Visual Arts Center presents Fade In: Teaching a Plant the Alphabet

Fade In is a program of specially curated films and videos projected nightly in the Visual Arts Center and viewable through the bay windows facing the southeast lawn of the Art Building.

For this edition of Fade In, the VAC presents John Baldessari’s early 1970s video Teaching a Plant the Alphabet. Created as an exercise in futility, the video is an absurdist lesson in cognition and recognition. Known for creating the illogic from a logical construct and making nonsense from sense, this tape documents Baldessari’s response to Joseph Beuys’s influential performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Baldessari’s approach here is characteristically subtle and ironic, involving ordinary objects and a seemingly banal task.

This video will run continuously on a loop until midnight each evening through May 12.