John Baldessari was a towering figure in conceptual art. I mean, literally he was a towering figure: 6ft 7in to be precise. He was also incredibly important. His own work spread across painting, photography, film, video, artists’ books, billboards and public sculpture. It was shown in more than 200 solo exhibitions, 1,000 group shows, and saw him appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Yet he was equally significant owing to his teaching at the California Institute of the Arts, where David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Analia Saban, Matt Mullican and Liz Larner were among his students. Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger have both cited him an important influence on their work, too.

John Baldessari, US conceptual artist with a sense of humour, dies aged 88 Read more

In a 2012 video which purports to be a “brief history” of the artist, narrated by Tom Waits (whom Baldessari requested personally, because he “has a great voice”), Baldessari is lauded as the “godfather of conceptual art”, the “master of appropriation” and “a surrealist for the digital age”. For an artist whose career was spent removing every trace of his own authorship, it’s ironic he’s the only one I’ve asked for an autograph: “BALDESSARI” in gappy block capitals inked in my copy of the catalogue to the artist’s 2010 Tate Modern retrospective.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two art lovers enjoy Penguin by John Baldessari in Regents Park, London. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Before all that, however, there was a young man forging a career in the then backwater art scene of California. His family was not a rich one; both Baldessari’s parents were immigrants and, after obtaining a master’s from San Diego State College, he taught first at a high school, then a community college and, one summer, a camp for juvenile delinquents. (He said his height came in useful.) In 1966, Baldessari started on a set of text paintings, which in a neat painted script lifted short phrases from tomes of art theory. “A Two-Dimensional Surface Without Any Articulation Is a Dead Experience” reads one. “Pure Beauty” another. The works rebuke the modernist trends that were setting cash tills ringing in New York, with Baldessari explicitly rejecting abstract expressionism and the fetishisation of the artist-as-lone-genius. Pushing this rebuff further, Baldessari went on to employ signwriters to create these early works. In 1968, he reproduced a copy of Artforum magazine adorned with a Frank Stella hard-edge painting on the cover, only to then commission a local man to write “This is not to be looked at” underneath.

Baldessari’s decision to burn – he said “cremate is the correct word” – the abstract and landscape paintings he had been making up until 1966 is cited as the moment postmodernism finally laid modernism to rest. In 1970 Baldessari had been offered his first job at CalArts, precipitating a move from his hometown of National City to the relative bright lights of Los Angeles. Roping in a group of friends, the artist gathered all his canvases from May 1953, the month of his college graduation, to March 1966, and cut them up. Then, the remnants packed together and loaded into the back of Baldessari’s Ford Econoline van, he drove to a local crematorium and had them incinerated. The resulting ashes filled 10 bags, nine adult size, one child size.

He titled that action Cremation Project, yet it proved something of a rebirth. On being invited to make a work with students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and unable to travel there himself, he set them homework from afar, instructing the young people to scrawl the mantra “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” repeatedly across the walls of the college gallery as many times as possible within 13 minutes. Baldessari was as good as that work’s promise. While over the ensuring decades his work possessed a theoretical interest in modes of communication, modern media studies and the relationship between text and image, it was never earnest.

“What if you just give people what they want? People read magazines, and look at photographs, not at Jackson Pollocks,” he said in a 2010 interview. On the subject of his series Commissioned Paintings, for which Baldessari employed 12 amateur artists to make his work for him, he likewise noted: “I felt that art didn’t have to be about the touch of the artist, you could be an art director, or strategist.” For all its intellectual integrity, Baldessari’s work borrows from the immediacy of advertising and graphic design. This collision between pop culture and high art is exemplified in the 1976 work Two Stares Making a Point But Blocked By a Plane (For Malevich), in which the artist obscured a large section of a found black-and-white photograph with a white collaged square of card tilted on one corner. The result leaves the two men who were the subject of the original image staring askance at a massive blank void.

Baldessari would go on to employ the trick of partially covering found images with planes of colour throughout his career, most famously obscuring the faces of B-movie actors and society folk in old found photos with red, yellow or blue adhesive circles. His aim, the artist said, was to concentrate the viewer’s attention on body language present in these otherwise unremarkable photos. By his own estimation, it is the work that, if he was at all, he would be remembered for in a hundred years. Yet he did himself a disservice. Baldessari was one of a handful of visionaries who dragged art out of the self-congratulatory mid-20th century academy, challenging his peers to make work that held its own in a real world – already saturated with images.