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Much of today’s most vital art draws upon mass and popular media, and particularly on photography, that most compelling metaphor for the Real World. Photography’s history and its cultural function are visually, psychologically and even legally tied up with our society’s need for the document, the catalogue, the fact—with our insistence on proof.

Yet photography is half truth, half artifice. It is, at one time, both a dumb recording system and an infinitely manipulable graphic tool.

The work of such ingenious and challenging new artists of the past decade as Dennis Adams, Sarah Charlesworth, Clegg and Guttman, Alfredo Jaar, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, the Starn Twins and a host of others both draws upon and critiques this dual potential of the photograph. Their work is testimony to its intellectual and aesthetic power, and the success of such work in the art critical and commodity arenas speaks to photography’s final and wholehearted acceptance by the art establishment.

But photography’s favor today obscures the fact that until very recently the medium was segregated from the mainstream of art. This book (and the exhibition it accompanies) studies a strain in Los Angeles art that preceded this radical shift by as much as thirty years, and yet anticipated current concerns by using the photograph as a basic tool for examining our culture’s self-image and for searching out the genuine in a world of copies.

The cause of the past dissociation of “art photography” from art was part technological, part historical, part sociological,¹ but the effect was artistic: with some glorious exceptions, photography for too long was derivative of painting, preoccupied with the technical, disengaged from cultural or critical dialogue and deeply mired in an aesthetic and social conservatism.

No one familiar with contemporary art would dispute that this has changed. Indeed, though the pendulum will continue on its inevitable way, right now it is painting that can seem quaint in its romantic insistence on the caress of the artist’s own hand. And the photograph—whether it be a found picture, torn from its original context and newly construed, or a carefully conceived new image constructed by the artist—is a fully accepted element of the art lexicon.

Such essential change does not happen overnight. Virtually all of today’s media-savvy work owes a heavy debt, for example, to the Pop art of the 1960s. And though Douglas Crimp boasted in a 1980 article that he was the first to use the word “postmodernism” to describe the photo-based work of people like Levine, Prince, Sherman, et al., even he found it useful to quote a 1931 Walter Benjamin essay to authorize his main point.²

Benjamin and Pop have received an extra measure of attention and re-evaluation in light of the new art of the past decade, as have other pioneer European critics and the whole topic of photography’s interaction with other visual art. Somehow, though, in the rush to embrace this work as a critically and financially viable art movement with a proper name—”Postmodernism” has become widely accepted—it has come to be seen as primarily a New York phenomenon, closely tied to a few downtown galleries and to theoretical writings by Crimp, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss and others that began to appear around 1980 in the East Coast journal October and elsewhere.³

In a sense, this book ends where Postmodernism as a critically endorsed school of art begins. This is not to say that all the work considered here shares that movement’s theoretical base—though some Los Angeles artists clearly had a major influence on the art that shaped the theory. Nor is it to ignore the monumental presence in any such discussion of earlier artists from Picasso to Warhol and Rauschenberg. Rather, it is to highlight the spirit of eclecticism, the disregard for Modernism-defined boundaries between media, the recognition of a growing societal inability to distinguish the real from the image—the hallmarks of a Southern California art that has flourished since the early sixties.

The forty-five artists discussed in this book each lived and worked in Southern California during the period between 1960 and 1980, but they are different individuals—some very much different from others. For some of them, photography’s mimetic character has been a career-long fascination; for others, photographs were a temporary distraction. But all, by some coincidence of geography (social? industrial? political?) took up for a period an investigation of the photograph’s essence. Searching for the answer to what the photograph is, they often tested assumptions about what it is not. Challenging its authority as repository of fact, they used it to lie, or to detect lies, or to rethink the conventional distinction between lie and truth.

“In Los Angeles,” the critic Christopher Knight has written, “the tradition of the visual arts is the tradition of movies and television, of billboards and advertising.”⁴

Not only does the rest of the world know Los Angeles by these cultural contributions almost exclusively, but in the past much of the serious all of Southern California—from Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust to Edward Weston’s photographs of studio back lots—owed a direct debt to the film industry. During the Great Depression, Walt Disney and other studios kept regional painters alive, giving them work as animators and in other creative roles. (The relationship continued beyond the 1930s: Rico Lebrun, famous in high art circles for his dark and brooding depictions of the Crucifixion and other expressionist themes, worked on the Disney Bambi and even today Disney dollars are essential to the operation of the top regional art school, the California Institute of the Arts).

Actors, directors and other film people, often among the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan people in the community, have played an important role as collectors. Jean Renoir, Mary Pickford, Hedda Hopper, Cary Grant, David Geffen, Michael Douglas, Edgar Bergen and his daughter Candice, Eddie Albert, Sterling Holloway, Vincent Price, Dennis Hopper (actor, director, collector and artist), Steve Martin and Nicolas Cage are just a few examples of industry figures who have built impressive collections and made important contributions to LA-area museums.

The unique presence of the movie industry affected the course of Southern California art history in other ways. In addition to the direct influence, the indirect sway of the Hollywood Dream Machine could be quite intense.

