John Baldessari could summon creation even from destruction.
One of America’s greatest artists—and definitely Southwestern College’s most famous professor —Baldessari rounded up 14 years of his paintings, took them to a mortuary and had them cremated. He put the ashes in an urn and —voila!— a new masterpiece, “The Cremation Project.”
It mattered not to the radical and undefinable conceptual artist that the paintings were worth tens of millions of dollars, they were old and it was time to change directions.
Baldessari died in January at 88, creating right up to the end. Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, photographer, graphic artist and more, the 6-foot 7-inch iconoclast towered over the art world like a shaggy NBA power forward. He produced more than 4,000 works of art, had 1,500 group exhibitions, 377 solo exhibitions, has his name on two buildings and starred in one episode of “The Simpsons.” He won scores of prestigious awards and was presented the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.
None of it went to his head, said Damon Hitchcock, a Baldessari student at SC in 1966 who now teaches here.
Hitchcock was barely out of high school when he sat on the curb outside a gallery in La Jolla and discussed art with Baldessari.
SC was in its second year and “The Cremation Project” had not yet caught fire. There were no nearby houses or sidewalks, but an art department was exploding to life like a new star. Hitchcock was one of less than a dozen students in Baldessari’s class.
Hitchcock said Baldessari was patient and nurturing, and spent considerable time with his students. He sat patiently with Hitchcock and developed a vision for a piece that was intensive and unconventional. It involved travel and placing letters from a travel atlas.
“It really expanded my awareness of what art could be,” Hitchcock said.
A National City native, Baldessari was lured from SC to teach at prestigious universities such as California Institute of the Arts, UCLA and UCSD. SC instructor Dr. Eun Park attended UCLA while Baldessari taught there. She said he was “incredibly generous” to his studio art students and had “no ego.”
Baldessari was a restless spirit who would reinvent a medium, then move on. He created legendary art through paintings, photography, video and books. He often said the thought put into art is more valuable than the finished product. A video titled “I am Making Art” is one of many unconventional pieces he made. Baldessari stood and stretched in the video while he repeated the line “I am making art.”
He also made art from black and white photographs collected throughout the years. He placed colored dots on all the faces of the figures in the photographs. The dots, he explained, were a way for the audience to see everything else in the photograph.
“I just got so tired of looking at these faces,” he said. “Why do I leave it? Because I think you really sort of dig beneath the surface and you can see what that photograph is really about, what’s going on.”
Baldessari said his time at SC allowed for experimentation. He gifted the college with an early abstract painting in 1962. It was a rare piece that survived “The Cremation Project.”
Hitchcock got to experience Baldessari before he was BALDESSARI, but also during his years of fame. During a visit to the Hirshorn Museum in Washington D.C., Hitchcock and his wife stood in awe in front of a Baldessari piece, unaware that others wanted to see it, too.
“He was a South Bay resident who wanted to share his visions,” Hitchcock said. “They were bold and ambitious, and he was eager to continue.”
Two of Baldessari’s most famous murals are San Diego County classics that anyone can visit for free. His UCSD mural “READ/WRITE/THINK/DREAM” is on display at the Theodore Geisel Library. “Brain/Cloud (with Seascape and Palm Tree), a 2011 work, is on view at 1250 Prospect St. in La Jolla.
