Volume II

Edited by Meg Cranston, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Published by JRP|Ringier

This second volume of JRP|Ringier’s complete John Baldessari writings traces the genesis and development of the artist’s understanding of art in the early 1960s through to the present. More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari presents Baldessari as storyteller, moralist, teacher and occasional gadfly, always concerned to accomplish what he describes as the central task of art making: to communicate in a way that people can understand. These writings address everything from matters of color in sculpture, to the dilemmas of art students in need of ideas, to the art world’s ever-conflicted relationship with money, while always returning to Baldessari’s love of language and his longstanding investigation into the tensions of word and image. With numerous never-before-published texts and facsimiles of original documents, this long-anticipated collection will prove essential reading for anyone involved in contemporary art.

More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari

Volume 1

Edited by Meg Cranston, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Published by JRP|Ringier

This first volume of JRP|Ringier’s complete John Baldessari writings project traces the genesis and development of the artist’s understanding of art in the early 1960s. More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari presents Baldessari as storyteller, moralist, teacher and occasional gadfly, always concerned to accomplish what he describes as the central task of art making: to communicate in a way that people can understand. These writings address everything from matters of color in sculpture, to the dilemmas of art students in need of ideas, to the art world’s ever-conflicted relationship with money, while always returning to Baldessari’s love of language and his longstanding investigation into the tensions of word and image. With numerous never-before-published texts and facsimiles of original documents, this long-anticipated collection will prove essential reading for anyone involved in contemporary art.

PA: John Baldessari in Collaboration with Naomi Shohan

Edited by Cristina Bechtler, David Campany. Text by John Baldessari, David Campany, Amy Cappellazzo, Jessica Morgan, Naomi Shohan.
Published by JRP|Ringier

PA is an annual artist’s magazine devoted to artists that use photography. For each issue, an artist is asked to invite a collaborator to engage in a dialogue about their practice. For this latest issue, American artist John Baldessari chose film set designer Naomi Shohan, and the two collaborated on a brilliant and witty elaboration of Baldessari’s treatment of found photography. The book juxtaposes Hollywood film stills from the outsider’s viewpoint--Baldessari’s take on Hollywood--with film stills from the insider’s viewpoint-- that of Shohan the set designer, who has worked on major film productions such as American Beauty, Constantine, The Replacement Killers and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Baldessari is well known for his enjoyment of collaboration, but this volume constitutes his most intriguing venture to date. Also included is a conversation with the artists by Amy Cappellazzo.

John Baldessari: Parse

Edited by Beatrix Ruf.
Published by JRP|Ringier

John Baldessari (born 1931) is a luminary in the realms of Conceptual art and book art, and one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the last 40 years. Since his sensational Cremation Project of 1970, for which he incinerated every single painting he had made between 1953 and 1966, Baldessari's work has mined the tensions between language, image and sign-making. Baldessari unpicks the very mechanisms of media representation, and even the idea of artistic subject matter itself, using painting, photography, film/video, collage and reliefs, integrating images and text from advertising and movies into his works. Since 1980, Baldessari has worked mostly without text in serial photographs and pictures, and strategies such as overpainting, visual omissions and withheld information have increasingly taken on the earlier function of language. For this superbly designed book, Baldessari has designed a sequence of enigmatically fragmentary and geometrically emphatic images, arranged rhythmically across the volume's landscape format, that slowly accrete narrative as the reader-viewer moves through the book. These fragments, derived largely from B-movie stills, lead into a second chapter that reproduces the complete pictures. Juggling these themes of composition, information, omission and rhythm, Parse consolidates Baldessari's signature concerns into a great work of book art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist & John Baldessari: The Conversation Series Volume 18

Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Published by Walther König, Köln

Hans Ulrich Obrist has been a staunch supporter of the Los Angeles maestro of Conceptualism John Baldessari from early on in his career. For these conversations, the artist and curator were joined by, among others, the Uruguayan artist and author Alejandro Cesarco, a friend and previous public interlocutor of Baldessari's. Baldessari himself offers readers insight into the motives and semiotics of his multimedia work and his life as an artist, always expressing himself with precision and with wit. A recurrent topic throughout these discussions is the interaction of text and image (on which so much of Baldessari's work leans), and issues such as the museum as institution, idea archives and unrealized projects, and on his career, exhibitions and retrospectives of the past few years.

