I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I'm sort of reporting.
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 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 BaldessariI think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.
John Baldessari