«If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.» (John Cage)

«I like boring things. I like things to be exactly the same over and over again.» (Andy Warhol)

Once, when I talked about John Baldessari's Super-8 films with Gregor Stemmrich’s class at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, several students were quick to point out that I never mentioned how funny these films are. They were right to bring this up; humor is important in Baldessari’s work. It has a particular quality. It is more a reality check than entertainment. (Reality, of course, necessarily includes artifice.) Its skepticism makes it an oddly sober humor. Even so, it is mildly subversive as well. It sets such low—«reasonably low»—hurdles for itself, that winning the race becomes insidiously somehow beside the point. In one video, when the artist half-heartedly promises to make «no more boring art,» is the problem making art or being boring? Rather than defy the rule,Baldessari pretends to be contrite. He writes the command over and over and, by atoning, transgresses the standing demand to transgress. He keeps writing that next time he’ll do better. But we can never trust him; each new promise breaks the rule once more.

1. From Artist to Art Making as a Hobby

Although it’s invisible (yet the product of a point of view), humor is as much as a representation to be reckoned with as any of the formal elements in these Super-8s. With deceptive modesty, it dismisses, out of hand, an Abstract Expressionist legacy of bar brawls, angst and heroic posturing. [1] Instead it admits that, from now on, American artists will be college-educated, middle-class professionals, middle class in an era of unprecedented affluence, middle class in a nation that boasts of being the most powerful in history. The new prosperity means freedom from doubt and privation. Thus, the bohemian loses his last vestiges of credibility and Artaud’s artist «suicided by society» comes to seem laughable. Middle class status is «laughable» too—because it’s blasé and self-reflexive. But that’s not exactly the stuff of whimsy. In the case

of these films, the humorous excess (not «structurally» necessary) is an index of social legitimation and prestige— like Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption. Even under pressure, however, the ethos of artistic marginalization dies hard. For example, after Allan Kaprow proclaimed the artist to be «a man of the world,» he still dreamed of «merging» art and life. For Baldessari, that was missing the point. Art was already part of life. To see that, he didn’t have to look any farther than the colleges and art schools where he worked on a regular basis. School was, after all, the overarching metaphor in «I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art» (1971); the artist simply mocked his inscription into its regime.

For artists of Baldessari’s generation, professionalism was wedded to education, but divorced from technical training. After Duchamp’s edict that tools that require skill are no good, this suggests a shift in class orientation toward the more managerial style of conceptual art. If technique was a stigma, wit was a virtue. Popularly, however, artistry still meant technique—which, in turn, meant realism. Better art meant better technique. In contrast, the AbstractExpressionists decided not only that art couldn’t be taught, but also that their kind of painting could not be reduced to skill, let alone technique. Even so, the existential confrontation between painter and canvas remained paramount. Ironically, because it mediated between skill and «unknowable» artistry, Abstract Expressionism emerged as the penultimate style in American art schools and remained so for decades. Against this, the suppression of technique and mystique informs Baldessari’s decision to work in Super-8. The format was flagrantly amateur, the medium of birthday parties and family vacations. In place of the existentialist came the hobbyist.

While technical prowess might now compromise one’s artistic standing, the new protocols of professionalism became i) a calculated indifference to the old ones, [2] ) a turn to less melodramatic subject matter and [3] ) a more detached, ironic treatment of that subject matter. Together, these represented a paradigm shift—for which Andy Warhol had been the catalyst. For Baldessari, the new sensibility meant a more nuanced, yet more matter-of-fact, look into the minutiae of everyday life. Camera in hand, he set out

to capture less, not more: postcards, flip books, a Christmas card, buttons, a thermometer, or an egg timer. It was a small world, after all. And the growing affordability of air travel made it seem even smaller. It exposed Middle America to the stultifying paradox of tourism, in which the tourist unwittingly transported his ideological props wherever he went. In an expansive spirit, the California Institute of the Arts, where Baldessari taught for so many years, launched its «post-studio» art program. Instead of withering away, however, leaving its occupant to consort with the world at large, Baldessari’s studio shrank to the size of a desktop.

