Author: Stephanie Janssen

Artist John Baldessari has spent a lifetime using wit, intellect and imagination to create an art of ideas. An art teacher before he became an art star, he has trained generations of high-profile contemporary artists to take risks with convention, much as he has. He is today an international celebrity, recipient of countless honors, including most recently a National Medal of Arts, awarded last fall. The revered artist has exhibited in more than 200 solo and 1,000 group shows and at 85 is still usually found at work in his spacious studio in Venice, California, his 6’7” frame folded into a chair behind a desk cluttered with books, magazines and work in progress. There, using photographs, painting and text, he carries on and reimagines the conceptual-art tradition of Marcel Duchamp.

The studio is relatively spare but books are everywhere, from a Jackson Pollock biography to a book of short stories by David Foster Wallace. On the wall in front of him are several possible images for an exhibition next October at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, and at the far end of the wall a hat on a hook. “It belonged to Robert Downey Jr.,” Baldessari explains. “He said, ‘I’ll give you some art,’ and he gave me his hat.”

BARBARA ISENBERG: You’ve been creating art in Southern California since the ’60s, when Los Angeles’ place in the art world was very different. Being away from the limelight of New York, first in San Diego, then in Los Angeles, did you feel you could take more risks?

JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, that’s a good question. I think the risk-taking part of my life was when I was still living in National City, California. It’s a burg south of San Diego. Who’s ever heard of National City? It was beyond risk. Nobody was looking, so what did I care?

BI: When you started out, weren’t you a high school teacher, just having fun?

JB: Yes. Then one day in 1969 I was staring at this blank wall in my house in National City and thinking, “What’s the most bizarre thing I can do? I could make language the basis for art, get a canvas and have somebody else paint it.” And there you have conceptual art in a nutshell.

BI: You’ve come a long way from National City, exhibiting throughout the world ever since. You’ve also been based in Los Angeles much of that time. How has living and working in Los Angeles influenced your art?

JB: I always answer that question by saying that a shark is the last one to criticize salt water. If you’re immersed in something, you can’t see it.

BI: How is Los Angeles different now than it was?

JB: Things have changed. New York artists come out here and sniff around for shows. Europeans think of California as romantic, full of sunshine and palm trees; it’s cheaper to live here, and there’s better weather. In New York, you have more competition. I think it’s still more prestigious to have a show in New York than it is in Los Angeles, but that’s about it.

BI: Have you ever lived in New York?

JB: I was bicoastal for a while. I had an apartment in New York, but I couldn’t work there. I gave it up.

BI: When you were starting out, who influenced you?

JB: My touchstone is always Duchamp. I actually met John Cage when I was teaching at UC San Diego and he was in residence there. His book Silence was very influential to me. Philip Guston has always been a huge hero.

BI: Was Andy Warhol an influence?

JB: Absolutely. Sure.

BI: They have something in common, don’t they—Duchamp, Cage and Warhol?

JB: Well, a certain kind of irreverence. If you think about Warhol’s main reputation at the time as illustrating children’s books, and someone told you that he would become such an iconic artist, you’d say “No chance.” But he was a very social animal, and he wanted attention.

BI: When you look around at artists you’ve taught over the years, so many of them went on to distinguished art careers of their own, such as David Salle, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican and James Welling. Do they influence you?

JB: Among the smartest is David Salle, who was one of my students at CalArts. He writes very clearly about art on interesting topics. David influences me.

BI: What has captured your attention lately?

JB: I’ve been very much influenced by Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton as his teacher. I haven’t gotten very far, but that’s what I’m working on now. The show will be painting and text.

BI: You’ve said many times in the past that the word and image are pretty much equal to you. Is that still the case?

JB: Yes, I still believe that.

BI: Yet what you do with the words and images keeps changing.

JB: Artists are artists because they don’t want to do the same art they’ve been doing, so they keep on pushing forward and experimenting. I keep on changing the work, and it will keep on changing. I don’t know how it will finally look. I have no idea.

BI: You told me once that you never wait for inspiration.

JB: It’s interesting how the mind works. I’m grappling with new work, and I sort of put myself to sleep trying out certain combinations in my mind, juxtaposing work by Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. Quite often, like most good ideas at night, they’re rotten ideas in the morning. But I can’t think of nothing. I think it’s impossible to have a blank mind, so different things flash on your screen. Most of the time, it gets to this: If I were in my studio now, what would I be trying to do with these artists?

