Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) by John Baldessari, made in California in 1973, records attempts to align three airborne orange balls.
The title supplies both an instruction and the criterion by which each photograph is judged. A standard roll of film limited the action to thirty-six throws, after which Baldessari selected the twelve results closest to a straight line. In a later discussion of related ball works, he described many of his early projects as being "about choosing" and framed his working method as a question: "what would happen ... if I did this?" Here, choice follows chance. Shifts in throwing technique and wind prevent exact repetition, while editing converts contingent outcomes into a rule-governed portfolio. Made during Baldessari's early-1970s turn toward photo-based conceptual work, the project links play and geometric order with the practical limits of photographic capture.
Across the twelve images, three orange balls hang at changing distances and angles against expanses of blue sky. Green palm trees occasionally enter the frame, locating the action outdoors while interrupting the otherwise reduced compositions. The orange-blue contrast makes each temporary configuration easy to inspect, and the camera arrests gestures that the eye would encounter only briefly. Because the plates are loose and unnumbered, viewers can rearrange them rather than follow a fixed progression toward success.
Baldessari performed the throws while his then-wife, Carol Wixom, operated the camera, shooting on 35-mm film. The twelve selected frames were reproduced as color offset lithographs on glossy leaves, accompanied by title and colophon leaves. Issued in Milan by Giampaolo Prearo and Galleria Toselli in an edition of 2,000, the portfolio came in a blue folder with a die-cut window.
Baldessari's 1974 solo exhibition at Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Buenos Aires included the work, which later appeared in a 2010 exhibition of his prints at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and in a related presentation at Palm Springs Art Museum in 2011. Subsequent presentations included the University of Notre Dame's photography survey in 2020 and the National Gallery of Art's The '70s Lens in 2024–2025. Complete examples are held by institutions including SFMOMA, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
