I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. 1971.
John Baldessari. (American, born 1931). Lithograph.
I always find arts only constructed in letters are interesting. They are clean, while meaningful; pure, while mysterious. Therefore I would like to write about I will not make any more boring art by John Baldessari on 1971.
John Baldessari wasn’t the only person doing text painting at that time. Other famous artists like Joseph Kosuth, also include bunch of words in their writing in order to express some kind of meaning. So, what is so meaningful for choosing this word? Is the story behind this art. Before he done this art, he did something extraordinary: he burnt all his art works between 1953 and 1966, he even titled it as The Cremation Project.—that’s what interested me, how many people could do such thing like that? It may be insane in some other people’s view, but I do think it was a wise act.
Back to the work, we can see his determination from this art work. This work is not like ordinary text painting, firstly it just contain one single sentence, secondly it is structured like corrections of homework or the punishment by our teacher — this is exactly what it is! It is a punishment to John Baldessari from himself, warning himself “I will not make any more boring arts”. It is actually funny that a person naming his punishment as an art works and publishes it to the public, while normally people will hide the bad things in the shadow, but John Baldessari didn’t, therefore we can see his determination again from this.
Another special thing of this art work is that, he recorded down the process of making this work. In that video, we can see he write the words vertically—the sentence were written horizontally, but he wrote it in a vertical way. We can consider it as John Baldessari wanted us to understand something from it, like the trust on something from just looking at the outcome; don’t assume the process is always same as others, or he is just a bit crazy after he burnt all of his art works. For any way, we can see his style from every act of his art work.
1971, 41 years ago, it was quite a long time to me, as at that time my parents weren’t even married. For such a long time, lots of things could be old fashioned, but not for this art work. This work told us, we shouldn’t lie to ourselves, forcing us to do something you hate or dislike. Nowadays, people were less honest to themselves, thinking too much about money, fame, reputation, too much things to think, and maybe in some sense, we were older than those old people.
What will you do then, my friend?
