I will not make any more boring Art is an early piece of conceptual text art by John Baldessari but it still has not lost its impact nowadays. It demonstrate his thinking at the time and his developing interest in Conceptual art.

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase “I will not make any more boring art” on the gallery walls. Baldessari committed his own version of the piece on videotape. Like an errant schoolboy, he dutifully writes, “I will not make any more boring art” over and over again in a notebook for the duration of the tape. In an ironic disjunction of form and content, Baldessari’s methodical, repetitive exercise deliberately contradicts the point of the lesson to refrain from creating boring art.

I will not make any more boring Art is typical of Baldessari’s work, for not only does it contain humor, but it is also a strategy, a set of conditions, a directive, a paradoxical statement, and a commentary on the art world with which it is involved. Like all his work to date, it addresses, on many complex levels, issues about art, language, games and the world at large.

Photos and video John Baldessari | Sources: Electronic Arts Intermix | MoMA collection | Ubuweb

John Baldessari is widely regarded as one of contemporary art’s foremost conceptual artists. Based in Los Angeles since the 1960s, John Baldessari is one of the most influential artists of his generation.He turned his attention to photographic works often incorporating found film stills, trawling dumpsters for discarded material from which he created his famous photo-compositions.

A major retrospective exhibition titled “John Baldessari: Pure Beauty”,  of this Californian conceptual artist is held at the Tate Modern in London. The combination of film, photography and painting has become one of the key elements in Baldessari’s art. Beginning with his early photo-and-text works from the late 1960s, the exhibition includes his extensive use of found film imagery in the combined photographs of the 1980s, the irregular-shaped and over-painted works of the 1990s, as well as video, and concludes with his most recent works to date.

The exhibition will examine the increasingly elaborate formal structures which Baldessari introduced into his work in later years and which have become a key component to his art. Abandoning the standard rectangular canvas or photographic format, he has produced a series of works combining numerous images to create various unconventional formats.

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty shows more than 150 works beginning in the late 1960s and concluding with an installation made specifically for this Tate Modern exhibition. The Exhibition will run from 13 October 2009 to 10 January 2010 and is In association with Rolex and supported by The John Baldessari Exhibition Supporters Group.

Photos by John Baldessari | Baldessari Studio