“LA possessed vulgar magic with no history except that of the movie industry,” says Edward Ruscha, asked about the attraction of his adopted city. Many of the artists discussed in this book echo that sentiment. “For me the ‘Hollywood state of mind’ was the single greatest influence” of the Los Angeles environment, Suda House reports. “Concepts of what was ‘real’ vs. what was ‘illusion,’ the set-building—constructed for the camera—sensibility, the glamour, the hype, the increasing nudity and sexual encounters depicted on film for the general viewing public—all contributed to this atmosphere of total freedom and experimentation.”

Asked what aspects of the Los Angeles environment and experience of the 1960s and 1970s were influential in the development of her ideas, Judith Golden responds, “The facade. Fantasy.

The movies. The movies. The movies!” Douglas Huebler says, “By 1978 I caught the bug—I began to write a screenplay (Crocodile Tears)… I learned the craft and was intrigued to find strong connections between the form of the screenplay and conceptualism (as I practiced it).”⁵

Perhaps the title of a 1976 work by Ilene Segalove says it best: “If you live near Hollywood, you can’t help but look like some 8×10 glossy.”⁶

Still photography, trusted ally of the scientist the judge and the journalist, historically has been used to corroborate our visual experience of the world. The earliest photographs were portraits and topographic records. Film’s history, on the other hand, is primarily as a story-telling medium, with a romantic train robbery and a trip to the moon among its first subjects. The still photograph is evidence; the moving photograph, illusion.

The conundrum presented by all pictures is this tension between fidelity to the world and the ingenuity of depiction. For visual artists, who faced this enigma at every turn, to become conscious of Hollywood’s challenge to the evidentiary value of the photograph would be intensely compelling. And as American art moved away from the rigid formalism (and near-absolute hegemony) of Abstract Expressionism to the mix of narrative-, content- and concept-oriented art embraced by the sixties and seventies, artists living near the film industry were particularly so compelled.

“I adore [photography’s] uneasy mix of fact and fiction—its dubious claim to truth—its status as history,” Eleanor Antin says. Kenneth Shorr has proclaimed his interest in “photographs as lies that tell the truth.”⁷ Robert Cumming writes that “hedonism, superficiality and illusionism” are what he remembers of the Los Angeles environment as important to his art, while the photograph’s lure is “the gulf between perception of objects (real-time, three-dimensional, parallax, existence in temporal/spatial environment, etc.) vs. the way they’re perceived in photographs (frozen time, two-dimensionality, weightless, local environment cut off by the four cropped edges).”

“The photograph as metaphor suggests many possible readings,” Eileen Cowin says, “blending memory, fantasy and desire. As in film, the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred.”

Allan Sekula, a San Diego artist and theorist, in 1975 published an extraordinarily influential essay that expressed a more complex version of these attitudes. “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” which appeared in the magazine Artforum, was among the first widely read political critiques of the medium of photography. “The meaning of a photograph, like that of any other entity, is inevitably subject to cultural definition,” he began, making a point that was obvious but (astoundingly) little-appreciated before this time. “The established myth of photographic truth” was based on “a particularly obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore—the claim for the intrinsic significance of the photograph.” Photographs give us not truth, however, but interpretation:

Photographs are used to sell cars, commemorate family outings, to impress images of dangerous faces on the memories of post-office patrons, to convince citizens that their taxes did in fact collide gloriously with the moon, to remind us of what we used to look like, to move our passions, to investigate a countryside for traces of an enemy, to advance the careers of photographers, etc. Every photographic image is a sign, above all, of someone’s investment in the sending of a message.⁸

AN ISLAND ON THE LAND

Carey McWilliams, in his great 1946 social history of Southern California, calls the region “an island on the land.” He argues that the unique geographic, geological, industrial and social circumstances of Los Angeles set it apart from the rest of the world, and that among the implications of that autonomy are strong cultural effects. “You can’t live for twenty summers on the hem of the Sierra Madre’s magnificent purple garment,” he quotes the painter and critic Antony Anderson as having written, “and still keep your Parisian ideals of seeing and doing. You are bound to start, sooner or later, new fashions of your own that are absolutely in keeping with your environment.”⁹

Robbert Flick expanded on the idea in a 1981 interview:

I always had the sense that Southern California was an entity one to [sic] itself, and that Northern California was separate, and that whatever came out of the Southern California melting pot was always going to be different no matter how one looked at it. It was totally unique. It’s a regionalism that is international in its impact. Because not all three conditions of network, and device for disseminating information that is accessible aside from the network, and the market system, were present; hence you get a form of inbreeding.¹⁰

Flick’s sensitivity to the lack of a “network” and a market was hardly misplaced. Southern California has had a stormy romance with the art of its time, leaving the area acutely short of serious exhibition spaces, critics and collectors until very recently. As late as 1950, despite desperate attempts to find a home for it in their adopted city, Louise and Walter Arensberg could find no Los Angeles institution prepared to accept their spectacular collection of Duchamps, Brancusis, Ernsts, Legers, Miros and other modern works.¹¹

Until 1965, when a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art was constructed as an entity separate from the county history and science museums, there was no independent art museum in the entire city of two and a half million people. In 1960 there were forty-one commercial galleries active enough to advertize in the yellow pages of greater Los Angeles, including frame shops, art associations and “vanity” outlets for the work of a single artist (by 1980 over 200 galleries, many of higher quality, were listed in the local phone books).¹²

There had been some glimmers of hope in the 1960s that the Los Angeles avant-garde might make an assault on New York’s preeminence. A handful of contemporary galleries were giving it a go, spurred on by the critical success of the Ferus Gallery, which had come into existence in 1957. Artforum magazine, founded in San Francisco to cover the West Coast scene in 1962, moved to LA in l965. And the tiny Pasadena Art Museum developed an extraordinarily advanced program over the decade, expanding in 1969 to sumptuous new quarters. As important as these events were in galvanizing an art community, however, they were small time in an international context. Nor did they prosper: Artforum moved on to New York in 1967, Ferus was closed in 1966 and even the museum failed in 1974.

