Lewis Baltz died on November 22, 2014. To speak in emotive terms, this was the moment at which nature and culture, human and meaning parted forever. The monument “Baltz” – and yes, he is a monument of contemporary, pre-present photography that is, for the most part, conceptual – remains. We will miss this special human being. Over the years, whenever I was in Paris I would often meet him at Café Beaubourg next to the Centre Pompidou. It was near his small apartment in Le Marais, where he lived with Slavica Perkovic, his wife. We would sit across the table from each other, order coffee and something to eat, and talk. To be more precise, Lewis Baltz would talk to me. Half of my attention would be absorbed by his voice, by that unusual mix of sounds created by a deep bass on a low volume. Maybe it was the 60 cigarettes a day he had been smoking for years that had thinned out the volume of his voice. In the noisy café, his dark and low voice only carried about half a meter. So I leaned forward, and often cupped my ear with my hand. The other half of my attention was turned towards his flow of thoughts – ideas and comments that would continuously unfurl as soon as the coffee had been served. Gossip and things pertaining to our friendship for maybe five to ten minutes, then two hours of reasoning, often on the topic of “power relationships” in the society of today and yesteryear. His mode of argumentation was that of a smart Marxism expanded by systems theory, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, firm and laconic, sometimes performed with a hint of sarcasm. In the end I would have both my hands on my ears. Not to cover them, but to understand everything as well as possible, both acoustically and in terms of content.
I remember Lewis Baltz almost exclusively in this seating arrangement: facing each other, both of us leaning forward slightly. Face to face, mind to mind. We would only begin drinking red wine and having a laugh from 6 p.m. onwards. He was strict. And serious and concentrated. Rarely a smile. Almost like his photographs. And then the images reeled off, point by point, like a film, like a statement. A few things had to be said, shown, and recorded. He would only allow himself to be frivolous when it came to ephemera, on invitations or on the inside flap of a book cover. On the jacket of a book he might pose as an elegantly dressed Californian “Mastroianni” in a precursor to the current selfie trend – knowing full well that the market was becoming increasingly personalized, that art was supposed to dress well and that in the future the artist would have to be a brand. It was perhaps an ironic riff on his own narcissism, and maybe also his conceding the fact that with his rigorous oeuvre he would never be able to appear glamourous in the event-led art world beginning to take shape at that time, in the early 1990s. Precise, laconic and sarcastic in his work and in conversation, frivolous and ironic in his later outward demeanor? Can we speak of a Baltz 1 and 2?
A clear division actually does exist in his work, with a striking caesura: LB1 + LB2. The first Baltz encompasses his famous groups of works, the large collection of small black-and-white photographs (usually printed on 8x10-inch paper), shot as individual images to begin with, then soon made exclusively as series, groups and sequences. Begun in the 1960s and realized until 1989. In his essay on the Prototypes (Baltz’s first photographs still realized as standalone pieces) Matthew Witkovsky precisely described the set of tools and methodology with which Baltz began his work in the photographic medium and which he employed throughout the most important sections of this large first part of his oeuvre. Witkovsky emphasized that the Prototypes (The Prototype Works, 1967–72) constituted anything but a simple or neutral capturing of a tightly cropped view of the world, but that they instead seemed almost strange and unnatural in their flatness:
“Baltz chose his distance and his positioning to minimize optical distortions, thereby heightening congruity between the depicted surfaces and that of the print. […] The negatives (high-contrast 35-millimeter frames) were first developed as if they were pieces of microfilm, that is, surfaces for the recording of flat and tonally primitive text. After killing the contrast in his negatives, Baltz laboriously tested local alterations in enlargement, over- or under-exposing portions of the image surface in roughly five to twenty-five separate steps to reintroduce contrast in a selective manner. The replacement of shadows, an indication of external light sources, with the suggestion of an inner luminosity, was one goal; saturation of tones was another. Both aims (and that of taut planarity as well) tend to reduce information while increasing visual attractiveness.”[1]
It may seem odd at first glance to begin a retrospective contemplation with a technical description of photographs. Yet there is barely another photographer whose work is so strongly characterized by such a significant decision, so considerably shaped by it. Those who have stood before Lewis Baltz’s small-format images, usually arranged in rigid blocks, will not forget the slight but lasting shiver the works induce. A shiver caused equally by what the images show or reproduce, their subject matter, and the way in which this is shown in the small, cold, almost foil-like, seemingly transparent photographs.[2] These are images that revoke the dramatic element of perspective, but in the flatness of the print reproduce traces of reality, stamp-like and razor-sharp. With contrasts that look as though they have been rubbed in with a thumb. Looking at them, they instantly give you the feeling of reality breathing down your neck. Contemplating them, you know that the infinite fine-grained nature of the image, which Baltz achieved by using exceptionally light-insensitive film material (he spoke of the microfilm having a sensitivity of 6 ASA and of using a tripod on sunny days), serves to embolden our perception and nourish our awareness, in order for our cognitive attention not to diminish for a second; so that we, as viewers, are willing to see everything he shows us in detail, to study and endure all of the banal, quotidian, painfully normal things in his photos along with the unfathomable ones, in order to then gain an incremental understanding of what it is that is at stake here over the course of the sequence, group or series of images, as these unfurl their visual “language.”
There is an idiom in German that translates literally as “exorcising the Devil with Beelzebub” and means replacing one evil with another. It describes the principle of tit for tat, of an eye for an eye, in conventional language, and may, if seen in reverse, also be understood as a principle of destabilizing existing systems through a high degree of affirmation. This principle can be found at play in the work of Lewis Baltz. His images seem in a way to embody an ultimate photographic modernity. The photographer stands upright and shoots, for the most part, what lies straight ahead of him; meaning he does not go for odd angles, nor for any artful contortions. He faces the world, his prints are incredibly clear, precise down to the very last detail and he pays great attention to the world. He also uses exclusively photographic means in creating his work. All of this essentially corresponds with the pragmatic part of the generally held notion of modern photography as formulated by various photographers themselves in the 1920s and 1930s.[3] It is just that Lewis Baltz pushed the “Modernism” of his photographs so far that it could seem as though he wanted to sweep the modern age away with an excess of modernity, as though in perfecting and escalating it he wanted to frame its demise. And, if we are to take the step from image to reality, from art to society, as though he wanted to show us – while remaining very prosaic and clear, and using the most accepted of means – a disaster lurking on the horizon.
