Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)

Date

1973

Creator

Like many of John Baldessari’s conceptual works of the mid-1970s, this series of images is a visual game of chance. The title sets out the simple rules of the exercise: to capture a precision aerial display in as many frames in a standard roll of 35 mm color slide film. An assistant tossed the balls, as Baldessari wielded the camera. These images depend upon chance, and variables of physiological effort, the physics of flight and motion, the weather, wind and other incomprehensible factors. After the slides were developed, the artist chose images that came closest to his goal. This visual game may be parody, but in the Cold War era when defense contractors used game theory to model and refine their weapons systems, the subject of its ridicule was deadly serious. To make this work of conceptual art available to a broad audience, Baldessari published the photographs as affordable offset lithographs in a large edition. from Touchstones of the Twentieth Century: A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame (exhibition, 2020-21)