Islands develop their own ecosystems, frequently engendering indigenous biological strains and even species. If there is one fundamental precept of the Los Angeles art ecology, it is surely the one mentioned by almost all of the artists interviewed for this essay: a sense of freedom from artistic rules and institutional strictures. Without a highly evolved, highly stratified art world structure, the many artists who would necessarily emerge from a city as large as Los Angeles might have little support, but they also had little to stop them from developing as they wished (or, to overextend the metaphor: they faced few predators). As John Coplans wrote in a 1964 article, “There were no fake dreams, false promises or even pretensions in Los Angeles. The situation was aggressively bad—this was the challenge.”¹³

Allen Ruppersberg writes of “the freedom of LA in [the sixties and seventies] to develop on your own at your own pace; the openness of the city to the newness of art in the city and the possibilities of that situation.” Eleanor Antin found “an openness not found on the East Coast and a generosity of spirit. New York was always formulating the correct ways to work and think while back here we were always eager to be surprised and engaged in new ways.” Gillian Brown, who came from the East in 1977 to study at UCLA, writes, “One of my first impressions of LA was that it had no cultural institutions (I was looking for Whitney, MOMA, etc.) A later impression was that this was freeing.”

As in New York and elsewhere, Los Angeles artists of the sixties and seventies who consciously saw themselves as working in a photography tradition—”photographers,” as opposed to “artists who used photography”—were kept at a certain distance by an art world that until that point had known only painting and sculpture.¹⁴ But the same freedom from rules and open structure that appealed to artists generally, gave LA photographers far greater access to their artistic peers in all media and encouraged experimentation.

Southern California’s unique, centripetal geography also made interaction and cross-fertilization more likely, because when people live in scattered communities it’s hard to maintain a clique-based social structure—you want all the input you can get. Moreover, there was not a highly developed, separate support system for photography (which, regardless of the good such a system might do, encouraged the separatism found elsewhere).¹⁵

“The almost total lack of a pyramidal structure or hierarchy in the photographic community and the lack of support by local museums and critics [allowed] for an extremely varied and aesthetically diverse creative environment,” according to Jack Butler. “Individuals just worked on their work without concern for acceptance by a ‘ruling’ authority, i.e., John Szarkowski in New York. The dogmatic prejudice of straight photography towards alternative methods of working with the photographic image did not exist here.” Darryl Curran looked to non-photographers for inspiration: “Unlike [the] San Francisco/Carmel area which honored view camera/pre-visualization or Chicago’s history of street photography/New Bauhaus, LA had no publicly visible photographic presence. Without specific photographic references I turned to artists I admired.”

On the other hand, photography’s very lack of artworld cachet attracted artists like Edward Ruscha and Allen Ruppersberg. “The fact that few ‘painter-fine-artists’ used photography in their work made it appealing,” says Ruscha (who, despite what he calls the “cruel beauty” of black and white photographs, says he used the medium primarily as a necessary step in the process of making books). Ruppersberg liked the photograph’s “accessibility and lack of pretension in the hierarchy of art materials [and] the fact that it had not been used before as a material for an object-oriented art making world and could act subversively in that context.”

FAMILY

Far more than in other parts of the country, artists working in various media had regular interaction—socially as well as artistically. Jerry McMillan, who has worked with photographic techniques for most of his career, has been a close friend of painter/printmaker Edward Ruscha since high school; the two moved from Oklahoma City together and shared an apartment as art students. McMillan introduced Ruscha to Robert Heinecken, as well as to Peter Bunnell, then a photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and others.

Heinecken lived a block from Wallace Berman in Beverly Glen (they met through their children, who went to the same elementary school). In the early sixties, Heinecken says, “there wasn’t any other person that I could share my enthusiasm with… Berman I would think of as a close friend, but that’s the only person that I had any direct contact with and the reason for that was we were neighbors.”¹⁶

Ilene Segalove worked as a John Baldessari assistant; the first exhibition ever for either Allen Ruppersberg or Terry Allen was a two-man show at an alternative gallery they helped start; Robert Cumming and William Wegman were friends from graduate school who both ended up in LA by chance; Wegman and Baldessari shared a studio. Steve Kahn was married to the painter Lita Albuquerque, Ellen Land-Weber was married to Victor Landweber, Eleanor Antin was married to artist/critic David Antin. And nearly everyone doing advanced work was associated—as teacher, student, or both—with either Chouinard Art Institute (later California Institute of the Arts) or the University of California, Los Angeles.