It was clear, both from things Lewis Baltz said in private as well as from public statements he gave, firstly just how highly he valued photography as a medium. He held it in the very highest esteem as being extremely well suited to showing things how they are, to showing what is happening out there that is important in terms of our society’s structure, and which for this very reason is worth being photographed, shown and discussed. Secondly, it was highly evident that he deeply despised the self-referential world of photography, which as he saw it was spinning a cocoon around itself so as to be able to formulate its own system of rules within that safe space pertaining only to this very medium (and removed from the criteria by which proponents of contemporary art, or even philosophy, sociology, ethnology or other sciences were judging their relative successes) and to celebrate itself. His sharp-tongued comment on this was: “Thus photography inherited some of that portion of the American art audience too intellectually torpid to understand, much less take interest in, the kinds of issues raised by the best American art of the 1960s.”[4]
His own path led him through photography (he began taking pictures very early, aged eleven or twelve),[5] through the world of his photography mentor William Current (who after his father’s untimely death would also take on the role of his surrogate father) and, via an appreciation of the artistic mission of Edward Weston, in the direction of becoming an artist interested in contemporary art as a conceptual field of reference and the medium of photography as a tool.[6] Seen from this perspective, his exaggeration of the Modernist form of photography appears in a new light. Lewis Baltz moved away from photography as he had known it since his youth, purged his work of all stylization, theatricality, pomposity, of the existential ponderousness many have been so happy to execute photography with, and transformed his photographic activity into a cool instrument for research and cognition that was conversant with the search for traces, with the structural analysis going hand in hand with 1960s and 1970s art and philosophy, and which in terms of form and content was much closer to the latter than any attempt to advance photographic history. Formally, Baltz worked like a professional Straight Photographer[7] (he appreciated the cool, impersonal style of corporate photography that seemed to do away with the author), while in terms of the content of his work and his own stance he was a conceptually thinking artist.
In the first part of Lewis Baltz’s oeuvre, in LB1, we thus already find a doubling, a hybrid mixture of photographer and artist: a photographing and conceptually thinking artist, who, as we will see in more detail in the following, in his work replaced the heroic with the everyday, the emotional with the rational, the exceptional and eventful with the structural. Most undeservedly, his work was time and again derogated due to this hybrid role. Despite his being able to show his core work series for about 16 years from 1971 onwards in the most important New York gallery of the time, namely Leo Castelli’s “Castelli Graphics,” placing him in the context of leading art movements, his work – and this is some kind of irony of fate – was for a long time predominantly critiqued from the photography side.
Lewis Baltz elucidated the path he had taken in his work in conversation with Jeff Rian: “Still, from reading camera magazines I learned about Robert Frank’s The Americans and about Edward Weston – who I wanted to be. I thought Weston was doing the best thing you could do with photography. But photography wasn’t so much an art.”[8] He went on to say that in the late 1950s, people working in photography took different directions – “Add to that, Robert Frank’s The Americans, which changed the emotional key of photography from European pathos to American irony” – but that his own formative development, and his thinking, took place in the sphere of art. And this sphere was seeing dramatic changes, the great rejection of modernity and along with it authoritarian models of art and society. The devastating events of the first half of the 20th century (the two World Wars having left around 80 million people dead), the advancements made in science and technology and the first waves of consumerism also radically changed people’s mindset. Let us open up the perspective on this a little:
In the first half of the 20th century the image was taken very seriously and seen as absolute. It often had great power, as though it were a tablet of law, a parade ground or a plan, a visual template according to which it was possible to conduct the psychological world. Sometimes it seemed as though the white canvas was the equivalent of lofty, pure, absolute time, while the black canvas was empty or nullified time, the void, and the red canvas was active, bleeding time, activity. Despite the fact that the canvasses were (often) abstract, they nonetheless stemmed from a desire to express deep meaning. They were fervently serious, deeply poetically serious at times, serious in their thinking and also sublimely serious.
Allow me to emphasize this argument by citing some artistic dogmas. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, for instance, conceived his work thus: “Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility” – and Kazimir Malevich his own as follows: “In the vast space of cosmic dance I build the white world of Suprematist abstraction as a manifestation of the liberating void” – whilst Max Bill understood his as follows: “Concrete art [...] is to be an expression of the human mind made for the human mind, and it shall be of a concision and clarity, of that perfection we have come to expect of works of the human mind” – to quote Richard Paul Lohse: “In their dialectic character, serial and modular methods of creation draw parallels to the expression and activities of a new society” – or the laconically absolute, exalted Barnett Newman: “The Sublime is now.”[9] The paintings presented themselves in the very same way these manifestos sound, and this was also how they were “received.” One could almost see it as a gnostic gasconade in an increasingly agnostic age.
It was a seriousness-of-images very nearly able to provoke assumptions of heresy: Was the image taken so seriously not in itself, nor as a metaphor, but in its function as a refuge from and surrogate for the world? Was the image taken, understood and performed as a representative of reality, with the entire seriousness applicable to “reality,” with the whole force of utopian projection and in the rhythm of time as lived by society? The image as a secularized Tablet of Stone, as an icon of the first half of the 20th century – and photography as self-assurance in the ever faster-paced era that was the second half of the 20th century? The reference to these absolute positions, to this succession of avant-gardes and manifestos, is so important because they took place in times of great crises and came to an abrupt end in the 1960s and 1970s. This seriousness, this canon, this punched-out understanding was to be ruptured in the 1960s, because it no longer corresponded with people’s experience of the world. In the mélange of feelings conjured up by postwar shock and the onset of the economic boom, in the rapid commercialization of the world starting first and foremost in the US, it had become obsolete. The incomprehensible horror of World War II had been too great. The belief in the state, in institutions, in the Church, in the various moral and legal authorities had been deeply shaken – if you will, the Freudian superego had been deeply disturbed.
