Questions Without Answers for John Baldessari (by David Salle)
I have always felt a deeply humanistic undertone in your work, despite its use of irony and obliqueness. But I am hard pressed to account for why I feel it and sometimes think it’s because I have known you for a long time. Where do you think it resides?
Is a Conceptual artist different from any other kind of artist?
A lot of ink has been spilled about art as the new religion, with the museum as its church. Do you agree with that view? Do you crave a spiritual dimension to art, or are you a pure materialist? Conceptualism is closest to: a) rationalism, b) romanticism, or c) symbolism? Where do you place yourself on that scale? (Hint: Romanticism insists on the primacy of the individual.)
Here’s a fan question: How did you come up with the idea of singing LeWitt? I understand the desire to tweak the seriousness of Conceptual art, but how did you arrive at the idea of the singing? And did you rehearse?
What’s the one thing an artist must never do? And, apart from questions like these, what is your definition of a bad art idea?
Harold Brodkey once said that people don’t like to be outshone—they’ll kill you if it bothers them enough. How have you managed to avoid this in your work?
What is it that you most persistently and coherently think about in your work? What place do aesthetic effects have in your work? What’s the most tenacious misconception about your work?
How important is intention in art? What did you do that was new?
Do you agree that you brought a new poetics to art? If so, how would you describe it? (Hints: the metonym, or synecdoche effect; the part for the whole, the fragment.)
In what way is your work American—does it have any strains of puritanism, transcendentalism, evangelism? Do you have any sense of nationalism in art?
Bruce Nauman once told me that the most useful piece of advice he ever got was from Bob Irwin. Irwin told him to always slip the head carpenter a $20 bill when showing in group shows—to insure that his piece would get built in time. Did you get any useful advice from an older artist?
You have always been a very responsible guy—an immensely productive artist, generous teacher, devoted father, art-world citizen. Does it ever make you a little wistful not to have been more of a screwup?
George Trow once wrote that every language has a secret moral history. Do you think it is also true for visual languages, and, if so, what is the moral history of the visual language you have done so much to bring into common usage?
Who is smarter: a painter of average intelligence or a really smart dog?
You have courted obscurity in your work from the beginning—especially in the seventies—and you have also made works of striking literalness. What is the relationship between the two?
Do you feel you have left obscurity behind? If so, is that one of the benefits of working over a long time?
Are you nostalgic about anything? Do you ever feel like Dr. Frankenstein, having had such a role in creating the monster of “conceptual art” that has so taken hold of art education and academia?
What do you feel when you hear an art adviser say, “I’m interested in work with a strong conceptual bias”? This is an overheard conversation, verbatim.
Andre Gide famously said he did not want to be understood too quickly. Care to associate to that? What quality in your work do you wish you had more of? Less of? George Trow again: “The writer has to have a machine gun in his heart.” Any thoughts?
Why do you think people insist on adding the word practice after the word art?
This question has been sent from the beyond by André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement: “Could you ever make love to a woman who does not speak French?”
And the follow-up: How would you explain the continued, pervasive influence of Surrealism even as the legacy of Freud himself seems to be fading?
Psychoanalytically speaking, what are you trying to recover or replace in your work?
Apollinaire wrote, “When a man wanted to imitate walking, he invented the wheel which does not look like the leg. Without knowing it, he was a Surrealist.” I’m not sure why, but this kind of reminded me of your work.
If you were a songwriter/lyricist, would you consider it a crime to sacrifice meaning to rhyme?
Do you still claim to not know what art is? What if your family was being held captive, and you had to come up with a convincing definition to gain their release? Edmund Wilson wrote that Flaubert had more in common with Dante than with Balzac—someone who was his contemporary and who was using the same form, the social novel. Who is an artist you think you have something in common with who may not be the obvious one? Who would you like to be shown next to?
What are the sweetest four words in the English language? (Hint: better late than never.)
What is the difference between wit and humor?
Apart from yourself, name two or three funny artists.
You once said something to me about a fellow student’s self-loathing as the engine of their art—an idea that surprised me at the time. Is that something that you think about often?
What if anything did you learn from Ileanna Sonnabend?
If a law were passed that artists were only allowed to work in pairs or groups of three—that is, if art could continue but the individual artist was outlawed—with whom would you want to form a team?