BI: You’ve also been buying art for the first time recently. How did that start?

JB: A painting by Giorgio Morandi was the first one, and it was instinctual. I was in New York, at David Zwirner Gallery, looking at things, and I just fell in love with it. I asked the price. He told me—I gulped, but I bought it.

BI: Well, that’s what money’s for.

JB: It is actually, in a way. Do you remember David Platzker? He used to work for me. He’s now a curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art, and I figure more people would see a work there than they would in my studio. So I’ve bought certain artists’ works and just given them to him. When he’s looking for something, he’ll call me and ask, “Would you be up for buying this?” I thought it was better to give art away so more people could see it.

BI: Do you think of it as a way to give back?

JB: Yes, I think so. It’s a good use of money. I also have a foundation, and there are good people on the board. I said, “You give money to whoever you want. I trust you, and that’s why I have you on this board.” Last year we gave around $500,000 to artists and artist spaces, and I feel pretty good about that.

BI: So you’re buying art for yourself and giving away art?

JB: What else would I do with the money? My children are provided for. I’m building a Frank Gehry house.

BI: Does your fame get in the way of your art?

JB: Probably, in a bad way. The analogy is to somebody in prison. His natural instinct would be to try and escape, but if you treat him really well and feed him really well and give him better housing, he might think, “Why would I want to leave?”

BI: Do you ever think about your legacy?

JB: There’s a certain satisfaction to knowing you’re embedded in the history of art. I feel part of a tradition.

—

RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE

VISIT CITIZENSOFHUMANITY.COM

To describe someone as a “contradiction” is to capitulate to one of the laziest clichés in the journalistic handbook. Within everyone lies some measure of opposing impulses. To varying degrees we are all saints and sinners, con artists and trusting souls, self-aggrandizers and humble servants. To call anyone, especially someone who creates things for a living, a living contradiction is simply to call them human.

But there’s also a sneaky brilliance, as well as a deep well of inspiration, in those whose creative identity is borne in the embrace of contradiction, by identifying themselves as a product of opposing forces. Warhol, Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson, Kanye West—for them, inspiration lay in the blurring of traditional aesthetic boundaries. The French artist JR is a proud heir to that aesthetic tradition. He and his work exist in a liminal space, between authorship and appropriation, anonymity and self-promotion, outsider and insider.

It is both the source of JR’s creative output and the origin of his astonishing rise from teenage tagger in the working-class suburbs of Paris to perhaps one of the most visible global artists working today. He has never received anything in the way of formal training, yet his visually striking work, the best known of which consists of giant “flypasted” black-and-white photographs of the disenfranchised mounted on building walls within their own neighborhoods, has become something of a global phenomenon. In 2011, after winning the $100,000 TED Prize for being an “individual with a creative, bold vision to spark global change,” JR used the entirety of his winnings to fund the Inside Out Project, which recruits regular citizens to create their own JR-style black-and-white portraits, which are then emailed to JR’s studio, printed and sent back to their creators to mount in their own environments. To date, more than 300,000 Inside Out portraits have been shipped and mounted in 129 countries, including some of the most war-torn, conflict-heavy zones in the world.

JR’s gorgeous duplex art studio is found in a downtown Manhattan brownstone that he doesn’t own or lease—it was bequeathed to him for a one-year art residency soon after he won the TED Prize. After being greeted outside by his assistant, Lucca, I’m led through a lobby and into the upstairs loft, which is rife with activity. Half a dozen assistants are at work on a variety of tasks, including printing out 36-by-53-inch photos that have arrived from around the world via the Inside Out Project and preparing them to be sent back to their creators to be pasted in their neighborhoods. I’m then taken downstairs, where I find a few more members of team JR preparing giants digital print-outs of his work. In the corner, in front of a desktop computer, sits JR.

Gone are the signature shades and the hat, replaced by a buzz cut and a pair of traditional eyeglasses. Had Lucca not introduced us, I’d have had no idea this was him. In person JR is engaging, passionate and truly inspiring. After recounting a funny anecdote about hiring an anxious Uber driver in Rio for a trip into the drug- and gang-ravaged favelas, where he maintains an art center for the impoverished local population, he shifts the conversation to the macros of his operations. He tells me that the New York studio, which clearly requires a tremendous amount of maintenance, not to mention a stack of monthly paychecks for the small army of employees, is really just a satellite office. His primary studio, complete with another team of assistants, is in Paris, and unlike the Manhattan location, it doesn’t come for free. I ask JR how he manages to maintain his massive operation of overhead expenses, given that so much of his work is mounted on buildings he doesn’t own and is thus unsellable.

