If Conceptual Art was founded on the denial of the visual in favour of the cerebral Live In Your

If Conceptual Art was founded on the denial of the visual in favour of the cerebral ("Live In Your Head" was the subtitle to one early 1970s Conceptual show), Baldessari's art is not Conceptualist at all: it is a riot of images.Once, Conceptual Art dealt with an object that had vanished. Nor, on the evidence of his Serpentine show, is he a slouch: his work is livelier, more youthful and more fun than that of many artists a third of his age At times, it is even profound. Labels tend to stick, but Baldessari isn't certain whether he's a Conceptualist any more. Nowadays, his art is all loose connections, skewed collisions and out-takes, chaotic situations, short-term memory lapses, blank spaces, mushy blobs and lot plots: a California of the mind.Fellow Conceptualist Joseph Kosuth once called Baldessari "Papa", in acknowledgement of his role in the movement. His art, over the past 25 years, has come to reflect this, with its scrapbook paste-ups of fragmented, stolen imagery: back-lot B-movie cowboys, femmes fatal and Babewatch beauties, wildlife shots, sportswear Jocks, palm trees and rainbows, the base material for his afternoon-shift adventures with scissors and glue.

He needs a life.I imagine Baldessari, lounging behind the closed blinds in sunny Santa Monica, watching re-runs on TV, flipping through glossy magazines, raiding the fridge and generally having a nice lie down. But for Baldessari, the purging of everything from his art, was too much Time hangs heavy, for the Conceptualist who's gone too far. But, it strikes me, Baldessari's refutation of painting may have more to do with the fact that Southern California is too damn hot for such energetic work. Even before he torched his oils, Baldessari had taken to writing gnomic statements, which he had transferred on to canvas by a signwriter: "Pure Beauty", they read, and "Everything has been purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work". The cremation was advertised, photographed, documented, and the ashes are kept in a little urn, which now sits on a shelf in his Serpentine Gallery retrospective.One reason he gave up painting was, he said, because he had no audience, and that, living near Hollywood, painting seemed somehow irrelevant.

Conceptual Art can be made on the dole.In 1970 John Baldessari burned all his paintings made between 1953 and 1966. This strategy, which I wholeheartedly recommend to many painters, was, in his case, a ritual act of purification, signalling his rebirth as a Conceptual artist. Conceptual artists don't need overheads like studios, paints, assistants. That the well-crafted object is not the be all and end all has been a lesson well learned by the generation of artists growing up in the Nineties, who forego the luxury of studios and the production of well-crafted objects. Weiner's short, anonymous statements are themselves intended as a kind of sculpture, albeit one which his audience is meant to construct in their heads.