As is well known, this had tangible consequences for the development of contemporary art. For many artists, the 1960s were a decade of total rejection. They saw a turning away from the abstract creative approaches striving for purism and objectivity, as well as from the intellectual system that went along with these, from the artistic oeuvre as a coherent, absolute entity; from what was seen as art-worthy material and from the concept of a personal artistic style. There was also a turning away from the great narrative, the great idea of form and universal truths. All of this was replaced by understanding, reflecting, researching, questioning, searching and testing – by reflection on the conditions of one’s own actions, by limitation of the statement one made and by exploration of the media, methods and materials one used. In the field of photography, doubt manifested itself in the form of a rejection of the individual image and a turn towards sets, series and sequences of photographs; in painting, it could be seen in the break away from the rectangle, from limiting an image to a canvas and in painting spilling onto the wall instead, into space and into life; all of which constituted an incremental “de-materialization” of art. The French group “Support/Surface” for instance (so as to include a European example here, too) discussed chassis and canvas as image supports and dissolved this construction. These types of actions were geared towards an artistic de-escalation of sorts, towards a purging of meaning and pathos, and a de-mystification. From now on, it was enough to show material (stone, metal, wood), supports (chassis, canvas or photographic paper) or surfaces (primer, the application of paint or photographic emulsion) or even just a few thoughts, ideas, experimental arrangements and hypotheses. The action of the process itself could also become the focus of contemplation, replacing the result, the image or sculpture. Action superseded the artwork as static object in the shape of performances, happenings, Land Art, Conceptual Art, investigative art, Body Art. Immobile artwork, stretched onto a wooden frame and hung on a wall in a building or cast in bronze, was replaced by mobile art and this could be a movement, flow, sequence, question or an idea.
As regards photography, Douglas Fogle provided a compelling description of the rift occurring in the 1960s. Until well into the 1970s, the “crucial moment” had been a guiding principle for that fraction of the photographic world advocating a Modernist view of the medium’s aesthetic autonomy and that regarded and discussed photography – without exception – as existing inside a closed rectangle which was seen to constitute its area of operation and truth. This point of view ultimately saw photography in terms of the panel painting:
„It is the gap between these two photographic worlds—the modernist aesthetic transmission of an authentic immediacy through the capturing of a photographic essence and the conceptual construction of a staged event that took up photography as a means to an end—that interests us here.”[10]
The image revolution that began to take hold in art and, with a slight delay, in the world of photography, can also be visualized by way of American photography’s relationship with the American landscape. The projection of a sacred nature, a natura naturans, an untouched, sacred Nature with a capital N, could be found in American photography since the 19th century, from Carleton Watkins to Ansel Adams. This began to slowly change in the 1960s. The newly awakened critical gaze discovered the pantheist notion of nature being confronted with a changing landscape, with the occupation of the land, the transformation of nature into a landscape, in a territory taken into possession. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha and other young artists countered the enchanted, rapturous view with a much more realistic, contemporary perspective. One focusing on concrete, everyday, banal environments. This new generation of photographers shocked a public accustomed to the notion of landscape as beautiful and existential with, among others, the exhibition “New Topographics” (1975–76).”[11] Here, the “divine,” sacred landscape[12] was superseded by landscape as it truly was. Or to put it in more banal terms, the photographers turned 180 degrees, thereby no longer looking out into untouched nature, into the national parks, but back towards the cities, into landscape as a place that was being used, consumed, designed and capitalized on, into the quickly spreading, sprawling American suburbs. Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Joe Deal and their fellow artists[13] simply populated the ideal vision of an America that until then might have been portrayed as barren or empty, but always at one with itself, beautiful and fulfilled. The heroic I and nature turned into We and the park and finally They and the front yard. Where there was once a beautiful spot of untouched nature, there were now detached houses or worn-out tires or some other kind of trash telling us that someone has been here before. Landscape turned into territory, limiting, excluding, but most importantly occupied. It became the field of economic activity, a place that had been conquered and commercialized. Lewis Baltz most notably turned this new understanding of landscape against the old Romanticism. His work was informed by a new conception of images. In his essay “Photography’s Objecthood,” Matthew S. Witkovsky quoted Donald Judd: “I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it’s very complicated …”[14] Baltz played a central role in this development as one of its protagonists. Let us now take a closer look at this.
“Simply put, this is one of the most impressive bodies of student work ever assembled.” Matthew S. Witkovsky’s statement on the Prototypes (The Prototype Works, 1967–72) is two-sided. On the one hand it describes and summarizes what seemed incredible: Lewis Baltz executed a large part of the photographs later titled Prototypes during the time of his undergraduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.[15] In terms of scope, precision and consistency, the work was and still is highly unusual for a student. On the other hand the statement insinuates, albeit quietly, that this was still the work of a student. Witkovsky went on to provide a knowledgeable account of how strongly the images reflect the young Lewis Baltz’s involvement with contemporary (American) art, how an image looks like a “found canvas” by Robert Magold, while other photographs indicate his study of the work of Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra and others in formal, thematic and strategic terms.[16] As evident as these references may be (Joseph Kosuth inspired the name for the group of works with his titles), as a body of works the Prototypes appear surprisingly rich, precise and present. The industrial symbols, the cars and garages, the rather unspectacular doors and windows and the numerous walls (building/house walls, brick walls) perceived and listed by Witkovsky[17] in the images, for the most part presented in a full frontal view that seems to fuse image plane and print plane and narrows down the image space, and the odd, often dull light – all these elements were to return in one or another of the later works, to be expanded on and refined and made into works in their own right. In this sense, the Prototypes read like the mother soil of a young artist, like the testing out of patterns of thought and images and a first vocabulary, which he was to draw on from that point onwards.
Two fields are juxtaposed in the Prototypes. On the one hand they capture California’s often commercial or small-scale industrial architecture in full frontal view and with closed, barred windows and doors that provide no clue as to the interior of the building they were a part of, which when looking at larger groups of these images gives rise to an impression of abandonment, decline, a dead-end, melancholic feeling. On the other hand, the images of cars, the recording made in a motel room, the plan view of the city, lettering and neon signs reading “Italian Food” or “Ideal” seem remarkably fresh, attractive, as though the dusty reality were here countered by a small world of wishful thinking, as though Baltz had here explored the dichotomy of the real world and the symbolic one, hard reality and the realm of desires, as though he had been trying to make the symbols of the commercial world crash onto the silent walls of the real, built world. The words “Point Realty” crop up twice as signs on walls, advertising the hidden combination of real world and investment world, of concretization and abstraction, of home and money. The places Baltz photographed and the titles he gave his works speak of a secret, hidden yearning in a life he evidently from the start did not see as a great departure and even less as a realm of possible utopias: Mountain View, Corona del Mar, Fashion Islands. And the “Berkeley Crisis” hovered above all of this, as can be seen in a photograph showing a metal newspaper stand with the September 4, 1968 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, which with the doubling of “Council Gets Tough” and “Tough Action Berkeley – Threat of New Violence” provides an account of the rift in society in that “Year of the Barricades,” while the image of the “Motel Room” seems to be suggesting a longing for bourgeois privacy (in an orderly and functioning society) – while at the same time calling to mind a staged fiction, a perfect film set.