Artistic interborrowings and interactions revealed themselves in the physical form of process and materials. The revitalization of American printmaking, largely attributable to Los Angeles efforts like the Tamarind Lithography Workshop (founded in 1959), Gemini G.E.L. (1966) and Cirrus Editions Limited (1970), could not but have a major impact on artists attracted to photography-which, after all, is a print medium of sorts. In particular, the highly experimental approach to technique and materials fostered at Gemini, and the workshop’s contacts with major American artists, was very visible to Los Angeles artists.

(Though the workshop’s experimental attitude itself was influential, regardless of process, it is interesting to note that Gemini supported a large number of photo-based projects. Indeed, one of the first collaborations entered into was a photogram silkscreen print on plexiglass by Man Ray. Robert Rauschenberg’s famous large print Booster, 1967, was produced in the workshop’s second year and drew almost exclusively on photographic sources. LA artist Edward Ruscha, who made lithographs at Gemini early on, produced some of his only color photographic works there in 1974-1975.)

Another apparent influence is the impact of a Southern California predilection for surf and car culture materials, such as high-tech plastic and enamel surfaces (important to artists working in the area variously called Finish Fetish, LA Look or Cool School); Robert E. Brown, Carl Cheng, Darryl Curran, Stanley Mock and Michael Stone all made extensive use of plastics in their photo/ sculptural works.

In the rarified atmosphere of the LA art world of the sixties and early seventies, major exhibitions took on overwhelming importance. The fact that the most significant exhibitions were also ones that encouraged experimental attitudes toward photography is worthy of note.

Two of the most important museum shows ever held in the Los Angeles area were presented virtually back-to-back at the Pasadena Art Museum, both of them organized by the legendary Walter Hopps. The New Painting of the Common Object (1962) was the first museum exhibition of Pop art presented anywhere: By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy (1963) was Duchamp’s first retrospective. Both reflected the freewheeling attitude of Southern California art and, to some degree, promoted it. Both held important lessons for artists working with photography: the first validated the Image in an Abstract Expressionist’s world, pointing an ironic and self-referential way for artists more or less stuck with Image as a given; the second discredited the merely “retinal” and opened up a vast new range of technical, presentational and conceptual choice.

At around the time of these shows, too, Andy Warhol was introduced to the world via the Ferus Gallery. Founded in 1957 by Hopps (in pre-PAM days) and artist Edward Kienholz, Ferus was the site of the debut exhibitions of Wallace Berman (1957), Llyn Foulkes (1961) and Edward Ruscha (1963), among many other major figures. Warhol’s first one-man show—a deadpan presentation of thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans—was held in 1962; another solo exhibition followed in 1963. Warhol met the Ferus LA stable and one can assume a certain amount of interchange, though the impact of his work was greatest on artists of succeeding generations. (Warhol’s first major museum solo exhibition was also held in the LA area, in 1970 at the Pasadena Art Museum.)

Finally, the emergence of the Woman’s Building, first known as the Feminist Studio Workshop, in 1973 and the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) in 1974 created important gathering places for serious artists. The Woman’s Building is credited with a catalytic role in promoting performance art and for giving exposure to artists with otherwise limited opportunities to show (including Eleanor Antin and Ilene Segalove). LAICA took up where the Pasadena Art Museum left off as a major venue for young artists from the region; the premiere issue of its popular Journal included a short article by Darryl Curran, reproducing works by Antin, Robert Cumming and Robert Heinecken, among others.¹⁷

The unique artistic mix of LA is such that it would be impossible to trace a linear history of the photograph’s special regional role. Nor, among a large number of innovators, articulate theorists and iconoclasts, can one find an undisputed leadership of an identified Movement. Still, four figures emerge as especially powerful, both for the intelligence of their approaches and for the impact of their ideas on other artists of the region-and, at least in three cases, throughout the nation and even the world. They are Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken, Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari.

A LOW-RENT DUCHAMP

“There is no justice, only revenge,” Wallace Berman wrote on a blackboard in 1957. His outburst had a specific and profound source (he had just been found guilty in an LA court of “inciting lewd and lascivious passions” through his art) but his reference could as easily have been to his entire life and career.¹⁸

Berman was a brilliant critic of American visual culture whose art is a sometimes-baffling, Beat-era amalgam of social protest, visual be-bop and mystic ritual (his most famous aphorism was “art is love is god”). One historian has called him “a low-rent L.A.-Hebraic Marcel Duchamp.”¹⁹

Like Duchamp he was a remarkably magnetic personality with an aversion to the spotlight, and an adroit recycler who found new meaning in society’s castoffs. Unlike Duchamp, his work was never widely recognized during his lifetime.

Still, Berman was among the first of a long line of Los Angeles-based artists who realized and aggressively developed the potential of the photograph-as-object: the photograph as an element that could be used as a raw material for complex art-making, rather than an artificial window on the world. He also led the way in treating the photograph as an artifact of culture, in itself worthy of examination.

To be sure, art history for a hundred years had produced examples of artists who altered and reused existing photographic images, or who drew more upon the materiality of the photograph than on its accuracy of delineation.²⁰ But Berman’s early interest in mass and popular imagery, his use of reprographic methods and his appropriation of advertising and other generic images place him squarely beside the first generation of pop artists as a major innovator. Moreover, his work is a knowing critique of the modernist ideal of originality, as well as an examination of photography’s cultural triumph as a kind of substitute reality.

