John Baldessari, The Meaning of Various News Photos to Ed Henderson, 1973 I don’t know Ed Henderson’s story, but that voice talking to him from offscreen definitely belongs to John Baldessari. In this piece, the artist doesn’t ask nor seem to expect that we know or learn much about Henderson, other than that he […]
John Baldessari, Time/Temperature, 1972-73 Here we see hands — presumably John Baldessari’s, but who knows — handling a variety of little objects. First, they hold a blue-sanded hourglass and a red-mercury’d thermometer, the contents of the former slowly falling as that of the latter slowly rises. Second, the hold a pair of plastic circles […]
John Baldessari, Baldessari Sings Lewitt, 1972. I come away from this video wanting to read some Sol LeWitt. In it, Baldessari, shot in classically muddy Portapak style, sits down and reads a selection of lines from Lewitt’s writing on modern art. Well, I suppose he technically sings the lines, but his delivery strikes me […]
[For installments 1-46 of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, see either my Typepad or Livejournal accounts.] John Baldessari, Title, 1971. Title isolates, in a bunch of different permutations, the elements of motion pictures: objects, sounds, people, spoken words, actions, screenplay directions. Baldessari builds things up as the piece’s ten episodes, so while at first […]