In his rich and substantial essay “Lewis Baltz and the Garden of False Reality” published in Candlestick Point, Wolfgang Scheppe wrote about this first large body of works:[18]
“In the more narrowly defined photographic epoch of Lewis Baltz’s artistic oeuvre, two groups of works stand in opposition to one another: the first dealing with order and the other with dis-order in the social organization of space. The survey of the landscape of total order and its profitable transformation into real estate and ground rent was joined by an examination of the landscape of entropy. The external non-places for the disposal of waste.”
The first group included Tract Houses, New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California, Maryland, Nevada and Park City – the second St. Quentin Point, Continuous Fire Polar Circle, Near Reno and Candlestick Point. These works developed an increasingly pessimistic undertone over the years. Scheppe quoted Baltz: “My work in the 1980s had an apocalyptic subtext; capitalism – the market – went from being the most important thing to being the only thing – and has remained ever since; by 1990 it seemed that the world had, in a sense, already ended, that is, it had withdrawn itself from our apprehension.”[19]
Tract Houses (1969–71) is a series of 25 photographs, most of them square, which were usually hung as a block of 5 x 5 images and show a residential estate with terraced houses being built along a freeway. Baltz employed a very narrow field of view in these photographs, showing only façades, still-covered windows and doors nailed shut. Most of these are shown in a frontal view: part of the façade, windows and doors shown in such a narrow composition and depicted so clearly that the dirty, rough, not-yet-plastered surfaces of the little houses spread out like a carpet of material in front of the viewer’s eyes, making the works somewhat reminiscent of the hard-edge paintings of his neighbor John McLaughlin. Two or three of the images open up the perspective and allow us to see the houses not as symbols, but as a narrow, labyrinthine housing estate. In 1990, almost 20 years later, Baltz photographed the estate once more – this time in color – for his catalog Rule without Exception.
Lewis Baltz ‘took’ Maryland (1976) from the middle distance. The images look down on and across at the ensemble of buildings, sometimes from a slightly higher vantage point, showing how they are placed in relation to one another. To produce these photographs he wandered around the detached housing development, approaching it from the unfinished side, from the construction site, roaming about the premises by himself either in the morning or evening light. The interplay between the small houses in the sunlight and the dark black lawn areas makes this residential area look strange and unfamiliar, transforming it into a somewhat disconcerting scene where dark shadows lurk. The author, though only present through his gaze, seems very present in these works, he “stalks” around the area, investigating the place by himself, as a stranger. This intense series is the one in Baltz’s oeuvre most reminiscent of a film set. In retrospect it seems like preparation for Park City. In the same way that the stonemasons first had to prove themselves by building a small chapel in the Provence before being let loose on Notre-Dame de Paris, here Lewis Baltz proved to himself that he would in future be able to realize the work on a larger scale for which he had lain the foundations here.
The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California (1974), usually hung in three rows of 17 photographs or in four of ten and one of eleven, are made in a similar way to Tract Houses and Maryland, which is why I am mentioning them here slightly outside of their correct chronology. The extensive series brings together houses in a close-up view with views of the landscape and the cube-like factories or warehouse facilities in it. In contrast to Tract Houses, with a few minor exceptions the buildings shown here had all been completed; they glisten and shine in the splendid Californian sunshine as though they have been spruced up for some event, maybe a sales talk. The light supports the minor architectural attempts to structure the banal façades. Apart from this, the viewer is again confronted with façades photographed for the most part directly from the front and belonging to buildings that lose all spatiality through the way in which they are shown, which turns them into (geometrically abstract) images. Into silent geometrically abstract images in fact, as these façades reveal very little of the content or function these structures might have. “Walter Hopps remarked that you couldn’t tell if they were making panty hose or mega-death,” Lewis Baltz once noted in an interview with Jeff Rian.[20] In this series we are faced with a commercialized modernity, a return-on-investment minimalism, that only went for the banal cubic shape of its houses – the basic structure of which is made up of a metal frame, on which cladding is then hung – because it was cheaper to construct than anything else. No architects were involved, and building regulations, if there were any, were only just about observed. In individual cases Lewis Baltz photographed one of the anonymous cubes from a corner in order to show that this was indeed a three-dimensional object.
Robert A. Sobieszek wrote a short, yet incisive essay entitled “Terminal Documents. The Early Desert of Lewis Baltz” on Nevada (1977), a group of 15 photographs for which, as far as I know, there was no clear instructions as to how they should be hung – three rows of five photographs or eight or seven or simply a row of 15 images seem to me to be possible ways of presenting this series. I would like to insert two quotations from his essay at this point:
“The landscape underwent rather grave changes between 1956 and 1979. Between the release of John Ford’s desert epic The Searchers and that of Andrei Tarkovsky’s post-apocalyptic film Stalker, landscape was increasingly perceived with far more than a simple loss of innocence and only a bit less than a complete surrender to cynicism. Of course the real landscape during these years was progressively scarred, mutilated, poisoned, sterilized, of all life forms and made, over the course of a couple of decades, to truly resemble T.S. Eliot’s ‘stony rubbish’ filled with ‘broken images.’ But, much more important, our very idea of the landscape (and ‘landscape’ after all is nothing but a perception) changed utterly and without, it would seem, redemption.”[21]
He goes on to observe that a “death of nature” had taken place; that the “notion of natural sublimity” had been replaced and the notion of a nature existing alongside and independent of human culture had disappeared. After the important reference to Robert Smithson’s theories of an entropic universe – theories and works that probably had a strong influence on Lewis Baltz – he states:
“In Nevada Baltz’s focus is no longer on the sterile architecture of an equally sterile late-century environment, but on a entropic terrain vague where what is built is merged with what is unbuilt, where ‘sprawl’ and ‘blight’ have become the picturesque norm, where the positions of observer and inhabitant have become confounded, and where past and present are intermingled.”[22]
I would merely like to add to these succinct formulations that this series is strongly reminiscent of the principle of the Nouveau Roman, of the recording of an event, a situation or a crime scene from many different perspectives. Baltz himself said, on another occasion, that he only became aware of the Nouveau Roman later on, yet his views inward or outward, up and down, his total views of groups of houses and his close-up shots, for example of a broken strip light on tarmac, still seem – without having been coordinated and independent in their own right – like illustrations of that very principle. A principle that began to question the position of the autocratic author as the sole figure in charge of the camera, action and narrative and consequently began to dissolve this notion.
