The idea was to take fine art and put it into the location of the movie scripts. The script itself is collage - some of the lines come from actual movies and I've written others to make the text work with the found image. In this way, the details of old dead guys' paintings (from the collection of the Stรคdel Museum in Frankfurt, where this work will be exhibited in relation to the historical paintings) become illustrations of the movie scripts. I found this mรฉlange of high art and Hollywood amusing.
John BaldessariI go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.
John BaldessariI was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?
John BaldessariWhat I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichรฉs I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.
John Baldessari