An untitled work from 1968 incorporates all of these elements. The piece is one of a large number of Berman works, produced over a period of about twelve years, based on the repeated visual theme of a hand-held transistor radio and images scavenged from advertising and the news. Made on an early xerox-type machine (the Verifax), the work is a short catalogue of Kennedy-era iconography, both bourgeois and underground. Berman’s earliest (1963) experiments with the Verifax are nearly contemporaneous with Andy Warhol’s repetitive presentation of commonplace images and with both Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg’s adoption of photographic production techniques.

As a true, Los Angeles-class eccentric and guru of the 1960s, Berman does not perfectly fit the mold of either Pop avatar or proto-Postmodernist. Much has been made, for instance, of his frequent use of Hebrew characters “to create,” as one writer put it, “a body of work blessed… by an intuitive Kabbalah.”²¹ As Anne Ayres has observed,

Surrealism was especially decisive for Wallace Berman. His 1960s verifax collages—especially those whose large scale disengaged the usual intimacy of his work—just barely slipped into the period’s dialogue with pop art. Certainly Berman’s occult references and surreal juxtapositions cannot be read as the brand new, deadpan combinations of pop. Nevertheless, some of the feeling of Berman’s hermetic laying out of fortune’s cards is subverted, in the large collages, by the mechanical repetition, impersonal grid format, and the isolation of individual images. The tonal variations he worked to achieve do not quite overcome the cool, impersonal facture; and if the rudimentary verifax copy machine yields a bit to nostalgia, it is still the pop-related mechanical replication that holds attention.²²

In his attachment to Surrealism and mysticism Berman shows as close a connection to West Coast alternative social philosophies of the 1960s as to advanced ideas in the period’s art. Still, the formal “distancing” of most Pop art was a handworked, romantic idealization of the vernacular; Berman’s mechanical re-presentation of mass media imagery was a self-referential commentary on media’s symbolic power. Even more precocious, the broadcast reference of the radio and the frontal, straight-on presentation format constitute a very early example of an artist’s recognition of the image, not as story, but as sign. It is that recognition that links Wallace Berman to the most innovative artists working with photography at that time and since, as will as to ideas current in art today. Berman’s “revenge” is to have emerged over time as prophetic of artistic concerns a generation later.

SEMINAL INFLUENCE

Even if the mainstream did not know him, Berman had substantial influence in his time as a result of his strong personality and a vaguely organizational bent. His occasional journal Semina, produced beginning in 1955 on a 5×8-inch hand press, gathered works of art (drawings and poems solicited from friends) together with snapshots and found images which were reproduced and re-presented, generally in their original format.²³

He ran a gallery of sorts during a sojourn in Northern California where he showed the work of George Herms, photographer Charles Brittin and others. His home—in various California locations in the fifties and sixties—was a gathering place for poets and artists, also serving the function of underground gallery and library; among his circle were writers Robert Alexander, William Burroughs, Philip Lamantia and Michael McClure, and artists such as Bruce Conner, Herms, Dennis Hopper, Jess, Edward Kienholz, Dean Stockwell and Edmund Teske. He frequently introduced art and artists he respected to curators and other artists.

Between the 1957 debut exhibition of assemblages and works on paper that got him busted and 1965 he exhibited not at all. From 1965 to his 1976 death in a car crash he had but four solo shows, one of which was presented at his studio, another running for a single day. But for the large underground that did see the work—often at Berman’s personal invitation—it was a revelation.

Berman has been credited, for example, with “prompting Kienholz to move beyond painting,” and George Herms says that the experience of Berman’s 1957 Ferus Gallery exhibition convinced him to pursue an art career: “That show… turned an art gallery into a temple. That’s when I decided that was what I wanted to do for my entire life.”²⁴

MUTABLE HISTORY

Both Kienholz and Herms are best known for their assemblage sculpture—an area of post-Dada, post-Surrealist art to which Berman also made important contributions. (“The California assemblage movement stems from one artist, Wallace Berman,” John Coplans wrote in 1964.²⁵) Another important assemblagist, later turned painter, was Llyn Foulkes. He was aware of Berman at an early stage and showed at Ferus as early as 1959, though he never really became part of that circle.

The assemblagists’ frequent incorporation of photographs was unusual for sculpture in the late 1950s and 1960s, which still tended toward Modernism’s dictates of truth to materials and faithfulness to the inherent formal characteristics of the medium (notwithstanding the comic content of pop). Kienholz, Foulkes and Herms, along with other California assemblagists including Bruce Conner, Jess, Fred Mason and Ben Talbert, rejected the formalist preoccupation with sculptural form and volume in favor of the associative and mnemonic power of objects with a history. The photograph’s special relationship to the experienced world made it a powerful tool in that respect.

It is surprising that, with the recent rekindling of interest in California assemblage (three major books have appeared since 1988), no attention has been paid to the role of the photograph. It is ubiquitous in assemblage sculpture. It can give a narrative, if mutable, history to objects otherwise vaguely nostalgic. The found photograph is cheap—oftentimes worthless—and readily available; yet, pathetically, it would not have been made if it did not have value to someone, once; perhaps it was treasured.