John Baldessari: Brick Bldg, Lg Windows W/Xlent Views, Partially Furnished, Renowned Architect

Edited by Martin Hentschel. Text by John C. Welchman.
Published by Kerber

Commissioned to produce an installation for Mies van der Rohe's Museum Haus Lange, John Baldessari decided to “rub the building up the wrong way” with humorous interventions.

John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation

Text by Hunter Drohojowska-Philip.
Published by Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco-Legion of Honor/Jordan Schnitzer Family

Conceptual art veteran John Baldessari (born 1931) began making prints in the mid-1970s, and has placed printmaking at the center of his appropriative practice, in which found photographs of people are amended with colorful dots that blot out the heads of the subjects, redirecting the viewer's attention towards marginal detail. “In my work,” he says, “I found that I could be the master of my own universe and control what people see and pay attention to.” For Baldessari, keen as he is to minimize or erase his own manual presence, printmaking also helps to flatten out these collaged additions and interventions, heightening their sense of estrangement and beguiling anonymity. Many of Baldessari's prints series have been extremely influential, such as the 1970s Raw Prints series, for which he amended photos of Santa Monica mallgoers with abstracted shapes printed above the images that replicate details from them; this series was pivotal in democratizing photo-based prints in the art world. Since then, Baldessari has gone on to collaborate with some of the world's great printmakers, such as Brooke Alexander, Gemini G.E.L., Cirrus Editions, Edition Jacob Samuel, Mixographia and Crown Point Press. An essential volume in any contemporary art library, this first full survey of Baldessari's four-decade printmaking career is the definitive volume on the prints, and boasts 140 color plates alongside testimonies from his printmaking collaborators.

John Baldessari & Alejandro Cesarco: Retrospective

Published by Walther König, Köln

Retrospective--a collaborative project by John Baldessari, the legendary California conceptualist, and Alejandro Cesarco, a Uruguayan, Brooklyn-based artist born in 1975--uses the act of looking back as a framing device and a narrative mode. Implicit in the work is a concern for the consequences of retelling and representing the past in the present.

John Baldessari: Music

Edited by John C. Welchman, Stefan Gronert, Christina Vegh.
Published by Walther König, Köln

Highly influential artist and teacher John Baldessari became known in late 1960s Southern California as a conceptual painter, and since then he has worked in a variety of other media, including photography, artist books, video and printmaking. Baldessari has engaged the theme of music off and on throughout his career, but until now, those investigations haven’t been seen in one cohesive volume. With more than 50 color images of paintings, photographs, videos and mixed media works spanning from 1970 through 2007, this compendium illustrates Baldessari’s complex relationship with text, image and sound, examining the centrality of music in his oeuvre. Featuring pieces such as the important 1972 video work, “Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” in which he set Sol LeWitt’s theoretical reflections on art to music, this connoisseur’s essential also includes many lesser-known and recent works--like a 2006 drum kit print with a yellow face over-painted in yellow and blue and a 2007 print series, Noses & Ears, Etc.

John Baldessari: Films Transferred to Video 1972-1977

Edited by Nicolas Trembley.
Published by JRP|Ringier/BDV Bureau des videos

Title (1972), 4 Short Films (1971), and 6 Colorful Inside Jobs (1977), three seminal but rarely seen films by the groundbreaking west coast Conceptualist John Baldessari, are assembled here for the first time on DVD. The films are built around the same principles as the artist's photographic work, and Baldessari's obsession with the non-link, with fragmentation and gaps, is all the more striking in moving pictures. His images do not arrive in a narrative progression, but appear as a succession of near-still, suspended moments, autonomous but integrated, for which it is up to the spectator to build a structure. Title is one of Baldessari's most radical projects, a juxtaposition of minimal images without hierarchy or direction, and particularly pointedly so because the subject is a conventional film, broken into its component parts. First come the objects, the characters, the landscapes, then the frames associating two shapes, and finally the start of an action, of a dialogue. Baldessari's splicing and categorizing reveals the tricks of cinematic space-time. Six Colorful Inside Jobs shows a room being painted in six different colors, each corresponding to a day of the week, leaving the artist a comic figure, and 4 Short Films is the product of a similar ironic twist, a free and absurd association between time, matter and objects. An essential document.

