Yet Baltz’s photos are not anti-sprawl one-liners; they record a feeling of lost possibility, dissipated shock. Unlike Ed Ruscha, who published photo books of Los Angeles during the same period in a cool, almost documentary style, Baltz reinvigorated what had become dull or usual, with new visual intensity.
Witkovsky’s inclusion of sculptures by Donald Judd and drawings by Richard Serra in one room of the show seem to confirm Baltz’s desire to transcend his subjects. Serra’s large sheets of white paper, filled with equally large, shimmering planes of waxy black pigment, stop the eye, dazzle with subtle texture and draw attention to the edges of the page in a manner very similar to Baltz’s “Prototypes.”
And yet Baltz’s images can never altogether cease being representations: They are inseparable from the effects of the built human environment. This dependency becomes clear in the exhibit’s final room, housing “Ronde de Nuit” — a piece executed some 20 years after most of the “Prototypes.”
“Ronde de Nuit” is not tiny, but massive, stretching 35 feet along a dimly lit corridor. The title is drawn from Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”; the piece is a combination of grainy blue images gleaned from security cameras and close-ups of bundled cables, wires and places for surveilling and storing data.
Whereas the “Prototypes” showed a world in which our living and working spaces were cheaply molded for speed and convenience, “Ronde de Nuit” shows a world transformed into pure data. Information, much of it hidden away, controls us.
Many familiar formal elements are here: Banal spaces rendered in textured patterns, thanks to digital noise; lines of cables leading the eye along vertical or horizontal pathways.
But it becomes clear that Baltz dazzles here not to delight us, but to jolt us. For Baltz, seeing the world with fresh eyes is the only way to understand our condition — to see the traps we build for ourselves. Ultimately, Baltz beguiles us not for the sake of simple pleasure, but to show us our complacency.
Cudlin is a freelance writer.
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments