The concept of the inventory and the practice of stock keeping are employed by John Baldessari in order to point to the implicitly manipulative quality of the act of representation. In his works from the 1970s, Baldessari made use of mundane, domestic objects in order to juxtapose words and images in a way that challenged conventional processes of signification. In the video Inventory (1972), he employed an encyclopedic process of classification; he combined the visual presentation of blurred black-and-white photographs of objects with their verbal description, which is read in his own voice. Over the course of 24 minutes, Baldessari presents the camera with a series of increasingly larger objects (a glass bead, a nut, an orange peel, a cigarette pack, etc.) - hardly identifiable closeups that undermine the classificatory principle underlying their display.