“Ninety-nine percent of what most artists do is, you know, pieces that they sell,” JR explains. “Picasso was selling everything he would paint. Sometimes he would do a mural, but that maybe represented 1 percent of his work. In my case, 99 percent of what I do is not for sale. It’s just me going to places, putting up stuff in the street that doesn’t make any money. The 1 percent that I have, that’s what I spend on creating artworks. That comes from gallery shows and the lithographs we sell online. That finances the operation.” Given the breadth and ambition of JR’s upcoming projects, including a massive installation at the Louvre, in which the museum will give him free rein of the entire building for 24 hours, as well as a documentary he’s co-directed with French cinema legend Agnès Varda, the 1 percent/99 percent balance seems a precarious venture. JR agrees.

“I could be out of this place any day; I don’t own it,” he tells me. “Everything’s very fragile. We spend money this year, but we don’t know if we’ll have money next year. Everything’s like that. We go from project to project, one after the other, just by believing that it would happen, but there’s no safety net. We don’t run a company, even if it looks like we do.”

JR’s refusal to accept any brand sponsorship may have limited the financial upside to his projects, but it’s also given him a degree of street cred that’s allowed him to work in a number of pretty challenging environs and avoid the normally inevitable shakedowns. “When I was in the favela, the first thing the gangsters asked me was, ‘How are you financing it?’ And I said, ‘It’s just me. It’s financed by selling my artworks and reinvesting so I could come here. If you don’t want it, you can scratch it down. Nobody else is involved.’ If I had said, ‘Yes, Coca-Cola is paying for it—they’re actually letting me do this,’ the first thing they’d say: ‘Cool, you pay us, too.’ I’ve never had to get in those debates wherever I was in the world because people knew it was a completely free project.”

JR’s efforts to encourage citizen-generated art in conflict zones has not come without some skepticism, from both the art-world establishment and the impoverished populations that JR has encouraged to contribute to his various projects. In the 2013 HBO documentary Inside Out: The People’s Art Project, which includes footage of JR’s citizen-generated art being mounted in the ravaged neighborhoods of Haiti, Tunisia and the West Bank, a Haitian man observes that art will never fill his belly. It’s a fair and sobering statement about the stark limitations of art activism as humanitarian aid, but JR’s work has had an impact that has shown tangible results beyond simply empowering the disenfranchised to find value and dignity in making art. The series of images featuring rabbis and imams that he posted on the wall separating Israel from the West Bank settlements has been credited for opening the door to tourism between the two countries.

“After that project, thousands of people traveled to visit both places, where before there was no tourism traveling into Palestine,” says JR. “So when you see that real action can happen after simple photos, just paper and words, that people see these images and have access to it in Israeli and Palestinian houses, and you realize, OK, even if it’s a tiny contribution, it does have its own impact.”

—

RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE

VISIT CITIZENSOFHUMANITY.COM

I first saw Ai Weiwei’s work in 2003 in New York. I was drawn to his conceptual combinations and remixing of found objects on an aesthetic level. Through his use of materials, Ai Weiwei creates artworks that really define him. His work introduced a new kind of ethos in art to me—and to a lot of the world.

Ai Weiwei lived in New York from 1981 to 1993, so he speaks English well. But beyond that, he is different from other Chinese artists in the way that he takes on the world and in the way that he communicates with a globalized audience. When we first met, Ai Weiwei’s focus was mostly interpretations of Chinese history, and his message seemed more artistic than sociopolitical. Over the years, the meaning of his art has evolved considerably—the majority of his artwork now reflects his engagement with sociopolitical issues worldwide.

Ai Weiwei was an early adopter of the Internet. For him, the Internet is just another medium, like porcelain, wood, bronze or Lego plastic. It’s a virtual medium that he has adjusted and created into an art form. He started with his own blog (which was shut down after he used it to draw attention to the government’s concealment of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake death toll), and he eventually moved on to Twitter. In recent years, Ai Weiwei uses Twitter and Instagram around the clock. Social media provides him with a channel to engage with the world in a global way. He doesn’t use the Internet or social media to promote his own shows or his own films; he uses these online platforms to consistently promote human issues. Those issues change and evolve over time: where one stops, another continues. Now that Ai Weiwei is a European citizen living and working in Berlin versus a Chinese prisoner in Beijing, his messaging is still changing.

As someone who’s not afraid to speak his mind, there are few Chinese artists who come close to Ai Weiwei. Since his 81-day secret imprisonment by the Chinese government in 2011, followed by the confiscation of his passport (it was returned in 2015), both his voice and resolve have gotten stronger. In terms of his fellow Chinese artists, I think many of them would like to emulate Ai Wewei’s stance. He is a very hard act to follow, and it takes a combination of many personal traits to be this type of person—and within this person you find the artist.

Actually, I consider Ai Weiwei to be a bigger person than artist. Through the consciousness of his art he is able to make people feel uncomfortable and uneasy, and I think that’s important, because life is not easy. It’s good to be reminded of the reality of things, and his art does that.

These days, for example, if you look at his Instagram feed, you can see how he’s speaking out by documenting the refugee situation in Europe. He’s currently working on a new film about refugees; he has taken on a global issue and he is drawing attention to it—that’s different than most artists. The majority of his peers are not doing this type of thing.

Now, by way of my association with Ai Weiwei, I feel like I’ve turned into an activist of some sort. For me, the political connectivity in his work is really important. It stands out as a requisite, even though he still creates beautiful objects. Using art as a voice to tell stories and to connect with people is central to his art and has become a truly integral part of his work.

You don’t have to agree with the message, but I believe art should communicate something. Ai Weiwei has really made me more aware of what I like. Art without significant meaning and reason—what’s the point? Beauty needs a body; it needs substance. There has to be something going on there. That’s why so many people understand Ai Weiwei.

Considering the various projects we’ve worked on together, the one that I feel is the most important is Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads. This monumental, historical sculpture project is his take on the 12 animal heads of the traditional Chinese zodiac that once adorned the fountain clock of the Yuanming Yuan imperial retreat in Beijing. The originals were looted by the French and the English in 1860. Ai Weiwei’s interpretation of the Zodiac Heads, which focuses on the themes of repatriation and fakes, made its debut in New York in May 2011, and this series (both Bronze and Gold) has since been exhibited at 35 international venues and counting. At the time of the launch of this work in 2011, Ai Weiwei was still imprisoned, and he had no idea what was going on. Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave a significant speech that drew attention to his situation, and he spoke sincerely about what Ai Weiwei really stands for. The pieces continued to travel around the world during his detention. I think the Zodiac Heads have become his most popular work because they have truly been exhibited around the globe now. Millions of art lovers worldwide continue to see them. The project has gone well beyond my expectations.

Ai Weiwei operates with a certain resolve and a strong direction of what’s right; he is a “no bullshit” artist. He’s a collector too, but he is not concerned about money; his focus is family and work. And he works all the time. Family. Work. Family. Work. And art, of course!

When Ai Weiwei was detained at his home in Beijing (2011-2015), his international profile was definitely raised up a notch. Every couple of months during that time I would fly over to Beijing for the weekend and spend time with him. I’d leave New York on a Wednesday night and get there Thursday and spend four full days with him, doing antique shopping or running around, going to the beach, swimming with the family, all kinds of stuff. We would spend time talking and considering our projects. I was with him on the historic day when he got his passport back from the Chinese authorities.

Ai Weiwei is a very loyal person. He’s the type of guy someone can call at 4 in the morning if they have a problem. He’s that guy who would drop what he’s doing and deal with it and help. He’s charitable and generous. We were in Australia a couple of months ago, and 10 or 12 people within one block of walking stopped him for a photo, and he posed with every one of them. He’s very compassionate, he’s tough, he’s demanding and he’s artistically precise. In his work you can see he’s a special person, and for me to be able to hang out with him and to work with him is very special, because I’m just a regular guy. It’s really inspiring for me, and Ai Weiwei has changed the trajectory and meaning of my own life.

Larry Warsh has been active in the art world for more than thirty years. An early collector of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring,  Warsh has collaborated with internationally recognized contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei on several notable projects, including the acclaimed sculptural installation Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010), which has been exhibited in more than 36 venues worldwide and continues to tour the globe. Warsh was the catalyst and executive producer of the award-winning documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012).

Text written with Lesley Mckenzie.

—

RETURN TO THE HOME PAGE

VISIT CITIZENSOFHUMANITY.COM