A photograph is a relic, no less than a scrap of cloth from a saint’s robe, and the assemblagist makes use of its mystical possibilities. Foulkes, for example, made a nineteenth century photograph, heavily scratched and over painted, a central element of his 1960 work Medic Medis. He told one writer, “I guess in someways I felt I was bearing the cross for all the dead people I had seen in old photos, photos of death and desolation, the Jews in Germany (I was in Germany for two years before going to art school).”²⁶

In formal terms, the photograph has a surface, a substance, so out of keeping with traditional sculptural materials that it invariably adds to the disruptive experience the assemblage artist wants to provoke. More important, the introduction of pictorial space as a counterpoint to, and extension of, sculptural space is powerfully disjunctive, and it gets to the heart of the photograph’s illusion as a window on an infinitely receding world.

NOT A PICTURE OF, BUT AN OBJECT ABOUT

The central artist in Southern California identified with photography as a primary medium is Robert Heinecken. This is so though Heinecken “seldom operates a camera and probably could pursue his art perfectly well if he never did,” as William Jenkins has pointed out. For the course of his work over some thirty years has taken him through an extraordinary investigation of the photograph’s conceptual possibilities. From the first, this investigation was based on the premise that, in his words of 1965, “the photograph… is not a picture of something but is an object about something.”²⁷

Unlike most photographic artists of his generation, the evolution of Heinecken’s artistic ideas and career are closely tied to an academic life; in this he is more like artists who entered the field a decade later. Trained in printmaking, drawing and design, Heinecken was hired to teach those subjects at UCLA (his alma mater) in 1960. Within two years, his interests had shifted and he was experimenting with photographic techniques. In 1962 he instituted the photography curriculum for UCLA’s Department of Art. It was one of the first such programs in a university art department anywhere, and it rapidly became one of the most influential in the nation.

In 1963 and 1964 Heinecken took part in early meetings of the Society for Photographic Education, where he met many of the key teachers and innovators of the time. The list of contacts he made there reads like a Who’s Who of American photography: Harry Callahan, Carl Chiarenza, Van Deren Coke, Kenneth Josephson, Jerome Liebling, Nathan Lyons, Ray K. Metzker, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, Jerry Uelsmann and Minor White.²⁸ As a result of the SPE connections, for some time he was the sole Los Angeles artist with ties to the Eastern creative photography scene. It was an important contact, helping him to develop ideas about teaching and giving him an audience that understood and appreciated the subtleties of his increasingly media-referential work. He was, for example, the only West Coast artist included in the important 1967 exhibition “Persistence of Vision,” organized by Lyons as Curator at George Eastman House, then the premiere photography exhibition space in the nation. Such support, though fairly limited, surely helped shape Heinecken’s perception of himself as an artist working in the photography arena—a “photographer.”

Heinecken’s earliest important work engages ideas specific to photography, even as it participates in there production and montage strategies of Berman—a nearby neighbor whose work he knew. It also draws on Pop ideas being exposed by the Pasadena Art Museum and Ferus Gallery. It is advanced in its attention to political and social issues (which were not directly addressed in other art photography of the time), perhaps because politics was very much a part of the environment at UCLA, the sister campus to the home of the Free Speech Movement.

Child Guidance Toys, first shown in 1965 but conceived in 1963, is an appropriation of a department store newspaper advertisement, altered only by slightly rearranging parts of the ad.²⁹ The result is a political poster of sorts, in the satirical spirit of the great photomonteur John Heartfield, that uses minimal means to suggest a possible source of violence in our society.

Heinecken chose not to produce this work (and others in the same series of enlarged ads) as a print on paper. Instead, he made a film transparency and designed it to be hung several inches from the wall where it is displayed. The reference to a photographic negative is obvious, and when the piece is properly lighted its shadow is indeed “printed” on the wall behind. The shadow image alludes, too, to the subliminal operation of advertising messages.

From a formal point of view, the simple act of presenting a film transparency as a work of art was both radical and advanced. It calls ironic attention to the myth of photography as an unobstructed window on the world (this is a window we can actually see through—though we see only the wall beyond and a duplicate image cast there). Most significant for its advanced understanding of the issue, the piece is experienced as an object—a free-hanging strip of plastic with an image on it—more like a sculpture or an abstract painting than an illusory photograph. The almost total lack of perspective, with objects of different sizes represented out of scale and in a horizontal, comic-strip sequence, also helps overcome the illusion.

In the ensuing years after Child Guidance Toys, Heinecken tackled a range of topics, often on the dangerous field of sexual politics. Much of this work is a guileless, exuberant response to the liberating atmosphere of the era. Some of it—like the famous TV/Time, 1970 (a television viewed through a transparency of a nude: an instrument for spontaneous collage)—clearly functions as a critique of the pervasive sexism and sexual violence of television. But some of it crosses the line into terribly poor taste, if not misogynism—for example, a Do It Yourself Embroidery Hoop, also 1970, that suggests a needle and thread might be used to decorate a picture of an anonymous vulva.

