JOHN BALDESSARI : THE ARTIST AS CONDUIT

Artist John Baldessari, who works with photographs and words the way other artists work with paints, considers just about everything raw material. His barn of a studio in Santa Monica, where he’s been since 1971, is a tangle of books and magazines, postcards and movie stills. On a recent day, a visitor’s cup of freshly brewed coffee rested on a stack of books and clippings that challenged gravity.

Clearly, this is a man consumed by the written word. Shelves of magazines include dated--and sometimes dusty--copies of Afterimage and American Scholar, of People and Tugboat, a San Diego-based literary magazine.

He estimated there are a couple thousand books, many on psychology and reflecting his interest in Dada and Surrealism, under his roof. His Austrian father and Danish mother were both immigrants, and “books were a way to escape the hermetic situation at home and the ghetto of National City (a San Diego suburb). I had to import my culture.”

Today he exports as well as imports that culture. His fascination with language surfaces, for instance, in the puns, double entendres and wordplays comprising such Baldessari titles as “Starry Night Balanced on Triangulated Trouble.”

He also exports himself. Continually criss-crossing the United States and Europe--he logged 35,000 air miles this year alone--he asks a lot of questions, takes a lot of notes and sees a lot of art. And whether he’s in Amsterdam or Santa Monica, he’s storing up conversational fodder from garage mechanics and bus drivers as well as artists.

The 55-year-old artist portrays himself as 6 feet 7 inches of conduit, sometimes funneling information to his CalArts students, sometimes to the gallery-going public. His first stop in a city is usually a bookstore, and his agenda is always work.

Baldessari confessed to a “major philosophical problem of balance between the reflective and active life, between reading and working and absorbing material. If you’re going to a movie or a performance, that’s ingestion, taking in material. . . . (But) I feel guilty when ingesting. And when giving birth, working on the art, I feel I’m taking a chance of it coming out flat, without the ingestion. I’ve never been able to get the balance right.”

One goal, said Baldessari, is to ingest information as “open-ended as I possibly can.” A work called “A Week of Television,” for instance, came about when the artist set up his camera in front of the TV timed to go off every 10 minutes. He buys movie stills, usually for a quarter apiece, of unfamiliar old movies because if he knows the film, “it brings baggage with it.”

The stills appear frequently in current work, and the artist considers them “snapshots from the world of the mind.” In his studio, he orders that world according to his own vision, coming at the stills with assorted implements as he isolates certain sections to incorporate in future works.

During Calendar’s visit, Baldessari’s TV set was on, but without sound. (“I just like looking at images,” he explained.) Sound came from the radio, and a typical day’s music might include classical music in the morning, opera about 4 p.m.--”to buoy me up when I’m lagging”--jazz and rock in the evening. Who specifically does he listen to? “Nobody specifically. It’s just the kind of music that suits my mental disposition at that time.”

His reading tastes are equally eclectic. Out on the table were books by psychoanalysts Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott, but probably not for long: “I’m a great browser. I like to pick up books, to read a sentence here, paragraph there. I don’t have to have allegiance to any one book. I can read it as long as it interests me. I’m a stereotypical Gemini. Always being fickle and meandering.”

He considers his intellectual browsing “a reflection of boredom and restlessness, (my) always having this kind of rage to learn about things. My mind feels like a caged animal, wanting to get out and get beyond what I’m doing.”

Before he became what one critic calls “the dean of West Coast conceptualism,” Baldessari was a painter. Then, in 1969, he gathered together all of his paintings still on hand and had them cremated. Their remains were laid to rest in a bronze, book-shaped urn, and the artist moved on to conceptual art.

Baldessari may have been born, educated and based in California, but he’s probably better known in Europe than at home. In November, for example, he was in Vienna, where his work was on exhibit and in Grenoble discussing a future project.

The artist guessed that 80% of his time is spent with people passing through town, and said most of that socializing is business related. Aside from gallery openings around the world to keep up with contemporary art and artist-friends--from Turin and Brussels as well as Santa Monica--his entertainment is generally food and conversation. “Eating is a social thing and conversation is a way of exchanging information.”

New in his life is exercise. For two years, he’s been trying to exercise an hour each evening, and at the back of his studio are a rowing machine, exercise bike and weights. “I live too much a reflective life,” he said, adding he’s now “trying to take care of myself. Before, I thought I was just a mind.”

A Guggenheim Fellowship received last July is “buying time to see how much I need teaching beyond its financial rewards. I always said I stayed in teaching to free my art from any economic considerations, so I wouldn’t change my art because of the market. . . . Now it’s like somebody saying put up or shut up. I don’t have that excuse of the money.

ON TASTE MAKING:

‘I’m a great browser. I like to pick up books, to read a sentence here, a paragraph there.’