Park City (1979) forms a turning point, so to speak. The highly elaborate series, which follows a huge building project for a garden city and dormitory town built on the contaminated ground of a former silver-mining town 45 kilometers from Salt Lake City, was the culmination of Lewis Baltz’s observations hitherto. The site was a large-scale real-estate project and its builder-owners were hoping for a sizeable return on investment. Lewis Baltz said of this kind of project that it was no longer in any way concerned with building something for the people. The developers, the syndicate were interested in only one thing and that was the profit to be made. In the end, after two or three years of work, the series comprised 102 images. As was generally the case at the time, Leo Castelli published them in a large, monumental book and they were also shown as a wall installation alternating between six rows of 17 photographs and eight rows, of which seven had 13 photographs and one had eleven. For the first time Baltz did not frame his photos, but merely mounted the prints behind glass or Plexiglas. A comprehensive and precise visual research project, pinned to the wall in very small-format prints and circling this gigantic amalgamation of advertising slogans, fictitious romantic visualizations of nature and tough financial business, documented from the outside, from the hilltops in a super long shot looking down at the valley – in order to then approach that modern campsite step by step, run a ring around it, photograph it according to a pre-arranged, fixed grid; first the materials stores, then increasingly the specific building sections and finally the houses, the interior of the “homes” slowly coming into being, the inner promise of these structures geared towards the luxury property market. Baltz worked like a surveyor, noting the position and the viewing direction for each photograph, for example “Park Meadows, Subdivision 2, Lot 64, looking West.” His photographs of the interiors of these houses are full of ambiguity. It is impossible to tell from these images whether the structures they show are being built or dismantled, erected or destroyed. As Hubertus von Amelunxen put it in his excellent essay:
“It is obvious in Park City that Baltz photographed the buildings as ruins, not in any romantic sense of returning the built to nature, however, but in the sense of a ‘ruin in the reverse’ of which Robert Smithson speaks in this text ‘A tour of the Monuments of Passaic. New Jersey’ (1967), meaning all those buildings that could still be built and are ‘ruins in reverse,’ ‘because the buildings don’t fall into ruins after they are built but rather rise into ruins before they are built.’”[23]
He ends with a wonderful paragraph that once again drives home just how contiguous Baltz’s work was with the art, the painting and sculpture of his day:
“The last 25 photographs (76–102) taken in Park City in my mind cite even more strongly than the previous images not particular works of painting or sculpture, but instead a gesture or mode of working present in painting or sculpture; the precise arrangements of a Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella’s geometric flat structures, the vertical monochromes of Barnett Newman broken up by bright slits of color, or the rectangular spatial interventions by Donald Judd. Of course none of these works is claimed by the author Lewis Baltz in any way, but it does show how he conceives his photography as an abstract interpretation of a visual field. And it is certainly no coincidence that Lewis Baltz ends the book with an image that begins on the left with a vertical black line and is covered entirely by a light, almost white map showing a drawing of a section of Park City. The segment of the map looks like an elephant covered with needles, as pins with heads in different colors are stuck into the individual parcels of land. The symbolism of these colors is resolved in the lower third of the image on the left: ‘Blue – For Sale; Green – Under Construction; Yellow – Under Contract; Red – Closed.’”[24]
The tradition or even the fetish of the vast open landscape meets its opposite; the rigorous, profit-oriented economy of rural development.[25]
I shall here subsume the second section of the monumental part of his work, which includes the work groups San Quentin Point (1981–83), Continuous Fire Polar Circle (1986), Near Reno (1987–89) and Candlestick Point (1987–1989), in a large canto: The world shown is falling apart, deflating, losing its previous order and form-giving structure. Continuous Fire Polar Circle shows, in seven photographs, piles of trash burning like the hell fire of a consumerist West; in Near Reno we travel down the hill in the direction of the city, which as Lewis Baltz said had been handed over to the Mafia, and over the course of three or four images we see, as in a tracking shot, that all nature, without exception, is “manmade.” On arriving in the lowlands we are confronted almost exclusively with images of decay or actual destruction, of canisters being shot aggressively, discarded televisions, metal sheeting riddled with holes and a dead sheep. The final photographs of this body of work are full of ambivalence. Here, every hosepipe, every cable insulator can conjure up mistrust, doubt and fear.
