JOHN BALDESSARI

When I went to art school, I was just having fun. I realised that was the last chance I had, and then I would have to get a job.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood.

I guess I get bored easily, and thank God. I don't want to all my life pound only the same key, although some artists do it very effectively. I'm not trying to denigrate anybody.

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.

That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting.

I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.

The idea of vaudeville clowns and court jesters is always to show the flaw, to point out what's not working and why it's not coherent.

I was getting tired of hearing the complaint, "My kid could do this," and "We don't get it. What's modern art? Blah, blah, blah." And I wondered what would really happen if you gave people what they wanted, something they always look at.

Photos should suggest a word(s) and vice versa. They should be equal and interchangeable.

If you're smart, you abandon the things that didn't work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to be successful.

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.

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.

I can't imagine a life without thinking, doing art. I don't feel any need to be a world traveler or an adventurer. I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. I think somehow I know that I should have a larger vision of art, but I can't think of what that would be.

Most of my friends are women. I think women are more interesting to talk to.

I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?

I think I live such a boring life. But I can't imagine any other kind of life, so I guess it's the life I want.

Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time.

I will not make anymore boring art.

There's no such thing as a bad photograph.

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.

I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.