Baldessari’s cinema works primarily in the Space of the spectator and opens up the filmmaking field to other language forms, to other story telling procedures. The film is no longer a narrative progression but rather a succession of near-still, suspended, photographic moments. Baldessari’s film aesthetic is built around his conceptual photographic work, an obsession with the non-link, with fragmentation and gaps. Images are both autonomous and integrated forms, time-image units referring to an ever-evolving film. It is up to the spectator to reconstruct and project a structure, to make up sequences from images.
Title is without doubt one his most radical Projects, a juxtaposition of extremely minimal images following each other without hierarchy nor direction. In this work Baldessari isolates and breaks up a classic film into its component parts. First the objects, the characters, the landscapes, then the frames associating two shapes, and finally the start of an action, of a dialogue.
In this way he shows the precise making and manipulation of meaning, the tricks of cinematic space-time.
In Six Colorful Inside Jobs he draws a parallel between a double process of life and creation. The video shows a room being painted in six different colors, each color of the spectrum corresponding to a day of the week. This work, which started as a performance/installation, integrates the artist as a comic figure faced with contemporary history—that of American painting—and shifts his function toward that of a house painter. Through this form of irony, Baldessari shows to what extent instruments and materials help him define the subtle limits between art and work, art and life.
4 Short Films is the product of the same ironic twist, a free and absurd association between time, matter, and objects. (Stéphanie Moisdon).