Inventory

“In Baldessari’s wonderful Inventory, the artist presents to the camera for thirty minutes an accumulation of indiscriminate and not easily legible objects arranged in order of increasing size and accompanied by a deadpan description—only to have the sense of their relative size destroyed by the continual readjustment of the camera [in order to] keep them within the frame. Who can forget Adlai Stevenson’s solemn television demonstration of the ‘conclusive photographic evidence’ of the Cuban missile sites, discernible over the TV screen as only gray blurs?”

—David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium,” Video Art: An Anthology, eds. Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1974)

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.