2. The Super 8 Films

In his Super-8s, Baldessari seeks out small, flat surfaces and vestigial signs of mark making. Often, an anonymous hand manipulates the objects that fall on screen. Thus, Baldessari’s lens brings some of the old concerns of Action Painting into fresh focus. The films, in their own way, are educational—which is to say slightly didactic, like filmstrips. The points they make are simple, so these films are concise, typically less than threeminutes. In «New York City Art History» (1971) the camera takes close-ups of colored cards and art history illustrations paraded through the streets of Soho. Views of pedestrians and traffic flood in between cards and around their edges. This juxtaposition seemingly reflects the art historical process itself. Artworks as icons lose their ability to alter the way viewers see—that instead is the capacity of less codified art. In «New York Green Postcard #2»(1971) and «City Postcard Painting» an incessant brush blots out the picturesque views featured in a series of postcards. Here, New York School Painting would seem to be the discursive subject. The panoramic views suggest a monumental scale (much like Oldenburg’s proposed monuments), but one nonetheless circumscribed by the postcards on which they are printed. The drama of self-confrontation through paint becomes a souvenir, too. Even so, the painting in question is as good as any other. Gertrude Stein once said she loved all kinds of painting, just so long as it was paint on a surface. Similarly, Baldessari says—in line with John Cage—that anywhere you point the camera is a composition. The

postcards are the painted equivalents of his photographic approach. «Black Out» (1971) is more reductive; a felt-tip frenetically scribbles over a piece of white paper until turns black. «Water to Wine to Water» (1972–73) reduces a Biblical miracle to the status of a magic trick or sciences fair experiment—but manages to dupe the camera all the same. This, like many of Baldessari’s other Super-8 films, is a loop originally shot in 16 mm. With no beginning or end to the transformation, the liquid won’t stop changing, turning the miracle itself into a slight annoyance. The artist as shaman or alchemist proves to be a tedious fraud. In «Time/Temperature» (1972–73) a small hourglass and thermometer measure properties that are otherwise invisible. Like the camera, these are indexical instruments, but where the camera would ordinarily be taken for granted, these devices seem self-evident.

The film industry is another concern in Baldessari’s Super-8s. Of course it is implied by the choice of medium, but some works reflect it thematically. «Dance» (1971), for example, records a flip book in action. This is nothing less than a demonstration ofhow film works. It implies, among other things, that the cinematic apparatus is less a matter of technology than it is a desire to structure seeing a certain way. In the various versions of «Taking a Slate» (1974), Baldessari presents the kind of footage that ordinarily lands on the cutting room floor. Sometimes we see a sequence just as it was shot. Other times, we see that same strip of film moving back and forth on a viewer. This means Baldessari sometimes had to film his own film. Moreover, there is no slate. An actor simply mimics one with his hands. Both versions of Ted’s Christmas Card feature tight close-ups of an old-fashioned, winter landscape printed on foil paper. The card keeps tilting so that it reflects a hallucinatory light straight back at the camera. The camera is in so close that we only see fragments of the scene. Tinsel Town beckons in «The Hollywood Film» (1972-73) where the same thing happens again, only this time with two buttons with starlets’ portraits on one side and mirrors on the other. When not confined to a universe of shallow facades, the viewer is accordingly «blinded by the light» of a reverse projection.

As a group, Baldessari’s Super-8s negotiate what

was once a confrontation between paintbrush and camera. Now, however, digital technology has become a kind of common denominator not only for painting and cinema, but also for drawing, photography and video as well; together they form an unbroken continuum of image making. This, of course, corresponds to an ideological complex—through which an optical unconscious might be glimpsed.

3. Film as a Medium

Sergej Eisenstein believed that the cinema embodied the most acute aspects of American capitalism. He, of course, was thinking in terms of representation, but the political economy of cinema is sharper still. According to Jonathon Crary, Edison’s primary genius was to use this medium to forge an economic link between hardware and software; what cinema ultimately offered was a new system of quantification and distribution based on the reciprocity of photography and money as homologous forms of social power:«They are equally totalizing systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single global network of valuation and desire. As Marx said of money,photography is also a great leveler, a democratizer, a «mere symbol,» a fiction «sanctioned by the so-called universal concept of mankind. Both are magical forms that establish a new set of abstract relations between individuals and things and impose those relations as real.» [4]

As Eisenstein argued, this is most true in the United States. Of all the industrialized nations, it has the greatest gap between rich and poor, but most Americans believe that they are, more or less, without class—that they are, in short, middle class. Photography’s leveling effect remains naturalistic within the confines of the medium; when Baldessari retroactively applies it to painting, it seems manipulative. Traditionalists might see it as ‹cruel,› ‹unfair› or ‹cynical.› Here, humor takes on a more compensatory Freudian role as the vehicle for otherwise unacceptable revelations. Perversely, Baldessari’s films exclude montage just where it would normally be expected. Instead, they reflect the principle Eisenstein called typage, which, in conventional film appears as typecasting or shooting on location. More broadly, it is a principle of minimum

interference through which reality finds its analogy in film. The presumed veracity of the photo, according to Michael Taussig, is like sympathetic magic insofar as the belief system rests on contact between photons emitted by the subject and the photographic plate. Andy Warhol’s films «Empire,» «Sleep,» «Eat» and «Blowjob» all seemingly guarantee that this contact remains continuous: no cuts, no camera movement and a relatively stationary subject. These movies demand a surplus «persistence of vision» that will transcend rational knowledge of film’s intrinsically fragmentary structure. This is the mythos of «real time.» Filming the Empire State Building this way seemingly reconstitutes its mythic, existential status. Within the gallery system of the 1990s, Warhol’s auratic use of the camera paves the way for the reintegration of film and video as updated forms of painting. When Baldessari brings a similar approach to bear on a mixed collection of ephemera, the viewer must accept it, too, as mythic—or else call into question cinema’s documentary authority.

