In the piece, Ever is Over All, by Pipilotti Rist, a stark juxtaposition is used to convey beauty, destruction and perhaps even delusion. Ms. Rist exhibits two overlapping video moments simultaneously and, as far as I could tell, placed them at a right angle within the exhibition space. She chose to use the camera at both a wide and close up shot. These moments play against each other in what appears to be slow motion. I suppose Ms. Rist was pairing a panning shot of a row of flowers to suggest nature. In the opposing tracking shot, we see a woman on an urban street use this same type of flower to gleefully break car windows, receiving nothing but smiles from passers-by, even police officers. I suspect the vision of this piece was to show the inherent destruction in nature, suggesting perhaps that we are that brutal natural force, even in a civilized society.
In John Baldessari’s piece, I am making art, we seem to be receiving a cheeky, but truthful, representation of the vastness of what can be considered “art.” With minimal movements and self touch, Baldessari appears to be both making fun of other artists who present simple ideas as art, such as Bruce Navman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Way, while also bringing attention to the idea that art may just be one’s intention to make it.