Minerva (With Old and New Truths) is a photographic collage composed of eight
fragmented images, taken from various preexisting sources (films and
photographs) and arranged vertically in the three panels. The title is taken
from a sentence of Hegel’s, “Minerva’s owl begins its flight only in the
gathering dusk.” It refers to the crystallization of Greek culture that accompanied
major classical literature and art in the period that saw the fall of the
previous Grecian civilization. 

 

Together with his other complex photo-collages
of the 1980s, this work seems like a long meditation on Roland Barthes’s
statement from his 1966 essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives,” “the narratives of the world are numberless…Must we conclude from
this universality that narrative is insignificant?” In this work of enigmatic
juxtaposition, Baldessari is neither willing to pin down any explicit narrative
nor to exclude alternative readings of its significance. Here, Baldesssari
seems to suggests a dialectic of “ability to see” and “inability to see” in the
arranged images.