What's with the God look?" I had thought to ask him at one point over the course of a rambling interview conducted in the lead-up to LACMA's opening of his retrospective —provocatively, ironically titled, "Pure Beauty." A slightly exaggerated (to say nothing of irreverent) take on a persona which is, after all, pretty familiar to most people who frequent Los Angeles art galleries, and indeed almost anyone acquainted with contemporary art around the world. But there is only so much time for irreverence in the company of an artist of John Baldessari's stature.

At 6 feet 7 inches, that might be half the story right there. Public perceptions of Baldessari's persona or public image may have evolved more or less in step with his career, a kind of reinvention that might be expected to parallel the invention of a new kind of art: from artist-teacher-malcontent to the self-radicalized, self-reinvented artist-professor-mentor; the local artist with an aggressively global outlook; and finally an avuncular figure become anchor and authority for an agglomerate of disparate styles and movements now commanding the global art market.

Baldessari's own position in the global marketplace belies the extent of his influence; the auction records for his work do not approach the stratospheric levels of say, Koons, or for that matter, his conceptualist peer, Bruce Nauman. But even Baldessari's "conceptualism" (if it can even be called that any longer) has always had a "left-coast" catholicity and eccentricity that set his work apart from his more ideologically entrenched peers (e.g., Kosuth) —a factor that has been crucial in the evolution of his art, as well as its broad influence. Ironically, as reluctant a teacher as he was, it is perhaps his role as mentor to a remarkably diverse group of artists that has extended and magnified his influence and importance. In other words, as important as his work is, it is not for that alone that he remains such an important figure in the post-modern contemporary landscape.

His reticence to discuss his teaching or mentoring of this flock of students is initially off-putting. Yet over the course of an interview that veered wildly between shallows and depths, one began to sense that, just as the "voids" in his art can be as important as the visualized elements, what Baldessari doesn't say is as important as what he does. Speaking of his early videos, many of which were made in conjunction with his earliest teaching at CalArts, he insists, "I didn't teach; we didn't have any formalized courses. I mean, it [the Sony Portapak video cameras] was there; so I was learning along with the students ... Everybody was experimenting because there was nothing to learn. You were charting your own course."

Yet even here, Baldessari limns a definition of a particular brand of conceptualism which, though it had already taken recognizable shape in some of the original text paintings, text-and-image pieces, early photography and the "Commissioned Painting" series executed between late 1967 and 1970.

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