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"In John Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), the title, again, gives a straightforward account of the content. Baldessari sings Sol LeWitt's thirty-five "Sentences on Conceptual Art" (1969), forcing LeWitt's text into the melodies of well-known tunes, including "The Star-Spangled Banner." In this case Baldessari splits language from written form, once again embracing a simple didactic structure that is contradicted from within. As he puts it in his hilariously delicate and deadpan introduction, he wants to help these sentences "escape," because they "have been hidden too long in exhibition catalogues," and, through singing them, to help them reach "a much wider audience." John Baldessari Sings LeWitt is shot in grainy black-and-white. The camera never moves. The artist sits in a black metal folding chair in front of a cinder block wall. Everything connotes great seriousness. Right up until Baldessari begins to sing, that is, when two incongruent registers are forced into juxtaposition. Aside from the evident and deliberate absurdity of the exercise, it is worth noting that Baldessari does engage specifically with a couple of LeWitt's directives: that "the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally" (although LeWitt doesn't seem to have considered singing), and that "if words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature." Baldessari has broken LeWitt's sentences free from their natural context on the printed page, without in any way altering the text itself (although he does worry about his "phrasing"). Just as he did with the instructional texts transferred to his paintings, Baldessari preserves the clear original text while allowing the new context to render it opaque. The gentle undermining of LeWitt's text reflects Baldessari's doubts about his own (or anyone's) capacity to speak from a position of authority on art. "I used to collect books on how to teach art," he recalled. "I was fascinated by them, and still have a lot of those books. I was intrigued by the idea that you could teach art, because I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it couldn't be taught." The LeWitt video is thus related to the Teaching a Plant the Alphabet and Inventory videos, also from 1972. In all of these Baldessari takes the presumed authority associated with teaching and makes it playful and absurd. Of course, even as he argued that it was impossible to tell anyone how to cr
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