I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.
John BaldessariI was teaching live drawing in a community college and students started zoning in on the face and spending a couple of hours on that and then putting the rest of the body on the face only in the last hour. It didn't work to just tell them, 'Well, you're really not thinking of the body as a totality.' So in desperation I would put a drape over the model's head so they couldn't see it. They had to draw the body and then at the end of the session for an hour I would take the drape off just to try to reverse their procedure.
John BaldessariPhotos should suggest a word(s) and vice versa. They should be equal and interchangeable.
John BaldessariThe 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 Baldessari