Hubertus Amelunxen wrote of San Quentin Point:
“In the book San Quentin Point (1986) by Lewis Baltz there is a picture of large nails spattered with cement and building materials. Their points are aimed everywhere, in all directions. And they are hanging in a leafless tree or shrub. One nail, or perhaps even all of them, is projecting out at the viewer. Anti-nature. Strangely, the nails are holding no planks, no house together, they are securing and holding only themselves. Hanging among the branches, it is not clear whether this objet-trouvé is about to mutate into nature or whether nature has not already become indistinguishable from inorganic civilizational residues, rubbish.”[26]
This paragraph provides the perfect introduction to an incredible group of works made up of 58 photographs, which Lewis Baltz displayed symmetrically in a composition reminiscent of a precious vessel or shrine, meaning the lowest row of images was missing a photograph on both the left and right-hand sides. These two blank positions lend the block of images a touch of lightness, sublimity and preciousness. This stands in stark contrast with the theme of the work, which shows a waste disposal site, a landfill near San Quentin Point in San Francisco Bay. Baltz began by approaching the place like a wanderer or an investigator, photographing the field from the outside, focusing on the first items of waste. He then lowered his gaze in order to take a precise and thorough look at what was happening on the ground beneath, what was taking place in this space, this “inhuman landscape,” as Wolfgang Scheppe quotes Beckett elsewhere. The group of works seems charged, full of suspense and ambiguity, between a photograph that records what is seen precisely and meticulously as though it were dealing with a precious archeological site, and the actual content of the image, a collection of trash carelessly scattered across the plain. The series reads like visualized irony, sarcasm, and turns into a metaphor for a collapsing, imploding society. Looking at Lewis Baltz’s work, Hubertus von Amelunxen asks, “Is there a clear ambiguity?” He goes on to say:
“On the one hand we are confronted by the systematically constructed work cycles made up of pulsating, rhythmic visual narratives that take stock, in such a damning way, of the wastelands created by civilization. On the other hand, we find with the quiet poetic quality of omissions, the puncturing of these wastelands, Lewis Baltz’s delicate, beautiful, careful and erotic revealing of these wounds, which at times has the sensuality of an SM dungeon.”[27]
San Quentin Point is Lewis Baltz’s toughest and most dystopian piece in thematic terms, while Candlestick Point, the final work in this large, pivotal body of works, is the most radical in artistic terms. Arranged as a “garden of a false reality” (Wolfgang Scheppe), Candlestick Point (1987–89) is made up of 72 photographs, framed in dark gray without the commonly used wide white passe-partout. Their placement on the wall consolidates the photographs in a system, despite Baltz having intentionally included gaps. A filmic character is often attributed to the work, but in my view it seems far more similar to a single screen with many pixels, of which a few are defective: image, image, image, no image, image, and so on. The work evidently seeks proximity to electronic imaging, despite having still been made with traditional means by way of Baltz’s method as described above. Yet after viewing these works for some time, we lose all certainty as to whether there is a human being, an author at work here, or whether we might not in fact be looking at the monitors of numerous surveillance cameras. No single image stands out (the group as a whole is the image), no particular epistemic interest is perceptible, visual-artistic properties are very pared down, and at some point the first color images are introduced seemingly without intention. In implementing his most extreme portrayal of an entropic landscape Baltz withdrew as an author and, as it were, allowed his camera to take the lead. This landscape had become radically alien to him. It was his farewell to an America that had horrified him profoundly and made him extremely sad. It was his big farewell to photography as he had always understood it and a withdrawal from photography altogether. Yet rather than being fraught with emotional turmoil, it simply came accompanied by a sarcastic comment:
“1989 was the centennial of Marcel Duchamp and the sesquicentennial of the invention of photography. Nearly every major museum did its history of photography exhibition and the effect was suffocating; it depicted a medium in extremis. Photography was circling the drain.”[28]
1989 constituted a turning point for Lewis Baltz in several ways. In a public sense the year stands for the end of the Cold War, for the power launch of neoliberalism. In a private sense it saw Baltz’s emigration to Paris, his decision to leave the US and dissolve his marriage. It also stands for a remarkable change in the way he approached photography. In 1993, I wrote of this change:
“Baltz’s turnabout has divided photographic minds. Some are left bewildered, gazing – with one eye tearing up, the other filled with rage – after the exiting author as he throws those he leaves behind a handful of image shreds like flint stones. The others are in the elevator, on the rollercoaster, whizzing through the veins and channels of these worlds with him. The Baltzian turnabout is a complex set of movements, a backwards departure and a forwards ascent with a bow and a half-turn, like a helicopter during a daredevil takeoff, like a camera in a wild tracking shot. It is an exit from an inward and outward triangular affair: 1. Here the photographer, there the world, there the photo symbol – seeing and showing reality, from a de-sentimentalized, quasi-scientific position, with the accuracy of a surveyor, the aloofness of a real-estate broker. On view in cool black-and-white photographs were today’s buildings and ruins, the peripheral areas, refuse piles of our present, geometric and organic architecture as an outward sign of structures, of power and decay. And 2. Here the photographer, there the photograph and there finally the viewer, at first looking at the visual world presented, then increasingly finding himself staring at the author. For a long time, both of these were fruitful and successful, then finally also calamitous triangular relationships. Defusing the radicalism by stabilizing and stylizing, mitigating by persevering even in a changed world. The beloved author left his position, pruned (the reproductions of) his icons with relish and accelerated his standpoint. Ascent, because the modern channels of communication no longer served this standpoint. This visual and conceptual raster turned into an outpost, questionable, because it was quasi-objective, questionable, because it was quasi-outside, questionable, because it was static, despite the ground beneath our feet long since having been turned into a runway.”[29]
This quotation shows how unexpected and sensational Lewis Baltz’s change had been. I chose to use the hectic, slightly frivolous inflection in order to undermine the great break with what had gone before. Purists turned away from him while friends and others who were interested in his work raised their eyebrows as they watched how out of the great, rigorous work, out of LB1, the “Rule without Exception,” as he had titled the catalog accompanying the exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center and the extended German catalog at Fotomuseum Winterthur (Scalo), Baltz developed a field of new works he ultimately described as being “Only Exceptions.”[30] His work from the 1980s onwards shows a completely changed Lewis Baltz: LB2. He gave up his former approach to photography, his elaborate projects. Looking back, he described how onerous it was for him to realize Park City, how he trudged around that terrible building site alone.[31] But the reasons for it go deeper. Baltz’s fundamental belief continued to hold true for him: Urbanism (and all contemporary life) is the objectification of power. Power is an ideology in itself. With the new addendum: The rest is spectacle. Yet of course some spectacle would be more interesting and some more boring, he added in a private conversation. Baltz understood early on that a new age had dawned in terms of media. A theoretical echo of this stance and of this understanding of the new world of media was provided amongst others by Guy Debord and the postmodern media theory of French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who in the 1980s and 1990s acted as a “diagnostician of the modern mass and media society.” In his most important theorem, concerning simulation, he described the social conditions of the 20th century as induced by the media and traced the history of a social transition influenced thus from the Renaissance to present day. He saw society in ‘the modern age of simulation’ as completely influenced by and dependent on the media: “Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to media is desocialized or virtually asocial.”[32] The consequence of his view of this relationship finally culminated in the radical observation that social events were now merely initiated by the media and reflected by them. The result, according to Baudrillard, was then a hyperreality produced by the media, in which it had become impossible to differentiate between authentic and simulated events – and where due to media signs’ lack of references such an attribution had actually become entirely pointless. He stated that the principle of causality had thereby been abolished and history had come to its end.[33]
This inability to distinguish between (historical) fact and (media) simulation would finally lead to the complete loss of access to a reality that can be tangibly experienced. In the words of Michael Wetzel on Baudrillard:
“The world is increasingly turning into its own photographic and filmic reproduction and the images from across the world are replacing a world view. One could say, the being-image is gaining ontological primacy over the being. New media and computer technologies have catapulted us into this zone of indifference between being and semblance, reality and image. The world of simulacra absorbs the semblance and liquidates reality.”[34]
We are essentially still following the critical enlightener Lewis Baltz, but what is new are his insights and methods. The Generic Night Cities (1989–2000) for example – together with Piazza Sigmund Freud, Rule without Exception and other photographs taken in Italy – are colorful landscapes by night. There is no daylight to dictate a natural, clear, hierarchical order, as numerous still and moving artificial lights lure and guide us. The city is presented as parking lot or traffic lane, stop and go, as a shrill urban laboratory. The photographs, all different, some exhibited as prints of up to two meters in size, are thin, flat and colorful like patch boards, the cities they show reminiscent of exposed computer chips, a machinery of desire and power driven by the motor of a neoliberal economy. And in their very own way lacking perspective or future.
