Broodthaers, Marcel. Un Coup de Dès Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard. 'Exposition Littéraire Auteur de Mallarmé' at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, December 1969.

VERSUCH. Church entrance facade, Rome, 2010.

SONGS : 1. SKY/SEA/SAND, 2. SKY/ICE PLANT/GRASS (DETAIL), 1973
COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, CHALK, PENCIL, TEXT
3.5 X 5 INCHES EACH
VARIABLE INSTALLATION SIZE

1. Sky/Sea/Sand
2. Sky/Ice Plant/Grass

JOHN BALDESSARI

Original Plan: To use certain geographical areas as visual surrogates for music staffs.

For example, one of the areas chosen was a frontal view of the ocean at the beach. Such a view was chosen in that it would easily subdivide into three zones, in this case sky, ocean, sand, and for the purpose of this piece, high, middle and low (in the sense of a musical register). Next, a person was given a simple red ball, (the musical note) and was asked to throw it high into the air (against the ocean background). With each throw, the person was asked simultaneously to shout “high”, “middle” or “low”. This notation would be the evidence of a secret melody being composed by that person.

The job of the cameraman was to freeze the ball/note in the proper zone that was called out with each throw. The melody would be limited to the number of frames in a roll of film, or multiples of that number. Thus 36, or 2 x 36, etc. The resulting photographs would then be numbered in the sequence in which they were taken, and situated on the three-line staff in its proper location.

The problems: Of course chance enters in here. A perfect answer to that problem would be the image of the ball appearing in each photo in its proper zone. This photo then would be placed on its proper line, with the line intersecting the ball. There is a small element of time entering into this musical piece in that the ball would not often be centered in the photo but would be skewed to the right or left.

So a longer note could be a photo where the ball was skewed to the left. All of the successful shots (or proper notes) are marked with a red (x). A missing photo, so noted on a blank white card and located below the staff. Photo-processor error. Duplicate photos of the same shot. Photo-processor error. The extra photos located below staff. Ball in wrong zone. The photo is located on its proper staff line, the staff line aligned with the zone boundary line; the zone falling below the staff line. These shots are bracketed.

No ball appearing in photo. The photo is located on its proper staff line, its bottom edge aligned. These shots are circled. Split zone. In these photos where the shot is clearly not of one zone, the photo is placed in the category of that zone the photo indicates by more than fifty percent. Perhaps all the problem shots can be seen as missing notes, wrong notes and similar drop-out.

Baldessari, John. Sourced from www.htvdeijsberg.nl/80-toonbeeld/john-baldessari/

"Here form IS content, content IS form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to read - or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. [Joyce's] writing is not about something; it is that something itself. . . . Here is a savage economy of hieroglyphs. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear."

Beckett, Samuel. (Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, (Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1929). Reprinted in I can't go on, I'll go on: a selection from Samuel Beckett's work. Ed., Seaver, Richard (New York, Grove Press, 1976), p. 60.

"I wrote my friend a letter using a highlighting pen but he could not read it. He thought I was trying to show him certain parts of a piece of paper."

Hedburg, Mitch. http://www.tv.com/mitch-hedberg/person/15114/trivia.html

"Every time some piece of the puzzle begins to come into focus, it fades away in a blur, evaporates in a wisp of thin and dubious haze, or gets bogged down in paperwork without sense or substance. Interrogation follows interrogation, statement follows statement -- and each one brings more tiny contradictions to light which further obfuscate the ungraspable, unseeable reality which the investigators are trying so hard to reconstitute."

Perec, George. 53 Days. Eds., Harry Mathews, Harry and Roubaud, Jacques, trans., Bellos, David (Boston, Verba Mundi, 2000), p. 33.

"This was the beginning. They are self-portraits. I percieve myself as being behind a hood. In a new series of "hoods" my attempt was not really to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot. Then I started conceiving an imaginary city being taken over by the Klan. I was like a movie director. I couldn't wait, I had hundreds of pictures in mind and when I left the studio I would make notes to myself, memos, "Put them all around the table, eating, drinking beer." Ideas and feelings kept coming so fast; I couldn't stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave. In the picture Cellar I wondered what it would look like to have a bunch of figures, scared, diving down into a cellar. I painted it in about four hours without any erasures. And when it was done I said, "Ah ..., so that is what it would look like.""

Guston, Philip. "Philip Guston Talking" (lecture at the University of Minnesota, March 1978), in Philip Guston. Ed., McKee, Renee (London, Whitechapel, 1982), pp.49 -56