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The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more… Because the work is beyond direct perceptual experience, awareness of the work depends upon a system of documentation. This documentation takes the form of photographs, maps, drawings and descriptive language.¹

Douglas Huebler goes to great pains to assure anyone who will listen that he is neither a photographer nor a Los Angeles artist. All the same, both landscapes have been substantially altered by Huebler’s extended visits.

If he sounds a bit disingenuous when he claims that his conceptual piece on American airspace required photographs to “show I was really there,”² much of Huebler’s work of the past twenty years or more has relied on photography not just to document an idea, but as the credential about which his dubious claims to veracity revolve. In the case of Location Piece #1, 1969, we have no reason to doubt that the photographs were made in the way the artist purports they were. Like much of the data with which we are inundated, however, the information they provide, for all its precision, tells us nothing.

Huebler did not move to Southern California until 1976, though he had extensive contact with the area from the late 1960s. Two important early exhibitions of his work were held at Los Angeles galleries, including the 1969 show at Eugenia Butler where his photo/text pieces were introduced.

1. Douglas Huebler, 1969 statement quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object… (New York:. Praeger Publishers, 1973), 74. ↩︎
2. Douglas Huebler, telephone conversation with Lisa Buck, 16 July 1992. ↩︎