The large power trilogy of Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies and The Politics of Bacteria appears like a mighty history painting in three parts at the end of history. The pieces are each two to two and a half meters in height and twelve meters long and divided into segments, modules. Their topic is surveillance, control, analysis. In Ronde de Nuit (1992) we are plunged into a fairytale world of sorts – “the forest where I lost myself” (Dante) – into the netherworld, hell, the basement, shafts and canals; and at the end of the darkness we stand in front of the modern sea of stars, the dazzling ocean of city lights, facing Manhattan as the ultimate firmament. Excerpts from video surveillance film in a police station are mixed with images of cables, tubes and a mainframe computer, with Dante’s Inferno as literary background noise, with a nod at Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment, in which the Swiss author reboots the Cartesian theorem: I am, because I am being watched.
In Docile Bodies (1995) we penetrate the outer layer or semblance of things and, following images from neurosurgery, enter inside the body, its mechanism. Performing an endoscopy of the body that is being monitored via a screen means gazing into the very core of the body, the body being latched onto the great machine. An entirely new kind of humility, a new type of power, the deference of the individual body towards organized knowledge as energy and power. An encroachment on the body’s integrity and intimacy. The Politics of Bacteria (1995) is a montage of photographs taken in and around the new Finance Ministry in Bercy, Paris. The structure of the piece is symmetrical, organized in the shape of a winged altarpiece in order to heighten the impression of dominance and of being embraced by power. The center of the piece shows a surveillance situation, left and right of this we see a mesh of images with men and their facial expressions and gestures of power, such as standing with their feet apart, hands on hip, uniforms, helmets. Outward signs of power and repression, the visualization of something invisible. Here Baltz finds a metaphor for the hierarchical climate of fear in the feeling of restriction and exclusion.
In each of these three works, near and close, detail and total view, brilliantly shining and rasterized alternate in such hard cuts that the viewer finds no respite, is unable to assume an ideal position in the sense of classical perspective. Here Baltz assembled images, most of which were taken from his archive, sampled images, structuring them in large, rhythmic image blocks or wall sections. These are new panoramas, not revealing a belief in the complete overview, but grids of total surveillance, control and entertainment. The three monumental works not only function as pictures on the walls, but are in fact walls themselves, wall pieces puzzled together. Here we find the culmination of what Baltz practiced in his early work time and again: the falling together of the image plane and carrier plane with the wall plane, the falling together of image and world, world and image.[35] And the author disappears: “The artist is yet more absent.”[36]
Paradoxical seduction in Generic Night Cities, metamorphosis in the trilogy – and then finally The Deaths in Newport (1995) brought forth, unexpectedly, Baltz the storyteller. Before the project had taken shape as an exhibition, as a book and soon after also as a CD-ROM – in several different, changing versions – Lewis Baltz stood at a white lectern at Fotomuseum Winterthur and told his audience a gruesome murder story that occurred in Orange County, South California in the 1950s, whilst showing some photos from the local press archives. A yacht exploded, a married couple died, charges were brought against the daughter and son-in-law. At the time the trial had a similar significance as the O. J. Simpson case would later have. Baltz told this story, illustrated with numerous archive images, drily, laconically like the son of a chronicler. A visual artist began to tell a story from his childhood, with his father – one of the principal witnesses – providing the personal connection, and against the backdrop of his own failing third marriage and the possibility of being able to conduct a now classic Baltzian documentation once more, namely on the occasion of the construction of a new museum building. Yet the curtain was soon lifted on this being a ‘documentary,’ and the narrator stepped onto the scene in a way similar to that of the narrators in old silent movies, in order to guide his audience through the postwar-American social drama on the Californian coast. The Deaths in Newport exists in four or five different versions.
The works Baltz then made, some of which resulted from a collaboration with Slavica Perkovic, take a slightly different route yet again. A woman’s naked shoulder leaning against the window facing one of those residential machines by day, plump breasts in front of the same background or a dark female silhouette in high heels with legs stretched up in the air (all of them excerpts from the Desire Videos, 1995) appear like visual triggers leading viewers to the framed texts alongside them. These tell stories, and it is never revealed whether they are true or invented, personal or adopted. They are contemporary American stories of abysmal normality, financial classes and patterns of behavior, sex and power, boredom and thrill in adventureless times. The works function a little like the magazines published in the late 1970s, with the difference being that Baltz/Percovic actually took the text seriously rather than using it as an alibi. After the documentation of façades, for example in New Industrial Parks near Irvine, we now enter the homes, the narratives and dramas of an anonymous world.[37]
A loose succession of further realized and planned projects followed, for example Giochi di Simulazione (1991) and the video piece End to End (1999), both executed for the project Linea di Confine in Rubiera (Emilia-Romagna). In the first of these two projects he turned a harmless layout photograph of a workshop in the Emilia-Romagna region into a story, a tale full of innuendo and the suspicion of crime. “Baltz proposed new forms of interpreting and ‘reconstructing’ the world, imposing, precisely at the base of his representation, the undefined border, the ambiguous limit between the exactitude of the representation and a sense of the inexpressible,”[38] as Paolo Costantini wrote about the piece. In the second project he told the political and economic history of the Emilia-Romagna after World War II in a video filmed with a mobile camera. He finally created a portfolio on Venezia Marghera (Steidl, 2013), addressing the unbearable coexistence of Marghera and Venice.[39]
What does this mutation mean? Baltz, at times seducer, at others storyteller, moderator, researcher, sorcerer’s apprentice, author A, author B, non-author, slipped out of his role in the traditional sense, deliberately turning himself into a “salamandering cursor of present-day visual communication.”[40] He saw as a given the destabilization, the disintegration of the photo-optical, photo-static relationship between seeing subject and observed object. Both subject and object, image and world were being dynamized, constantly shifted toward one another, were entering into new contexts, encountering each other in new constellations and new aggregate states. In a post-post-structuralist turn he no longer believed, similar to Roland Barthes in his later work, that a precise scientific unraveling or visual capturing of the world would be able to explain its essence. He therefore sought new access points, and also new spectacle, even by using his own personal history.
