Imitate Baldessari: Artists, Teachers, and the Making of Conceptual Art

Abstract There's a fabled sheaf of increasingly yellowed papers, nicked and stained, gently crumpled—there must be some coffee on them somewhere. They've come to be known as the Assignment Sheets. The story is that the famed Conceptual artist and teacher John Baldessari handed them out to his students when he began teaching at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in 1970. The only problem is that none of his students has any memory of ever seeing them. And it turns out that Baldessari went on to execute many—though not all—of the assignments on the list, i.e. “34. Defenestrate objects. Photo them in mid-air.” So it would seem that these assignments were not for students to carry out after all—this was more or less a productive fiction—so much as they were ideas for the teacher to mine. Baldessari was reeducating himself at this moment and these assignments were a key part of his project. This was a transitional time in the artist's career: He stopped making paintings and cremated his early work so that he might dedicate himself to the practice of Conceptual art. In Conceptual art the idea is traditionally understood to be central (see, for example, the work and writings of Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner), but by turning ideas into assignments Baldessari showed (or perhaps better yet, realized) that this might not be the case. It is what one does with ideas that counts. I come to this conclusion by way of an analysis of one of the final assignments: “105. Be black.” Though Baldessari maintained a deep fascination with blackness at this moment, he ultimately realized that not everything can be done. The identity of the artist, in other words, is tied to the horizons of possibility.