The exhibition Parables, Fables, and Other Tall Tales by American artist John Baldessari (1931–2020), a giant of contemporary art in every sense—his height of 2 meters (6 feet 7 inches) allowed him to quite literally look down on the art world—has opened at Bozar in Brussels. A pioneer of 20th-century conceptual art who influenced all subsequent conceptualists, Baldessari is no stranger to Belgium. Veterans of the scene may recall his exhibitions in 1972 and 1974 at Galerie MTL in Brussels. His work resonates with that of Belgian poet Marcel Broodthaers, who, forty years into his career, began visualizing his poetry and achieved fame (immortalizing a pot of mussels in the process). A trained painter, Baldessari captured the spirit of his era by playing with words and ideas, creating an entire universe of his own. He was the first to realize that all the great art had already been made before him, so he “went another way.”
In 1970 Baldessari made his first radical gesture: an act of self-cremation—more precisely, the burning of almost all his abstract and figurative paintings, which he carried out at the San Diego Crematorium. The ashes were collected and placed in an urn shaped like a book, engraved with the words:
“John Anthony Baldessari / May 1953 – March 1966” (as if referring to a date of birth and death). Part of the ashes he even used in a cookie recipe—a kind of ironic commentary on the “digestion” of art.
This act became a manifesto of conceptual art: what matters is not the object (the painting) but the idea and the action. Baldessari demolished the boundary between “art” and “anti-art.” Instead of traditional painting, he turned to texts, photographs, videos, and found images. It was as if he were declaring: art does not have to be a beautiful object—it can be a thought, a gesture, a process. This inspired many young artists, especially his students at CalArts, where he taught. He showed them that it was possible to begin from a “clean slate” and build a personal artistic language. As a result, the Cremation Project entered every 20th-century art history textbook and became one of the most famous “starting points” of conceptualism, while Baldessari himself became a kind of “founding father” of the movement—and a great teacher. Cindy Sherman, for instance, studied under him. Notably, he was the first to bring “photography” into galleries and museums as an art form (before him, photographs were mostly just souvenirs).
What fascinated him most were language, photography, text, chance, and irony—the very foundations of conceptual art. One striking scenographic element of the Bozar exhibition are wallpaper-like photo collages featuring his witty pairs of look-alike objects: a potato and a lamp, a clock face and a pizza.
A particularly large theme in his work is the Nose (one wonders if he knew Gogol). In the 1980s and 90s, he often took photographs of people and painted over their faces with colorful dots, leaving only fragments such as a nose or an ear visible. In doing so, he stripped the image of individuality, transforming the portrait into an abstract play of forms. The nose became a kind of “signature” or symbol—sometimes comical, sometimes absurd, sometimes unsettling. This device allowed him to pose questions: what makes a face recognizable? Where is the line between personality and cliché? In Baldessari’s hands, the Nose became both a hallmark of his style and a tool for critiquing visual culture, in which individuality is often reduced to a trivial stamp. A nose, torn from context, becomes a banal “icon.”
Baldessari’s installations also stand out for their unusual forms—he believed the frame was a tyrant, dictating shape and restricting the artist’s intent. His imagination invented the most unconventional configurations. His conceptualist manifesto, I will not make any more boring art (1971), is reflected in the video piece well worth spending ten minutes with in the very first room of the show.
The exhibition will demand some mental work from you, but the reward will be rich. John Baldessari is a master storyteller in the visual language. An artist you’ll be glad to get to know better!