MFT: John Baldessari - I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art

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This is "I will not make any more boring art" as written by John Baldessari in 1971. It is a conceptual art piece in a form of the phrase handwritten in cursive font over and over again on a sheet of paper. It was based on the working scribbles from his notebook. It is obviously designed to condition frail mind of an artist and form a mental block that will prevent him from making art that can be considered "boring". It is a statement. Direct and sincere, stripped off any superficial elements. This sentence underlines what Baldessari have learned earlier in his career. It may seem on the nose and quite obvious - but sometimes solutions lay in plain sight and be extremely ambiguous. 

Conceptually "I will not make any more boring art" is reminescent of old-time school punishments with its mindnumbing excruciating repetitions of tenacious redeeming phrases to bulbous eternity and effervescent oblivion as immortalized in the title sequence of "The Simpsons". It is also a neat riff on Rene Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" and its playful cognitive dissonance. It is just a message that is turned into piece of art by the fact of its documentation. However Baldessari's thing is not an argument on the nature of art - it comes from a different place. 

In the early 70s John Baldessari felt that he ran out of course and played himself. He was deeply unsatisfied with himself and his body of work and was utterly disappointed by his recent aesthetic tendencies. He wasn't breaking any new ground, he wasn't challenging himself, he wasn't trying something new and different. And so he thought - what is worth of an artist who doesn't take any chances and relies on the book of tricks like a shaggy dog who knows he will be fed anyway? And so he decided to get rid of his early works in the most blatant way possible - destroy them. With a little help of his friends he gathered his early stuff and burned it in crematorium. The remaining ashes were placed into the urn with an inscription saying "John Anthony Baldessari, May 1953 - March 1966". 

He did that as a rebooting measure. Because those works were just things. Nothing of particular interest that could be destroyed thus it was destroyed. Baldessari decided to throw away everything and start anew. I guess it was because he read Kipling's "If" six times in a row and stumbled on a line "...watch the things you gave your life to, broken" thinking "Hmmm, interesting...". From then on Baldessari was interested in ideas as the most potent and lasting material. But by embracing conceptual he also started to poke fun at it. 

"I will not make any more boring art" is a tongue-in-cheek subversion of conceptual art. Even mere thinking over the phrase adds the factor of the process of not making something boring to the mix. That journey and achieved experience out it is part of the piece. "I will not make any more boring art" exists in many forms - as a statement, as a writing on a piece of paper, as an instuction, as a thing to be written, as a video documentation of the process of writing of the phrase, as a photo documentation of the piece and so on.