John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]

 Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.) 
 What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows—almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I’m basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that’s more au courant. 
 The real reason I got deeply interested in photography was my sense of dissatisfaction with what I was seeing. I wanted to break down the rules of photography—the conventions. I discovered I was more of a “thinking” person than a “working” person. Photography allowed me to register my ideas more rapidly than painting them. They grew out of a sense of urgency. If you’re stranded on a desert island and a plane flew over, you wouldn’t write “HELP” in Old English script. 
 I have no particular allegiance to photography, other than it’s quick. 
 I think that if people don’t understand painting, they should be able to understand text or photographs because you get that in books and magazines and so on. 
 I’m not going to temper, I don’t change, don’t want to take the chance of some magic being broken. I like being in my studio, being around all my stuff, magazines, books. This is my existence, this is where I get my power. 
 What got me interested in found imagery was that it was not considered art, but just imagery, and I began dumpster diving in photo shops. 
 One of the things that compels me is I can’t prioritize a word over an image. It’s that constant state of not being able to pick or to say that this is more important than that. They’re both important. 
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