Rearranging Baldessari’s Balls in a Straight Line

Rearranging Baldessari’s Balls in a Straight Line takes John Baldessari’s Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) and completes its impossible task. Baldessari’s original gesture — a wry attempt to impose geometric order on randomness — becomes here a digital act of obedience: the balls finally align, the straight line is achieved.

The intervention sits somewhere between homage and mischief. By resolving what was meant to remain unresolved, it exposes the tension between control and chance, humour and precision. The joke persists, but its punchline has shifted — from the absurdity of failure to the absurdity of success.

Twelve digital prints with title page and colophon, each 32.1 x 24.1cm (12.6x9.5 inches). Portfolio printed in 2021, housed in a protective folder.
Edition of 100.

On a typically overcast summer's day in Manchester, I trawled the internet looking for something meaningful and came across high-resolution JPEGs of John Baldessari's Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts). Such was Baldessari's influence on my own work that the urge to realign his balls was irresistible. So with heavy grey clouds filling the sky outside my studio, I did just that.