Addition Through Subtraction: A Lesson From John Baldessari

More. We all crave more. We’re obsessed with adding things, piling them on until we’ve built monuments of information, color and noise. But here’s the catch — meaning often hides in the spaces between.

The work of John Baldessari serves the point. Baldessari spent his career taking away the thing we’re trained to look for first: the face. In images of people doing utterly forgettable things — shaking hands, snipping ribbons — he covered their faces with colored dots.

Red, yellow, blue. Baldessari forces us to consider what’s left. A handshake. A pair of scissors. The action, the posture, the gestures take on their own weight, inviting us to look beyond the obvious.

Funny, isn’t it? Take away the face, and you see what’s going on in a different light. You notice the way one person leans in more, or the tension in their grip. No two ribbons are the same, no two handshakes identical. By taking away, Baldessari made the mundane feel meaningful.

That’s what good art — and good communication — does. Sometimes, it’s what you don’t say that makes an impact. Mark Twain put it best when writing to a friend: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Stripping things down to their essence takes work. Leaving out the noise takes time.

In a world screaming for more, sometimes less is revolutionary. Sometimes, the things we take away reveal what matters most.

Here’s a short piece on John Baldessari narrated by Tom Waits. Definitely worth a watch.