The late, great American artist John Baldessari began his career as a painter, only incorporating his signature addition of text and photography into his work in the mid-60s. In 1970, he decided to honour this reinvention by burning all of the paintings he’d made between 1953 and 1966. He baked their ashes into cookies and placed them in a glass urn, titling the resulting artwork The Cremation Project and presenting it alongside a bronze plaque bearing the destroyed works’ “birth” and “death” dates, and a recipe for the cookies. This act marked the beginning of a new phase for Baldessari—namely the shrewd interrogation of imagery and language (through printmaking, photography, installation and more) for which he is now remembered.
