Inventory (1972)

Handling

In a sly twist on the methodology of the 18th-century "philosophes" who classified the laws and history of the world in massive encyclopedias, Baldessari devises and then subverts his own system for cataloguing the world. In a matter-of-fact tone, he states that he is going to present a precise, methodical inventory of objects, progressing from small to large in size. Drawing on his own collection of found objects, he exhibits and describes a seemingly arbitrary series of over thirty disparate items. By undermining the viewer's empirical perception, video ultimately is proven to be a flawed medium for the indexing and classification of the world.