John Baldessari Movies

The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes.

In Walking Forward-Running Past, Baldessari ingeniously employs photography and video to examine and ultimately deconstruct film. In this conceptual...

Presented without commentary, this film reveals the thinking behind the work of John Baldessari over the course of his career, and provides clues to...

In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making....

A film by John Baldessari

“[A] rather perverse exercise in futility,” this tape documents Baldessari’s response to Joseph Beuys’s influential...

A tribute to fellow artist Sol LeWitt, Baldessari sings lines from LeWitt's thirty-five statements on conceptual art to the tune of popular songs.

Baldessari progresses from simple, static images, such as a rock in an empty room, to complex narrative scenes, like a woman eavesdropping on her...

Seen from a bird's eye view, a figure paints the walls and floor of a windowless room six times in six days, using each of the primary and secondary...

'Folding Hat' is a deadpan conceptual exercise that represents a dashed attempt to rescue an object from the meaning assigned to it. Whistling an...

In a sly twist on the methodology of the 18th-century "philosophes" who classified the laws and history of the world in massive encyclopedias,...

From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s (b.1931) varied...

Baldessari introduces eight news photos to Ed Henderson — ranging in subject matter from geese at the zoo to an accidental electrocution...

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...

A short film by John Baldessari

A film by John Baldessari

Baldessari has commented that he is "less interested in the form art takes than the meaning an image evokes." In Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks...

Baldessari has Ed Henderson examine obscure movie stills and attempt to reconstruct the films' narratives.

Contemporaneous to his best-known video works, these Super-8mm films represent Baldessari's conceptual engagement with motion picture film, pointing...

Script is the opposite of an improvisational exercise. Seven couples, all amateurs, are handed pages from random movie scripts and instructed to...