Whether it was the times or the influence of his work, many of Heinecken’s contacts and students also chose to deal with sexual subjects. Darryl Curran presented stylized nudes as Pop icons; Ellen Brooks was more romantic and, at the same time, confrontational to mores of the day with her sculptural representations of copulating couples; Suda House searched for the line between female sexuality and the pornographic myth; Jack Butler concerned himself with the subject of representation and sexual fantasy.³⁰

Heinecken is, as Berman was, a strongly attractive personality with a very inventive mind. Soft-spoken and gently supportive, he has a contagious sense of humor and a zest for life only slightly tempered by sixty years of parties. He is universally loved by past and present students and by colleagues who know him. These personal qualities, as much as his work and ideas, allowed him to bring together an extraordinary nexus of faculty (in undergraduate, graduate and extension programs), students and associates.

“My moving to LA and many of my positive experiences there are directly related to my association with Robert,” writes Judith Golden, who taught at UCLA from 1975 to 1980. Ellen Land-Weber says of the period between 1969 and 1974, “[The Los Angeles scene] all kind of revolved around Heinecken and [Robert] Fichter at UCLA.”

Among the artists discussed in this book, Robert Cumming, Curran, John Divola, Fichter, Golden, Land-Weber, Jerry McMillan and Todd Walker all taught in the photography program at UCLA at some point. Brooks, Gillian Brown, Butler, Carl Cheng, Curran, Divola, Robbert Flick, Susan Haller, Victor Landweber, Virgil Mirano, Kenneth Shorr and Michael Stone received their graduate degrees there.³¹

PHOTOGRAPHY INTO SCULPTURE

In addition to his insight as a social critic, Heinecken’s free-ranging intellect made him an ingenious technical experimenter as well. He told the New York Times in 1970 that his teaching emphasized “ideas, individuality, expression, sensations, responses, ideological and experimental attitudes first, and media second” (an attitude the interviewer attributed to “his acceptance of what might be called the California zeitgeist“). In discussing the primary concerns of his own work, he suggested a strong tie between its formal/experimental aspects and its meaning, declaring his interest in

the relationship and play between an unfamiliar picture-object content and the familiar photographic image… the various ways in which photographic images transcend their relationships to actuality… setting up real physical participation by the viewer in the work… [and] relating the concept and content of each piece to the next, so as to be involved in the constant development of individual subjective work.³²

From early on Heinecken found that to satisfy these interests he had to reject the traditional idea of a flat photograph on paper. In late 1965 he began a series of “multiple solution puzzles” and small sculptures. The puzzles are changeable montages of anthropomorphic shapes—photographic fragments of body parts—that never quite resolve into an entire human form. Some of the sculpture, like FigureSections/Beach, 1966 which can also be manipulated by the viewer, works in a slightly different way, walking a tenuous line between human shapes and visual analogues in nature, and between two and three dimensions.

This work was to have a major impact on the practice of photography as an art. In 1966 Heinecken showed it to John Szarkowski and Peter Bunnell, then director and curator, respectively, of the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography. (Bunnell and Heinecken subsequently maintained a strong relationship through the Society for Photographic Education, in which both were active as officers and each eventually served as chairman.) Four years later Bunnell organized the legendary exhibition Photography into Sculpture. If not precisely a response to Heinecken’s ideas alone, the show was surely under their influence.

Photography into Sculpture was presented at MOMA from 8 April through 5 July 1970. As Bunnell pointed out in the exhibition wall label, the majority of the twenty-three American and Canadian artists included were from the West Coast; what he did not note was that nine were from greater Los Angeles. Even more telling of Southern California’s sway: of fifty-two works in the exhibition, thirty were by LA artists.³³

Four of the artists included had been Heinecken students: Ellen Brooks, Carl Cheng, Darryl Curran and Michael Stone (Brooks and Stone were still in graduate school). At least two of the others—Robert Brown and Jerry McMillan—were introduced by him to Bunnell; the final two from Southern California were Richard Jackson and Leslie Snyder. But Heinecken’s influence, even at that time, was considerably wider. Bunnell puts it this way:

There was no doubt in my mind that [Southern California was the center]. The Vancouver people were not originating it… They told me that they knew what was going on in Los Angeles. They would drive all the way down there, gauge Los Angeles, and turn around and go home again… There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that this was a Southern California manifestation… It was clearly Heinecken, or the spirit that he generated, and the curriculum of the school which apparently fostered [it].³⁴

The exhibition received extraordinary attention for a photography show of that era. It was presented on the ground floor of the museum, in a high-traffic gallery. Though no catalogue was published—typically for a contemporary photography exhibition of the time—articles by Bunnell on the topic appeared in the magazines Art and Artists, Art in America and Artscanada. It traveled widely, too, showing at eight additional venues and ending up at the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County (24 January-5 March 1972).³⁵

Critical reception was mixed. The day after the exhibition opened to the public, New York Times critic Hilton Kramer slammed it, calling the work “lamentably compromised by facile tricks and vulgar distortions.” He devoted a portion of his review to an attack on Bunnell’s curatorial integrity and credentials:

I have no doubt that this exhibition will prove very amusing to the large public that doesn’t care a fig about photography as a fine art but only wishes to be entertained by a succession of novelties and “bright ideas” in visual form. Indeed, I can understand their response and even sympathize with it. Theirs, after all, is a response based on ignorance. What I find more difficult to understand is Mr. Bunnell’s enthusiasm for this work. Mr. Bunnell is far more knowledgeable about the history and the esthetics of photography than all but a small handful of specialists in this field. He is a true connoisseur. His grasp of the esthetics of sculpture is more questionable, of course. Perhaps it is this that has led him to overvalue the gimmicks on display here.³⁶

