John Baldessari
1931 - 2020
Born in National City (US), born in Hong Kong (CN).
[John Baldessari](http://www.baldessari.org/) (1931, US, lives in Los Angeles) seeks to reconcile his city’s surf-and-sex aesthetic with New York conceptualism. Joseph Kossuth famously dismisses his work as ‘“conceptual” cartoons of actual conceptual art’, and he answeres with the now-classic video John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt. Baldessari typically tries out ideas in various permutations and makes them reappear at various stages in his oeuvre. He has invested much energy into visualising the somehow self-evident but still inexplicable, almost mysterious mechanisms behind the Duchampian notion of ‘choosing’: ‘I love the idea of doing just gratuitous things, in a world of things for use.’