A Brief Reflection on John Baldessari

My absolute favorite of the films we watched was the portrait of artist John Baldessari. The draws of this film for me were the use of shots of everyday objects belonging to the artist and the infusion of its narrator, the gravelly-voiced crooner of all things banal and macabre, Tom Waits. I’ve been a fan of Waits for many years, and the fact that he and Baldessari have a sort of conversation (“He’s got a great voice!” “Thanks, John.”) in the midst of the former narrating the latter’s life and accomplishments is one of the many highlights of the film. Waits’ distinctive snarl on words like “Biennale”, and undertone of “Jesus Christ” accompanying rapid shots of Baldessari’s bevy of awards lends an amount of humor to this short that would never have been there had someone other than Waits narrated. As a voice actor myself, this is one of the many reasons I love hearing just the right voice for a spot, and Waits was a brilliant pick for this.

While there is some discussion of Baldessari’s current life, we don’t see modern-day John that often, and when we do it’s nearly always in a medium or a close-up shot from across his enormous desk. This helps us feel both the immensity of his workspace and the kind of intimate closeness that only Baldessari’s friends, family, and work itself have likely seen. Of course, that intimacy also comes in other forms; giving the audience a very personal look at Baldessari’s office and personal life, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman go so far as to shoot close-ups of objects as mundane as his coffee machine, and as private as his Wi-Fi password. (I also enjoyed seeing the hand-drawn thank you note from SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg.)

Much of the film is made up of archival footage of Baldessari’s work, be it films or pictures of his paintings, and almost all of Wait’s dialogue is accompanied verbatim and in real time by written words in various formats on the screen.  (The use of iconic orchestral music like Rossini’s William Tell Overture provide a perfect and almost frantically joyous backdrop to the pictures, so caught up in the act of helping tell John’s story that they make the documentary feel much shorter than its six-minute runtime and hold the audiences’ attention for much longer.)

Waits’ booze-soaked voice echoes dramatically at the end, quoting Baldessari:  “I will not make any more boring art!” for an ending to a film that is fast-paced and full of close-ups, giving us a look at man whose life has been nothing but.