"[A] rather perverse exercise in futility," this tape documents Baldessari's response to Joseph Beuys's influential performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Baldessari's approach here is characteristically subtle and ironic, involving ordinary objects and a seemingly banal task. The philosophical underpinnings of Baldessari's exercise are structuralist theories about the opaque and artificial nature of language as a system of signs. Using a common houseplant to represent nature and instructional flashcards to represent the alphabet, Baldessari ironically illustrates this theorem. That language is the structuring element of the tape—the length of the tape was determined by the number of letters in the alphabet—enforces the connection between language and art, a recurrent theme in Baldessari's work.
This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.
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Biography of John Baldessari Titles by John Baldessari:
Baldessari Sings LeWitt 
Ed Henderson Reconstructs Movie Scenarios
Ed Henderson Reconstructs Movie Scenarios
I Am Making Art
I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
Inventory
The Meaning of Various Newsphotos to Ed Henderson - 2
The Meaning of Various Photographs to Ed Henderson - 1
Teaching a Plant the Alphabet
The Way We Do Art Now and Other Sacred Tales
Xylophone
Work by John Baldessari also appears on:
Anthology: Surveying the First Decade
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