John Baldessari: Prima Facie

Marilyn's Dress

Published by Walther König, Köln

More than any other artist of his generation, the Los Angeles-based Conceptual artist John Baldessari explores the relationship between reading and seeing, between language and image. In this small, provocative artist's book, Baldessari presents 16 supposedly evocative colors along with the names that they were given by the American paint companies that produced them. Across from each solid colored left-hand page, the right page offers the color's title, creating a concrete poem in four parts. For example, in part one, "Organic Order" stands beside a mulchy green, "Creative Thinker" is paired with a deep purple, "Avant Garde" goes with mustard yellow, and "Abstract" is across from sea-green. Further on we learn that warm peachy-pink stands for "Love and Happiness," while warm pinky-peach represents "Beautiful in My Eyes." Source companies include Pratt & Lambert, Benjamin Moore and Pantone.

John Baldessari: A Different Kind Of Order

Edited by Edelbert Kàb and Peter Pakesch. Essays by Rainer Fuchs, Matt Mullican, Anne Rorimer, Marie de Brugerolle, Winfried Pauleit, Hans Dieter Huber, Klaus Hoffer, Gertrud Koch, Ann Goldstein and Christopher Williams.
Published by Walther König, Köln

Burning his early paintings and producing his 1970 Cremation Project, John Baldessari embarked on a new quest to explore the relationships between painting and language, images and text, originality and authorship. This overview of his works up to the early 1980s, encompassing film, photography, and painting, show him rooting around with characteristic humor and poignancy.

John Baldessari: Life's Balance 1984-2004

Artwork by John Baldessari.
Published by Walther König, Köln

Weighing what is art and what is not art and piling both on a canvas has been John Baldessari's seesaw practice throughout his career. Over the past 20 years, as this retrospective shows, his narrative and formal experiments have had a sophistication and playfulness in his use of manipulated imagery and, most recently, painterly color that remain vitally questioning. A companion volume, available seperately, covers the years before 1984.

John Baldessari

Essays by Tracey Bashkoff, John Hanhardt, Frederic Tuten and Russell Ferguson.
Published by Guggenheim Museum

The American artist John Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s, combining Pop art's use of mass media imagery with Conceptual art's use of language to create a unique body of work that has become a hallmark of postmodern art. Early in his career, Baldessari began incorporating images and text utilized by the advertising and movie industries into his photo-based art. He appropriated pictures and movie stills, juxtaposing, editing and cropping them in conjunction with written texts. The resulting montage of photography and language often counters the narrative associations suggested by the isolated scenes and offers a greater plurality of meanings. The layered, often humorous compositions carry disparate connotations, underscoring how relative meaning can be. Throughout his long and celebrated career, Baldessari has continued to play with and critique popular culture, and over time he has increased the scale and visual impact of his work. This publication looks at new works Baldessari created on commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim.

John Baldessari: While Something Is Happening Here, Something Else Is Happening There

Works 1988-1999

Contributions by Meg Cranston, Diedrich Diederichsen, Thomas Weski.
Published by Walther König, Köln

John Baldessari & Lawrence Weiner: The Metaphor Problem Again

Artwork by John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner.
Published by Walther König, Köln

John Baldessari: Two Gestures And One Mark

Artwork by John Baldessari.
Published by Oktagon

John Baldessari: National City

Artwork by John Baldessari. Contributions by Andrea Hales. Text by Hugh Davies, Anne Rorimer.
Published by Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego