“A good example of Baldessari’s deadpan irreverence is the 1971 black-and-white video entitled I Am Making Art, in which he moves different parts of his body slightly while saying, after each move, ‘I am making art.’ The statement, he says, ‘hovers between assertion and belief.’ On one level, the piece spoofs the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium. The endless repetition, awkwardness of the movements made by the artist, and the reiteration of the statement ‘I am making art,’ create a synthesis of gestural and linguistic modes which is both innovative (in the same way that the more serious work of his peers is innovative) and absurdly self-evident.”