In LB1 we find a magnificent body of works unveiling, in the culmination of a Modernist molding of the photographic gaze, an American landscape being radically economized and capitalized and beginning to ecologically, morally and physically implode as well as starting to show signs of decay.[41] In LB2 we are faced with a magnificent turnabout, in the course of which the artist almost entirely reinvents himself in view of the new social, economic and media-related developments. He pulls himself out of the hat as a Baudrillian Baltz of sorts, without losing the incisiveness, precision and sarcasm inherent in his analysis of the world.
[1] Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Photography’s Objecthood,” in: Lewis Baltz, The Prototype Works, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2010), unpaginated.
[2] Matthew S. Witkovsky describes in detail how Lewis Baltz began by mounting his prints, how he doubled them in order to stop them from sinking into the mount board. Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Photography’s Objecthood,” in: Lewis Baltz, The Prototype Works, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2010), unpaginated.
[3] Paul Strand, Fotografie, (1917), pp. 59ff; Alfred Renger-Patzsch, Ziele, (1927); Edward Weston, Präsentation statt Interpretation, (1924/25), quoted from Wolfgang Kemp & Hubertus v. Amelunxen, Theorien der Fotografie, (Munich, 1999).
[4] Lewis Baltz, quoted from Witkovsky, loc. cit., see note 5.
[5] See the conversation between Lewis Baltz and David Campany in this volume.
[6] “I had an absolutely clear idea: I wanted to work in the medium of photography; I didn’t want to be a painter or sculptor — or work in advertising, fashion, or make war pictures or documentary photography. I also wanted to live in a beautiful place and have beautiful women come to visit at all hours of the day or night.” Lewis Baltz in conversation with Jeff Rian, (l’Oeil/Steidl: 2014), p. 7.
[7] Despite seeing himself as a craftsman who had learned this technique by himself.
[8] Lewis Baltz in conversation with Jeff Rian, loc. cit., pp. 3-4.
[9] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in: Umbro Appollonio, Der Futurismus, Manifeste und Dokumente einer künstlerischen Revolution, 1909-1918, (Cologne, 1972), pp.119ff; Kazimir Malevich: Die gegenstandslose Welt, (Cologne, 1962), p. 194; Max Bill, quoted from Willy Rotzler, Konstruktive Konzepte, (Zurich, 1977), p. 130, (pt. trans.).
[10] Douglas Fogle, “The Last Picture Show,” in: The Last Picture Show, artists using photography, 1960-82, exhibition catalog, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, (UCLA Hammer: Los Angeles, 2014), p. 10
[11] Even though this was for the most part a retrospective reaction. The exhibition itself was hardly acknowledged at the time. See Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Photography’s Objecthood,” in: Lewis Baltz, The Prototype Works, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2010), unpaginated.
[12] See Estelle Justim & Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock: Landscape as Photograph, (Yale University Press: 1985).
[13] The differences between the individual participants were massive, at least when seen retrospectively. See, among others: Britt Salvesen, New Topographics, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2009).
[14] Donald Judd, 1965, quoted from Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Photography’s Objecthood,” in: Lewis Baltz, The Prototype Works, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2010), unpaginated.
[15] He completed the course of studies, of which he had a critical view, in May 1969. See Lewis Baltz in conversation with Jeff Rian, loc.cit., p. 9.
[16] Matthew S. Witkovsky, loc. cit., unpaginated.
[17] Matthew S. Witkovsky, loc. cit., unpaginated.
[18] Wolfgang Scheppe, “Lewis Baltz and the Garden of False Reality,” in: Lewis Baltz, Candlestick Point, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2011), p. 99.
[19] Lewis Baltz, quoted from Wolfgang Scheppe, loc. cit., p. 100.
[20] Lewis Baltz in conversation with Jeff Rian, loc. cit., p. 34.
[21] Robert A. Sobieszek, in: Lewis Baltz, Nevada, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2010), unpagniated.
[22] Sobieszek, loc. cit., unpaginated.
[23] Hubertus von Amelunxen, “Park City – A Disposition of Irony,” in: Lewis Baltz: Park City, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2010), unpaginated.
[24] von Amelunxen, loc. cit., unpaginated, (trans. from German version).
[25] Wolfgang Scheppe, loc. cit., unpaginated.
[26] von Amelunxen, loc. cit., unpaginated.
[27] von Amelunxen, loc. cit., unpaginated, (trans. from German version).
[28] Wolfgang Scheppe, loc. cit., p. 122.
[29] Urs Stahel, “Verführt, provoziert, aufgeklärt,” in: Hubertus von Amelunxen & Stefan Iglhaut & Florian Rötzer (eds.), Fotografie nach der Fotografie, (Verlag der Kunst: Dresden & Basel, 1995), pp. 130-131, (trans.).
[30] Lewis Baltz, Only Exceptions, (Steidl: Göttingen, 2012).
[31] See in the same volume: Lewis Baltz in Conversation with David Campany.
[32] Jean Baudrillard, Agonie des Realen, (Merve: Berlin, 1978), p. 80.
[33] Baudrillard, loc. cit., p. 49.
[34] Michael Wetzel, “Paradoxe Intervention. Jean Baudrillard und Paul Virilio: Zwei Apokalyptiker der neuen Medien,” in: Ralf Bohn & Dieter Fuder (eds.), Simulation und Verführung, (Fink: Munich, 1994), pp. 139-154, (trans.).
[35] Comparable with Jean Baudrillard: “… there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined,” in: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, (UMP, Ann Arbor: 2002), p. 89.
[36] Lewis Baltz in conversation with Jeff Rian, loc. cit., p. 47.
[37] “Geschichten von Verlangen und Macht / Stories of Desire and Power,” in: Lewis Baltz, Die Toten von Newport Beach / The Deaths in Newport; Slavica Perkovic, “Sechs Geschichten für vier Männer / Six Stories for Four Men,” in: ibid., (Scalo: Zurich, 1995).
[38] Paolo Costantini, in: Giochi di Simulazione, exhibition catalog, (Rubiera, 1991).
[39] Right at the end the Sites of Technology of 198&