In the early 1970s, John Baldessari made a promise “I will not make any more boring art”. The lithograph image demonstrates his thinking at the time as his interest in Conceptual art developed. The work was created at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in conjunction with an unconventional exhibition. Baldessari was not present at the “exhibition,” nor at the workshop where the print was made. He simply sent a handwritten page to the students to be reproduced and made a videotape of himself writing the sentence. Prior to the creation of this work, Baldessari, together with friends and students from University of California at San Diego, gathered paintings he had made as a young artist and drove them to a crematorium where they were burnt.

His participation in the conceptual movement lead him to create ‘Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)’ in 1973. The images represent Baldessari’s interest in language and games as structures following both mandatory and arbitrary rules. He attempts to fulfill a simple yet arbitrary goal, following rules in a similar manner to a game as structured by the title of his book. There are thirty-six documented attempts in the book–the typical number of exposures on a roll of 35mm film. The resultant images are documentation of Baldessari’s game, but they also border on abstract imagery and bear a resemblance to his later works.

In other works, Baldessari takes archival images, using colourful price stickers to obstruct the viewer from seeing the faces of the people in the image. The viewer is encouraged to analyse other aspects of the image, that would otherwise not catch their attention, such as the clothing of the figures, wealth, era, etc.

“I just got so tired of looking at these faces” – John Baldessari

Responses:

In response to ‘Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)’, we took 1 larger ball and 3 tennis balls and took turns throwing them in the air to get a straight line. This was harder than it seemed. The balls were coloured bright yellow or green in order to stand out against the white/grey sky. I found that it was difficult to maintain that the moving items were in focus.

Another experiment we carried out involved dodging the camera. In many of the outcomes, the face of the subject is not clearly seen, reflecting the same ideas of Baldessari.

All images from both experiments were taken with varying shutter speeds of 1/100s to 1/200s to capture the movement of the subjects in different motions.

In a third experiment, we experimented with the use of archival imagery. We used a coin toss to determine where the circles should be cut out on the image.

In Photoshop, I edited circles of colour over the already cut out circles. I also painted lines of colour over certain areas where there was negative space.

In one image, I used the colours of the Jersey Flag, Red, White and Yellow, as the image depicts Jersey soldiers.