Rule Without Exception by Lewis Baltz 1991

Lewis Baltz: Rule Without Exception

The work of Lewis Baltz has appeared in numerous major exhibitions and in several handsome publications.  It has been lavishly praised by a host of critics and curators, and it has garnered prestigious grants.  This striking book of unconventional design offers a retrospective consisting of brief excerpts from his principal bodies of work along with texts by more than a dozen writers.  The sparse selection of pictures provides a sketchy but adequate acquaintance with Baltz’s work; the commentary (most of which was previously published with his catalogues and monographs) confuses more often than it clarifies.  Both the photographs and the texts are frequently pretentious and hollow, offering further unneeded examples of that disheartening blend of studied coolness and intellectual exhibitionism that characterizes so much of the contemporary art scene.  Make what you will of these remarks: “This is an inexhaustible and agnostic exercise, however fleeting, in the face of infinitely interchangeable analyzable objects,” and “The garbage in his pictures rises off the ground as profits soar off a page in a bogus business plan.” Those with a hearty appetite for arid disaffection, boredom, and existential despair will find much to admire in the work of Lewis Baltz.  Indeed, one writer notes that “In Baltz’s work, there is no collusion with the viewer, it is estranged, mute. … We have to be stimulated by displacement to enjoy this work.”

From the tight, spare formalism of “The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California” and “The Tract Houses,” we move to “Park City,” “Nevada,” and “Maryland,” stepping back to take in wider vistas of bulldozer scars, construction debris, regimented architecture, and other familiar evidence of soul-dead, affluent modernity.  “Near Reno,” “Heartlands Sanitary Landfill,” “San Quentin Point,” and “Candlestick Point” concentrate on the inevitable, entropic by-products of a corrupt and enervated civilization: smoldering trash fires, bullet riddled television sets, mounds of plastic that look like shredded entrails, broken bottles, twisted metal, a few pathetic weeds.  This, we are told by one of the writers, is “The true condition of the world.”  Finally we come to a selection of color photographs, a surprise from the man who sarcastically dismissed “The Rush to Colour” in the 1970s, when many photographic artists began to explore the potentials of newly improved color processes.  The inanity of these color pictures is unsurpassed even by the most leaden of the black and white work, but the accompanying comments by a French writer introduce a level of nonsense that is truly astonishing. “Color,” he writes, “puts us in orbit.  It colors, goes on coloring, and ends, colored.  Color flays the skin of the world. We hang it up to dry. So it comes between us and ourselves.”

Another French critic chastises us Americans for our presumed lack of appreciation of Baltz, telling us that “No other name, no other body of work from the United States has sustained such favorable consideration, has been surrounded by such enthusiasm and respect.”  (French film critics say the same thing about Jerry Lewis and his manic, puerile comedies.)  One feels compelled to suppose that the work of Lewis Baltz justifies at least some of the copious and distinguished attention it has received.  Many of the photographs are striking, both in their formal rigor and in their disturbing observations of contemporary life.  Baltz’s sensitivity to sequencing and presentation is also worthy.  The best of his pictures are edgy yet detached, raw yet elegant; their potency resides in a sense of bleak, anonymous distress that is conveyed through calculated understatement. Unfortunately, however, deadpan observation too often devolves into pointless banality.

One of the writers notes that, “Baltz does all he can to make his pictures unlikeable.”  Few viewers of contemporary art are unprepared to be challenged and even disconcerted.  We do not insist on being beguiled, nor do we expect to like everything we see in galleries and books in the same sense that we might like a friendly smile or a crisp apple.  We may legitimately fail to appreciate, however, work as acutely and self-consciously barren as much of this photography, and writing that is so largely effete and vacuous.  The best of Lewis Baltz’s work provides us with a vision of the so-called developed world that is grim, dire, and highly refined, yet which also suggests that concern and compassion are admixed with cool despair.  Unfortunately, in order to find this genuinely worthy vision, the reader/viewer must wade through a veritable landfill of images and prose that pretend to give us a hard look at profound truths, but which instead provide little more than a disinterested scrutiny of trash.

Sean Wilkinson
July 1991