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

1973

For this work, Baldessari threw three balls at once, trying to line them up in midair, while his then-wife, Carol Wixom, took pictures. Although he endeavored to make each attempt identical, no two photographs are the same due to unavoidable differences in his technique and uncontrollable variables such as changes in wind speed. Baldessari made thirty-six attempts—the number of exposures on a standard 35 mm film roll—and chose the twelve shots he considered most successful. Through this process, he documented the unbridgeable divide between the conception of an artistic idea and its execution, which is inevitably affected by the vagaries of chance.