The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California College of the Arts (CCA) presents John Baldessari: Class Assignments (Optional) on view January 19–March 31, 2012.
In May 2011, John Baldessari was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from California College of the Arts for his extraordinary contributions to both art education and the development of art over the past 50 years. In response to this, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts developed a new exhibition with the artist, which opens on January 19, 2012, reflecting Baldessari’s interest in pedagogical approaches to art as well as his own conceptual approach to art making.
John Baldessari: Class Assignments, (Optional) will feature work by CCA students in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts as they respond to a series of art-making instructions provided by Baldessari. The instructions are based on Baldessari’s teaching notes from his time as a professor at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in Valencia, during which he taught the course Cal Arts Post Studio Art: Class Assignments, (optional), 1970. The CCA students will interpret his instructions, such as “Imitate Baldessari in actions and speech. Video,” or “Disguise an object to look like another object,” and their resulting works will be presented in the Wattis exhibition.
John Baldessari: Class Assignments, (Optional) extends Baldessari’s predilection for the structure of languages and arbitrary games, which have been key elements in his most salient conceptual works since the 1970s. Additionally, the exhibition will exemplify many of the strategies used by Baldessari such as experimentation, the use of rule-based systems, and the defiance of arbitrarily imposed limits to find new solutions to problems.
About John Baldessari
John Baldessari was born in National City, California, in 1931 and lives and works in Santa Monica, California. His work has been shown in more than 200 solo exhibitions and more than 1,000 group exhibitions. Baldessari was also awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2009. A major retrospective entitled Pure Beauty, which spans five decades of his work, toured between 2009 and 2011 through Tate Modern, London, the Museu d’Art Contemporain (MACBA), Barcelona, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles.
Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) is noted for the interdisciplinarity and breadth of its programs. It offers studies in 21 undergraduate and seven graduate majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design, and writing. The college offers bachelor of architecture, bachelor of arts, bachelor of fine arts, master of architecture, master of arts, master of fine arts, and master of business administration degrees. With campuses in San Francisco and Oakland, CCA currently enrolls 1,950 full-time students. Noted alumni include the painters Nathan Oliveira and Raymond Saunders; the ceramicists Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, and Peter Voulkos; the filmmaker Wayne Wang; the conceptual artists David Ireland and Dennis Oppenheim; and the designers Lucille Tenazas and Michael Vanderbyl. For more information about CCA, visit cca.edu.
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