John Baldessari

Wrong, 1967, LACMA

John Baldessari’s wide-ranging art practice includes printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography—everything but painting. He once painted as a young artist and art teacher, of course. But by 1970 he had grown so disillusioned with the very idea of painting that he took all his canvases to a San Diego funeral home and cremated them. In 1949, David Park took his abstract works to the Berkeley Dump and began the adventure that was the Bay Area Figurative Movement; Baldessari’s gesture was even more radical and just as significant. The ashes of his works were baked into cookies and placed in urns marked with their birth and death dates. In a stroke, he invented a very Los Angeles style of conceptual art—cocky, cheeky, unpretentious yet explosive. As he once said: “One of the healthiest things about California is 'Why not?'”

Why not combine text and image in a work? Why not appropriate instructions from art books as that text? Why not obliterate your own hand by hiring sign painters to do your works? Why not use stick-on dots to force attention away from human faces in your photo-based works? Baldessari has asked these questions; from his teaching positions at Cal Arts and UCLA, he has encouraged hundreds of SoCal art students to ask their own.

Wrong asks one of Baldessari’s best-known questions: who makes the rules? The subject (the artist) has been photographed violating one of the basic rules of photography, positioned so that a palm tree appears to grow out of his head. And that’s not all that’s wrong. The palm tree is cropped, a car is truncated, and there’s too much foreground. Even the genre of this large (59 x 45 inch) work is at issue; it’s printed with photo emulsion on canvas. But it reminds us, in its ironic and amusing way, that art has abandoned such judgments and celebrates the abandonment.

And it’s pure, edgy LA. Baldessari’s work pushes at the borders of artistic media—promising, as a famous work of his said, to make no more boring art—and it comments on contemporary culture without the high-minded seriousness of New York. Between Baldessari and Ed Ruscha, who also works at the intersection of photography, painting and text, Los Angeles became a noted contemporary art center.

Baldessari, who died in 2020, was, at 6’7,” an imposing figure in every way. He was in over 200 solo shows and 1,000 group shows and received dozens of awards in his six-decade career. And in 2018, he received an honor reserved for very few artists—he appeared as a character on The Simpsons.