Painter, teacher, oddball, genius… John Baldessari has defied and surpassed many labels over the course of his career. But above all, nothing seems to fit quite as well as ‘radical’. Considered one of the most influential conceptual artists to come out of the 20th century, Baldessari was bucking the system long before it was cool, and then mundane to do so. A tireless champion of the idea that images and words are interchangeable, Baldessari’s work sought to marry the two entities once and for all. His early paintings earned him a bit of fame that quickly transformed into infamy when he burned nearly everything he’d created between 1953 and 1966 in the dramatically metaphorical, yet very literal, Cremation Project (1970). Baldessari then turned his attention to photography, film, found imagery, and the element of chance to achieve his new world view, drastically changing the way art was made. He hired sign painters and amateur artists to do his bidding, orchestrating elaborate photo series, video projects, and artist’s books such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line. Whenever his interest for a project began to wane, he was off to the next idea— constantly tweaking, modifying and superimposing one philosophy or ideology onto another, looking for answers, challenging perception.
     On October 20, John Baldessari: Pure Beauty (on its last leg following stints at the Tate Modern, Museu d’ Contemporani de Barcelona and LACMA) opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s the first major U.S. retrospective of his work in nearly 20 years.