What, if anything, makes a work safe from “rust and larvae”? (Hint: not its social importance but its art, and only art, says Nabokov.) If continuing to make art meant that someone you didn’t know would be physically hurt, would you stop? Or would you just find a way to make something that didn’t look like art? What do you think you represent to the people who admire your work?
Do cultures go through fallow and fertile periods?
When you find your inspiration flagging, are there things you do to revive it?
Have you shown a feminine side in your work?
How would you describe Duchamp’s genius, and why do you think you found it so congenial?
Do you believe in the idea of a masterpiece, and what qualities must a work have to qualify as one?
What aspect of your personality has created the most problems for you in life, or in art? Do you think of yourself as brave? And if so, in what way?
Do you think it’s possible for art to lie—and remain art?
Sanford Schwartz described the persona in Philip Guston’s work as “Am I a genius, am I a fraud, I’m dying.” Where is the angst in your work?
How would you describe your work to an ET who had just come to Earth from another planet, one where they don’t make art?
Which is better for an artist: to be loved or feared?
(Source: theparisreview.org)
Hemingway at the Met
Pg. 479 Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker
Pg. 57-61 Portrait of Hemingway by Lillian Ross
When Lillian Ross arrived at Ernest’s suite late Thursday morning, she found him wearing a plaid bathrobe and drinking champagne. He said that he had been up since dawn working on his book, and launched at once into further autobiographical reminiscences, heavily larded with boxing terminology. It was fun to be fifty and about to defend his title again. He had won it in the twenties and defended it in the thirties and forties. Now here he was coming into the ring once more. “I am a strange old man,” he murmured, as if to himself. But he knew that Miss Ross was listening. The program for Friday morning was to visit the Metropolitan Museum. When Lillian arrived for her third interview session, Patrick had come down from Harvard, Ernest was wearing his new Abercrombie and Fitch topcoat, and they set off in a taxi through the rainy streets.
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When we drew up at the Museum entrance, a line of school children was moving in slowly, Hemingway impatiently led us past them. In the lobby, he paused, pulled a silver flask from one of his coat pockets, unscrewed its top, and took a long drink, Putting the flask back in his pocket, he asked Mrs. Hemingway whether she wanted to see the Goyas first or the Breughels. She said the Breughels.
“I learned to write by looking at paintings in the Luxembourg Museum in Paris,” he said. “I never went past high school. When you’ve got a hungry gut and the museum is free, you go to the museum. Look,” he said, stopping before “Portrait of a man,” which has been attributed to both Titian and Giorgione. “They were old Venice boys, too.”
“Here’s what I like, Papa,” Patrick said, and Hemingway joined his son in front of “Portrait of Federigo Gonzaga (1500-1540),” by Francesco Francia. It shows, against a landscape, a small boy with long hair and a cloak.
“This is what we try to do when we write, Mousie,” Hemingway said, pointing to the trees in the background. “We always have this in when we write.”
Mrs. Hemingway called to us. She was looking at “Portrait of the Artist,” by Van Dyck. Hemingway looked at it, nodded approval, and said, “In Spain, we had a fighter pilot named Whitey Dahl, so Whitey came to me one time and said, ‘Mr. Hemingway, is Van Dyck a good painter?’ I said, ‘Yes, he is.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m glad, because I have one in my room and I like it very much, and I’m glad he’s a good painter because I like him.’ The next day, Whitey was shot down.”
We all walked over to the Rubens’ “The Triumph of Christ Over Sin and Death.” Christ is shown surrounded by snakes and angels and is being watched by a figure in a cloud. Mrs. Hemingway and Patrick said they thought it didn’t look like the usual Rubens.
“Yeah, he did that all right,” Hemingway said authoritatively. “You can tell the real just as a bird dog can tell. Smell them. Or from having lived with very poor but very good painters.”
That settled that, and we went on to the Breughel room. It was closed, we discovered. The door bore a sign that read “NOW UNDERTAKING REPAIRS.”
