In Conversation: John Baldessari & Jeremy Blake

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Tim Griffin

JOHN BALDESSARI: I like it when you see a surfer out in the water: You're trying to get beyond the land, but you keep getting returned by the waves. In "Intersections" I was dealing with movie imagery and then scenes from water or earth, one or the other, which come out so essential and non-Hollywood. Then I would combine the two in the most banal way. You know, it's like screen grabs. I'm not trying to be too artful about it. I'm just counterposing one against the other.

I think a lot of my interest there comes from the fact we can't figure out what's real anymore, because we were brought up on movies. It finally hit me one morning when I came down to my studio, trying to find a parking spot, and there were movie trucks in my way. I walk up to my place and Roman Polanski is in a chair, with Jack Nicholson, right there in front of my studio. And I say to them, "I'd like to get in. That's my studio." Talk about collision. They were shooting Chinatown, I assume. I get that strange mirror effect a lot, you know. I'm watching some dumb movie and there are shots of Santa Monica. I say, "This is a movie. This is not a travelogue." [Laughter.] I continually have this kind of floating back and forth between the two worlds in my mind. But I like that.

JEREMY BLAKE: Speaking of two worlds, you paint on photographs, when you could just paint or just do photos. Is it an alchemy thing? Are you looking for the ideal mixture?

JOHN BALDESSARI: I always think about the movie title When Worlds Collide; I'm trying to make a new world. It's a lifelong venture of trying to put a square peg in a round hole, of trying somehow to make a hybrid out of painting and photography. I rub two sticks together to make fire.

One of the things that compels me is I can't prioritize a word over an image. It's that constant state of not being able to pick or to say that this is more important than that. They're both important. I think it's that struggle that animates a lot of what I do, that a word and an image are equally important.

JEREMY BLAKE: That's a way of achieving a new kind of vitality, right, a hybrid vigor.

JOHN BALDESSARI: I didn't mean it to happen. I know in the '70s I did film and video in some Greenbergian sense, trying to figure out what each one did. And my films became like still images, and my photography became like movies. At the first show I did in the '70s, there was a really great curator at the Modern, Jennifer Licht, who came and had a look around. And she smiled at me and said, "John, I see you're still painting." The idea, then and now, is that you can't get it out of your system. It's going to be there, whatever you do. Right now I actually do physically paint the photograph, but I think the point is--the return of the repressed. The more you try to blot it out, the more it's going to be there.

JEREMY BLAKE: And you actually were trying to get away from it, period.

JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah, but you just can't. But that's also going to be the working method. I always say, "Why work at making things beautiful, because it's going to be beautiful anyway because you're an artist?" [Laughter.] In other words, you've spent all these years being an artist, so it's going to be there. Just try to--have something else as your goal instead of being beautiful. It's going to be beautiful regardless.