John Baldessari began his work as a painter in the 1950s, but gave up painting in 1966. "I couldn't spend the rest of my life making different combinations of colour". As an end point he set a dramatic action a few years later: in 1970 he burned his entire painterly oeuvre and documented this process photographically after announcing it in the local newspaper. In the same year Baldessari moved from National City - the province - to Santa Monica, where he still lives today. The CREMATION PROJECT is a key work within Baldessari's oeuvre and for Conceptual Art in general.

Baldessari has been teaching at CalArts in Los Angeles since 1971, and is still very influential as a teacher and role model today. There are a striking number of interviews with him, his statements about art, especially his own work, are very precise, simple, insightful and last but not least humorous, certainly this contributes to his qualities as a teacher.

To this day Baldessari mainly uses the media of photography and text, often in combination.
Photography as a medium stands for truth and authenticity in everyday use, and this can still be asserted today, in the digital age. For Baldessari, this was one reason, among others, to use it to realize his conceptual work, following the thought: Why not show people what they think they understand and know, namely photos (and texts)?

Baldessari goes one step further in his strategy, which is of course one of confusion and seduction: "The world constructed by the media seems to be a vivid surrogate for 'real life', whatever that is. I decided that aiming my camera at the television set was just as reasonable as aiming it out the window".