“They have our indulgence,” Hemingway said, and took another drink from his flask. “I sure miss the good Breughel,” he said as we moved along. “It’s the great one, of the harvesters. It is a lot of people cutting grain, but he uses the grain geometrically, to make an emotion that is so strong for me that I can hardly take it.” We came to El Greco’s green “View of Toledo” and stood looking at it a long time. “This is the best picture in the Museum for me, and Christ knows there are some lovely ones,” Hemingway said.
Patrick admired several paintings Hemingway didn’t approve of. Every time this happened, Hemingway got into an involved technical discussion with his son. Patrick would shake his head and laugh and say he respected Hemingway’s opinions. He didn’t argue much. “What the hell!” Hemingway said suddenly. “I don’t want to be an art critic. I just want to look at pictures and be happy with them and learn from them. Now, this for me is a damn good picture.” He stood back and peered at a Reynolds entitled “Colonel George Coussmaker.” which shows the Colonel leaning against a tree and holding his horse’s bridle. “Now, this Colonel is a son of a bitch who was willing to pay money to the best portrait painter of his day just to have himself painted,” Hemingway said, and gave a short laugh. “Look at the man’s arrogance and the strength in the neck of the horse and the way the man’s legs hang. He’s so arrogant he can afford to lean against a tree.”
We separated for a while and looked at paintings individually, and then Hemingway called us over and pointed to a picture labelled, in large letters, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe” and, in small ones, “By Cabanel.” “This is where I got confused as a kid, in Chicago,” he said. “My favorite painters for a long time were Bunte and Ryerson, two of the biggest and wealthiest families in Chicago. I always thought the names in big letters were the painters.”
After we reached the Cézannes and Degas and the other Impressionists, Hemingway became more and more excited, and discoursed on what each artist could do and what he had learned from each. Patrick listened respectfully and didn’t seem to want to talk about painting techniques anymore. Hemingway spent several minutes looking at Cézanne’s “Rocks—Forest of Fontainbleau.” “This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over,” he said. “Cézanne is my painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter. Degas was another wonder painter. I’ve never seen a bad Degas. You know what he did with the bad Degas? He burned them.”
Hemingway took another long drink from his flask. We came to Manet’s pasted portrait of Mlle. Valtesse de la Bigne, a young woman with blond hair coiled on the top of her head. Hemingway was silent for a while, looking at it; finally he turned away. “Manet could show the bloom people have when they’re still innocent and before they’ve been disillusioned,” he said.
As we walked along, Hemingway said to me, “I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.” He had learned a lot from Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach, too. “In the first paragraphs of ‘Farewell,’ I used the word ‘and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint. I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes—or, anyway, so he would like it. All such people are easy to deal with it, because we all know you have to learn.”
“Papa, look at this,” Patrick said. He was looking at “Meditation on the Passion,” by Carpaccio. Patrick said it had a lot of strange animals in it for a religious painting.
“Huh!” Hemingway said. “Those painters always put the sacred scenes in the part of Italy they liked best or where they came from or where their girls came from. They made their girls the Madonnas. This is supposed to be Palestine, and Palestine is a long way off, he figures. So he puts in a red parrot, and he puts in a deer and a leopard. And then he thinks, This is the Far East and it’s far away. So he puts in the Moors, the traditional enemy of the Venetians.” He paused and looked to see what else the painter had put in the picture. “Then he gets hungry, so he puts in rabbits,” he said. “Goddam, Mouse, we saw a lot of good pictures. Mouse don’t you think two hours is a long time looking at pictures?”
Everybody agreed that two hours was a long time looking at pictures, so Hemingway said that we would skip the Goyas, and that we would all go to the Museum again when they returned from Europe.
It was still raining when we came out of the Museum. “Goddam, I hate to go out in the rain,” Hemingway said. “Goddam, I hate to get wet.”
What the hell! I don’t want to be an art critic. I just want to look at pictures and be happy with them and learn from them. Now, this for me is a damn good picture. Now, this Colonel is a son of a bitch who was willing to pay money to the best portrait painter of his day just to have himself painted. Look at the man’s arrogance and the strength in the neck of the horse and the way the man’s legs hang. He’s so arrogant he can afford to lean against a tree.
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Ernest Hemingway at the Metropolitan Museum in Lillian Ross’ 1950 Portrait of Hemingway.
Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Colonel George K. H. Coussmaker, Grenadier Guards,” 1782. Metropolitan Museum.