4. Photographic Works

As opposed to his film approach, Baldessari typically constructs his photo works around the principle of montage. Here, unlike Eisenstein’s classic version, Baldessari’s photo montage is apparently non-signifying. For raw material, he typically uses an intervalvometer to shoot stills from film or television. What the exact shot will be is arbitrary. Thus, the shots are not «composed» in the usual sense. Rather, actors—or the camera—are caught in transition. By combining these pictures with unrelated shots from other movies, Baldessari wrenches them out of their intended narrative. Thus montage foregrounds latent meanings within a given still. (In this regard, the photograph itself is literally metonymic because the 35 mm negative derives directly from film stock.) The misuse of these photos frees them from their regular denotative function. They return to a more fundamental materiality, i.e., what Eisenstein called «the factual immutability of the shot.» However, because the camera always produces surplus information, the shot can’t be reduced to a univocal meaning; that is the role of the caption. What is immutable, then, is not necessarily invariable—at least on the level of the way

its read. This return to photo-materiality releases a liberatory glee. In short, the artist uses still photos to unpack film grammar, a system so thoroughly ingrained that it ordinarily goes unnoticed. Baldessari’s reflexivity thus addresses film and TV as mass culture’s dominant signifying practices, as sites where subjectivity is most powerfully formed and transformed. The focus on subtext not only undermines the overdetermination of conventional narrative imagery, it also indicates how film and television cultivate a deeper from of apperception in mass culture.

5. Between Glamour and Boredom

Boredom in Warhol's work derives primarily from apperception, namely the generalized experience of shock in mass culture. Not surprisingly, Warhol is also a key figure in the transvaluation of Action Painting esthetics. Put bluntly, he substituted piss for paint. More discursively, by claiming he wanted to be a machine, he exchanged authenticity for a romantic inversion of it. This accounts for the fatal glamour that runs through Warhol’s films. The fundamental tragedy, of course, is the camera’s destruction of theauthentic: «The Superstars are fading.» This is exactly what confounded Jackson Pollock when Hans Namuth tried to film him painting. Namuth had asked Pollock to paint over a sheet of glass, so that he could record the action from underneath, at the point of impact. For this Pollock had to pretend to paint a picture on the glass. What pretend meant, more exactly, was to paint something he did not plan to show, to paint on glass instead of canvas. Although this posed a personal crisis for Pollock, earlier on he had, in fact, considered painting on glass as a way to integrate painting and architecture. So, it could only be the camera, the inserted technical apparatus, which was the falsifying element, that for which he performed and that which turned his gestures into theater, or a spectacle. From the more objective standpoint of film form, it is difficult to say whether Namuth’s approach was naturalistic or anti-naturalistic. Baldessari’s camera specializes in de-glamorizing. Since whatever tiny events that unfold do so in real time, this is a recipe for boredom: boredom with a trace of humor, a classic surrealist formula. The effect, however, is far from surreal, yet, if the viewer is willing to make the

requisite mental adjustments, i.e., to disregard the quotidian facticity of the filmed objects, these too might become sublime. That’s exactly the problem the camera always poses: making the requisite mental adjustment. In this sense, Pollock was not simply exploited by the camera; he exploited it, too. Life Magazine and Vogue (including a fashion feature shot by Cecil Beaton) ran big spreads of his work. These, together with his good looks and personal charisma, helped catapult him into national celebrity. As early as 1946, Mark Rothko remarked, «Pollock is a self contained and sustained advertising concern.« [5] In fact, none of that is true, even at the level of polemic. He was not self contained, but promoted by a media system. His role was more that of product than promoter. By putting himself behind the camera, however, Baldessari turns the tables. Only as a joke could he ever exclaim, «I am Nature!» Nor would Ed Harris ever film his life story. When Saturday Night Live featured a regular skit called «Bad Conceptual Art» in the late 1970s, perhaps Baldessari’s work might have made it on. Yet, if praise is damning, parody might be the sincerest form of flattery. Otherwise, boredomkeeps the producers at bay. Baldessari, for his part, promises to entertain next time, then fails to make good on the promise.