John Baldessari “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts),” 1973

Photography is full of shit. Most photos hung in a gallery by an experienced artist could have arguably been taken by anyone capable of clicking a button—five-year-olds and monkeys included. So what makes a photograph transcend above the rest? And when does a picture change from a frozen moment in time to a piece of art?

Being so effortless, it’s easy to force a photo to look arty and thoughtfully inspired. Close ups of flowers, photos of architecture, the Instagram app for iPhones etc., we’ve all seen them. Shooting with a sense of humor, and with a fun and succinct design, Californian conceptualist and photographer John Baldessari’s collection of photos titled “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)” is innovative yet beautiful as it playfully redefines this need for forced beauty in photography.

For the past 53 years Baldessari, now 81, has been poking his finger in the eye of the contemporary art world. He has challenged art’s unspoken rules by testing what would happen if these lines were more blurred, and exploring their reasons for existence. He is a genius at stripping things of their normality—their context, order of being experienced—and then seeing what comes of it. Always asking ‘why?’ is an important quality for artists to have while creating their art, but Baldessari looks at the entire scope of art as it is and asks this same question: why must we take photos of the beautiful things in order to make beautiful art? Why not find beauty in odd places? This gets the gears in your mind churning and gets you to look at simple things in a new way—a specific quality that takes art from lackluster to intelligently successful. And as a result, Baldessari has been able to experience the world in a way that is not preconceived and to see profound connections that others aren’t even looking for.

This idea of reconstructing normality is seen through Baldessari’s collection “Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts).” The artist’s series of work captures his attempts at throwing three balls in the air to make a straight line—an absurdist idea—looking at non-conventional forms of order, seeing what happens when he tries each new method. Thirty-six being the number of frames in a typical role of 35mm camera film, the collection shows 12 of the best in Baldessari’s trials.

 

Though the resultant images are merely a documentation of Baldessari’s ball game, they also border on abstract imagery and resemble his later paint and graphic design works, using circle shapes and pops of color.  Visually, the simplicity of the layout combined with the complimentary color combination in the subject, the blue sky and orange balls, is pleasing to the eye. And without feeling a need to make these photos more complicated to be successful, the photos stand strong with only the few elements in the space.

Through arbitrarily tossing balls in the air to express new out-of-the-box philosophies and finding art in the trial-and-error process, Baldessari achieves the near-impossible: showing us that photography can push boundaries, make you think, evoke emotion, strike a nerve, and actually be art.

 “Beauty is a by-product,” Baldessari explained in an interview with Seesaw Magazine, “Each time an artist does something, you get better and better at making beauty, so why work at it?  Why not something else?”