John Baldessari is still on a mission to 'un-asshole' the art world

Okay, wait. Before we go any further. If you don’t know anything about John Baldessari you MUST watch this film narrated by Tom Waits in which he gives you a very great quickfire bio of ‘The Godfather of Conceptual Art’.

Now, with that context, let me introduce Baldessari’s two new exhibitions Pictures & Scripts simultaneously happening at the Marian Goodman galleries in London and Paris.

The shows contain new work by the Californian artist that juxtapose still images from black-and-white films with made-up film scripts in a funny way that pokes fun at the commercial art world.

Baldessari chooses obscure cropped clips – apparently he has archived thousands over the years – that include Westerns, Noirish crime dramas and Danny Aiello in Once Around. His fake film scripts include classics lines like, ‘So how do I un-asshole myself?’ and build on the artist’s obsession with meaning and composition.

According to Marian Goodman, the arrangement of words and images has been a defining interest of Baldessari’s since the 1960s when he stated “a word could be an image or an image could be a word, they could be interchangeable’.

The Pictures & Scripts exhibitions run until April 11 in Paris and April 25 in London.