It is truly an ironic stroke of fate. Lewis Baltz’ path seemed to be laid out plainly before him. He had graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from San Francisco Art Institute and an MA from Clarmont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University). For his first degree, he had created his Prototypes – photographs that explore the viewpoints and forms of various minimalist and conceptual approaches to the urban landscapes of the 1960s. For his second degree, he had produced the Tract Houses, forming the first of several series that would transform his photographic documentation into conceptualised visual fieldwork. Both of these series, as well as those that followed – Maryland, New Industrial Park Near Irvine, Park City, San Quentin Point, Candlestick Point etc. – marked him out as an artist who reflected the commercialisation of landscape and housing development in a socially critical way and with all the precision of a surveryor or visual statistician.
His work fitted perfectly into the intellectual and conceptual context of an art world which, at that time, was taking an increasing interest in photography. Or so it seemed. Here was social criticism that was neither politically moralistic, nor pointed an accusatory finger. Sharply, directly and clearly showing what was what, Lewis Baltz swept away the cobwebs, dismissing the cloying sentimentality and existential hubris that the traditional rectangle of the photograph, in all its virtuosity, had come to represent. He created photographs of remarkably clear-cut focus, immaculate composition and astonishing contrasts, which nevertheless seemed almost transparent and immaterial in their lucidity..
The way ahead for Lewis Baltz as an artist looked smooth. His series were shown at some of New York’s most prestigious galleries, such as Leo Castelli in Soho. And yet, somehow, a few grains of sand got into those smooth-running gears. Not that Lewis Baltz couldn’t have exhibited in international galleries and museums. Not that he couldn’t have published his series in book form. Not that he hadn’t caught the appreciative attention of experts and those in the know. Yet, strangely, the reception of his work was primarily in the field of photography rather than in the world of art. Anyone who understands just how little Lewis Baltz actually liked the photographic scene as such – or rather, how strongly he felt that much in photography was antiquated, self-indulgent, unclear and cloyingly sentimental – can grasp just how painful this reaction of being accepted as a photographer but not so much as an artist, must have been for him.
The reasons for this are many and to some extent unclear. Perhaps it was the very fact that, although he was able to exhibit at Leo Castelli, he was mostly relegated to the secondary gallery Castelli Graphics. Perhaps it had partly to do with the fact that his art really was socially critical – and not just paying lip service to social critique. The ideas he presented were evident and emphatic in their social critique, and not merely paying lip service. That is not something that always goes down well in the US. As the iconoclastic 1960s and 1970s were drawing to a close and everyone was enthusiastically starting to produce images again – often in very large formats, at times as big as billboards – while storming the museums and the art markets with them, Lewis Baltz remained focused, at least for the time being, on small-scale works of great precision that were sharp, increasingly unsettling and even radical. The main reason for this can be found elsewhere: the art scene at that time, riding a wave of burgeoning interest in photography, loved to incorporate used photographs, industrial photographs and scraps of photos into artworks. Photographs had to take on the role of realistic sign or two-dimensional relic. The more patina the better. In an interview with New York photography critic A.D. Coleman, published in the New York Times in 1972, Ed Ruscha stated that photography, for him, was „strictly a medium to use or to not use, and I use it only when I have to. I use it to do a job, which is to make a book.“ In the same interview, he explains that the photographs for his book are not art, but merely a tool by which to achieve that goal – simply snapshots. In contrast, the prints by Lewis Baltz must have appeared highly modern. For Lewis Baltz was producing precise, sharply focused, detailed prints that charted the American landscape like X-rays, or, as we might say today, like high-res scans. It seems to have been this sharpness of focus, this sheer perfection, that somehow rattled the art world and made it recoil. Yet the world of photography welcomed him, albeit with a kind of love-hate approach, given that Baltz was so often one step ahead of everyone else in exploring and recognising the power structures of society and their visual signs.
And so, for a long time, Lewis remained very much an artists‘ artist. Highly esteemed by some. Then he mutated into a European, leaving the USA, abandoning his position as an enlightening author, and becoming instead a persuader, a storyteller, moderator, seeker – a veritable sorcere’s apprentice – author A, author B, non-author. The destabilisation and dissolution of the photo-optical and photostatic relationship between seeing and what is seen was, for him, a given. Both subject and object, image and world, were energised so that they constantly clashed, finding new contexts, different constellations and changing states of matter. Ultimately, in a post-poststructuralist world, he no longer believed that a scientifically precise unraveling or visual documentation of the world could explain the essence of things, and so he sought new approaches and embraced the society of the spectacle.
That rattled too – and how. Even his own admirers were perplexed. Although his work is finished (complemented in this book by previously unpublished images) its reception still has a long way to go. That will involve starting anew, several times over, in order to appreciate, discuss and perhaps fully understand the art of Lewis Baltz within the context of his time and beyond. Of that I am certain. Lewis Baltz consistently created a thoroughly enthralling hybrid, not only of art and photography, but also of his own early and late phases, and of his keen photographic view of the American landscape in all its radical economy-driven capitalisation, and its magnificent transformation into a society in which the artist, observing the latest social, economic and media developments, more or less completely reinvented himself.
Translated by Ishbel Flett