Downtown

It’s difficult enough to get a handle on artist John Baldessari’s conceptual work, but with nothing to go on but the prints he’s made from the years 1971 to 1988, it’s even harder. For those familiar with the artist’s unconventional art-making strategies, however, the prints are an entertaining reminder of the depth and quirky nature of Baldessari’s inquiries into the way visual information is processed by our minds.

Some of the newest prints in the “Tristram Shandy Suite” continue the artist’s interest in incompleteness and the way fragmented images can still suggest a whole. But as with some of the 10 prints in “Hegel’s Cellar” and the newest “Object (With Flaw),” Baldessari stretches that concept and makes it more complex by also pulling out random negative or positive shapes from the photos he uses. Since the brightly highlighted shapes dominate, the meaning of the original image becomes secondary to the superimposed “art information.”

Baldessari’s prints, like his photographs and videos, are a tribute to the artist’s rambling sense of invention and keen appreciation of simple things that convey information. When he repeatedly wrote the simple phrase,”I will not make any more boring art,” he fully intended the paradox he created to be a comment on his art-making and a personal challenge. It’s a challenge that’s still engaging. (Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., to Jan. 28.)