In Conversation: John Baldessari & Jeremy Blake

ArtForum, March, 2004 by Tim Griffin

JEREMY BLAKE: I'm curious, then, how you dealt with--well, what happened when you found yourself among Conceptual artists? Was your idea of having fun disallowed or counted against you? How has that all sorted itself out?

JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, in the late '60s, I was introduced to some painter at Max's Kansas City and he said, "Oh you're one of those 'write-abouts'?" I said, "What do you mean 'write-abouts'?" "You know, critics write about your work." To him, that's what made a Conceptual artist.

Joseph Kosuth is an old friend of mine, but in some early Art International article he called me a Pop artist, saying I wasn't a true Conceptual artist. And I think another old friend, Mel Bochner, called some Conceptual art "joke art." I always suspected I fell into that category. I loved the idea of using language in art, but I didn't think it had to be so boring. There are a lot of ways to use language, and it was only being used one way. That bothered me. That's why I had this "I will not make any more boring art" thing.

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JEREMY BLAKE: I don't take the idea of you being policed by Kosuth that seriously, but that happens with people on the other side of the aesthetic fence too, like a friend of mine who is a famous and gifted figure painter. On the train home from a lecture we recently did together at Yale he wouldn't stop badgering me about how he thought Robert Smithson was boring "PBS art." Shutting down the range of interpretation is an obsession for some people--a negative obsession that cuts across styles. Symbols should have a wide range of interpretation. On the other hand, I don't want them to be so wide that they don't mean anything. I want to reclaim abstraction from its being just a visual style. After all, before abstraction was a visual style, an abstraction was a philosophical concept that called up multiple images. That's what abstraction means to me: the visual demonstration of philosophical nuance.