The Ideal Situation
Baldessari has been a longtime faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. The prospect of having just a single student was what attracted him to the Rolex programme. “That is the ideal situation. As a writer once said about teaching, and I’ll always remember it, the ideal teaching is the teacher on one end of the log and the student at the other end of the log, and that’s it.” Cesarco appealed to as still in a formative stage. “Sometimes graduate students are really the toughest ones,” Baldessari continues, “because they will come out as very blasé. They make like they know it all. They’re impenetrable. They’re fully formed. So you want to know: Why come to art school? With Alejandro I sense somebody that had a lot of interests I feel sympathetic with.” In the beginning, the heart of their relationship was, quite simply, talk.
In Baldessari’s home of Santa Monica, California, they trolled the galleries. And there are many. “We look at the Saturday listings, and choose from the menu,” said Baldessari. “Sometimes there’s nothing. Sometimes, there’s something we want to see. And we’ll just try things. I have a garbage-can mentality. I don’t dismiss any kind of art out of hand. You have to sift through a lot of garbage to find something. But if there’s one square inch that gets you, that’s enough of a pay-off. Good art can appear anywhere — art that makes me completely change my idea about art. It hasn’t happened too often. The highest praise I can give is: ‘I wish I had done that.’ As opposed to a critic who said: ‘It’s interesting. I’m glad he did it and I didn’t.’ Years ago I saw a terrible show by an artist whose name you’d know. Later I was talking to a critic/painter friend, and he said, ‘We always hate him but always wind up talking about him.’ He gets under your skin.”
On Baldessari’s agenda at the time was the show Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Image, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As curator, he created a fun-house environment by setting off the Belgian master’s surrealist icons against creations in many media by 31 contemporary artists. At the same time, Cesarco was organising biennales in Bucharest, Romania, and Porto Alegre, Brazil. He had selected the artists, invited them to follow their own agendas, and was mostly keeping his hands off. “A lot of my work involves using other people’s work,” he explains. “Other people are your material. You’re a choreographer in a way, or like the casting director for a movie. Neither of us is about manual labour. It’s all about being an art director, conceiving strategies. Only the work only I can do, will I do. Otherwise, I job it out. Most of my art is about thinking.”
Might the same thing have been true throughout the history of art?
“I don’t think so,” Baldessari replies, Socratic in his distaste for flat contradiction. “There’s more and more of a division of labour. Instead of ‘School of…’ in the days of the Old Masters, we now have ‘Factory of…’ How much work did Andy Warhol do?”
Scattered around his house are works in progress from Baldessari’s series Prima Facie, which exemplifies the practices he speaks of. Each piece begins with a found photograph of a face. Through the wizardry of computers, printers, and other artisans, the photograph is blown up to giant proportions, subdivided into large sections, and coloured in flat colour patches on surfaces of varying thickness, emphasising noses and ears. Though any personal likeness vanishes, the almost abstract final image often possesses a startling personality of its own. Baldessari’s fingerprint is nowhere to be found, yet the work is thoroughly his. The schools and the workshops of the Old Masters made nothing like this.