Baldessari als Erzieher

Baldessari started to produce collages out of black-and-white movie stills in 1976. Even if his work is decidedly anti-dogmatic, over time the production of these images seems to follow a recurring pattern. The process is simple: The artist goes to a shop and buys second- rate movie stills, files them away using a provisional classification system, then selects some and cuts parts of them, sometimes add- ing touches of colour to certain areas, sometimes adding coloured dots and sometimes combining various images together. Baldessari selects the most generic images, the ones with no identity – the “stuff nobody wants”: At one place I go to for movie stills, I look where the photographs are randomly thrown in boxes. It’s stuff nobody wants. Photographs they can classify or identify go upward in price . . . The stuff I get is twenty-five cents a shot. But I like that because I don’t want stills from movies that I’ve seen or when I’m familiar with the stars. It has to be really obscure because I don’t want any baggage to come with it.