Titles by John Baldessari
- Art Disaster
- Baldessari Sings LeWitt
- Ed Henderson Reconstructs Movie Scenarios
- Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks for Photographs
- Folding Hat
- Four Minutes of Trying to Tune Two Glasses (For the Phil Glass Sextet)
- Four Short Films 1972-1973
- Haste Makes Waste
- How We Do Art Now
- I Am Making Art
- I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
- Inventory
- Police Drawing
- Practice Makes Perfect
- Script
- Six Colorful Inside Jobs
- Six Colorful Tales: From the Emotional Spectrum (Women)
- Some Words I Mispronounce
- Teaching a Plant the Alphabet
- The Italian Tape
- The Meaning of Various News Photos to Ed Henderson
- The Way We Do Art Now and Other Sacred Tales
- Three Feathers and Other Fairy Tales
- Title
- Two Colorful Melodies
- Walking Forward-Running Past
- Xylophone
Inventory
In a sly twist on the methodology of the 18th-century "philosophes" who classified the laws and history of the world in massive encyclopedias, Baldessari devises and then subverts his own system for cataloguing the world. In a matter-of-fact tone, he states that he is going to present a precise, methodical inventory of objects, progressing from small to large in size. Drawing on his own collection of found objects, he exhibits and describes a seemingly arbitrary series of over thirty disparate items: a small glass bead, a nut, a dried orange peel, an artificial flower, a cigarette pack, toy money, a utility belt, a shoe tree. Stripped of any frame of reference — color, scale — the objects are virtually unidentifiable as the things Baldessari says they are. Without visual perception or cognition, the viewer relies on Baldessari's voiceover description to supply the objects' meaning. Therein, he suggests, lies the critical paradox: By undermining the viewer's empirical perception, video ultimately is proven to be a flawed medium for the indexing and classification of the world.
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