By the end of its run, however, another Times critic would write that the exhibition had

served notice… that the West Coast was witnessing a resurgence of photographic activity, a renewal of energy so significant that… its impact on the medium promises to be as strong as was that of the “f/64” group several decades ago… In fact, California now rivals New York in terms of the importance of the work being done.³⁷

The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer saw the exhibition as “photography straining to become something else and not always quite succeeding,” but he allowed that, since hybridization was the very point of the exhibition and the work it encompassed, it was senseless to take “a puristic way of looking at a very unpuristic phenomenon, and even the most motley of the show’s pieces manage to make a good case for themselves on their own terms.”³⁸

Despite its tentative critical reception, no single exhibition did more than Photography into Sculpture to promote a new attitude toward photography and its possibilities among artists throughout the United States. This was so by virtue of sheer exposure, and because the revolutionary materials and content of the work was in perfect synch with artistic and social attitudes of the time. The exhibition buried forever the notion that photography is a slave to the objects it names.

This profound insight was not fully understood at the time. Kramer might be expected, given his unmitigated disdain for the exhibition, to prattle about “the printed photograph[‘s]… standards of purity and truth” and what he saw as a violation of “the integrity of the photographic process.” But even Bunnell, though he saw an orientation to content in the works’ “internal meaning or iconography—of sex, the environment, war,” chose to focus on formal and technical matters—on “volumetric properties that intellectually and physically correlate form, space, and light.”³⁹

Such a preoccupation with formal issues has haunted analysis of this work over the years since 1970. A spate of exhibitions with titles like Photo/Synthesis, The Alternative Image: Photography on Nonconventional Supports and Images: Dimensional, Movable, Transferable emphasized technical experimentation with little regard for the meaning of the work or the varying intentions of the artists included. As late as 1987, curator Kathleen Gauss would write of the Photography into Sculpture artists, “For the most part, this research was overly attentive to process and materials, and lacked compelling visual or intellectual underpinning,” though she recognized that the work “does reflect how attitudes toward scale, color, imagery, and indeed the fundamental ways of reading a photograph were changing.”⁴⁰

In fact, such fundamental change was the very point of the best of such work. As Susan Kismaric has said of Heinecken and others in a different context (though, perhaps unbeknownst to her, a context closely related to the long romance between Log Angeles artists and the photograph): “These Californians employ photography to debunk the myths and illusions the medium helps create.”⁴¹

In emphasizing the materiality of the photograph, denying its transparency as a window on the world, Heinecken and the others were questioning its authority—its claim to Kramer’s so-called “standards of purity and truth.” To make work of this sort in the 1960s was an inherently political act, entirely in keeping with the social and political questions many of the works themselves raised with their images of commercial excess, political satire and sexual freedom.

INFORMATION MAN

The Information Man is someone who comes up to you and begins telling you a series of related facts about a particular subject in your life. He came up to me and said, “Of all the books of yours that are out in the public only 17 are placed face-up with nothing covering them. 2,026 are in vertical positions in libraries. 2,715 are under books in stacks. The most weight on a single book is 68 pounds and that is in the city of Cologne, Germany, in a bookstore. 58 have been lost; 14 have been totally destroyed by water or fire. 216 books could be considered badly worn. 319 books are in positions between 40 and 50 degrees. 18 of the books have been deliberately thrown away or destroyed. 53 books have never been opened, most of these being newly purchased and put aside momentarily. Of the approximately 5,000 books of Ed Ruscha that have been purchased only 32 have been used in a directly functional manner: 13 of these have been used as weights for paper or other things. 7 have been used as swatters to kill small insects such as flies and mosquitoes. 2 were used as a device to nudge open a door. 6 have been used to transport food like peanuts to a coffee table. 4 have been used to nudge wall pictures to their correct levels. 221 people have smelled the pages of the books. 3 of the books have been in continual motion since their purchase. All 3 of these are on a boat near Seattle, Washington.” Wouldn’t it be nice to know these things?⁴²

Edward Ruscha’s 1971 account of a “daydream” may be the artist’s clearest statement yet concerning his famous series of enigmatic books, as well as the best critical clue to their meaning. (Not that critical appraisal hasn’t been attempted: a bibliography and exhibition history prepared by Michael Kelly in 1989 runs eighty-three pages.)

Beginning in 1962 with Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha published at least one book a year for ten years, producing a total of seventeen by 1978. With the exception of a few of what Ruscha has called “capers”⁴³—self-consciously narrative visual jokes like the 1969 work Crackers—all these books are expressionless enumerations of “facts.”

As a much-lauded painter and printmaker, Ruscha is well aware that facts recounted are, by nature, interpretations. A recent Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition made this quite clear by juxtaposing Ruscha’s photographs for Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965, with drawings based on them.⁴⁴ Depicting the same subject with minimal changes, the drawings take on a romantic, dreamy quality totally lost in the tangle of specific details of the photograph.

It was exactly those details, however, that Ruscha sought to extol in the books. Twentysix Gasoline Stations collects a series of photographs, more or less randomly chosen, of service stations on old Route 66 between Los Angeles, where the artist currently lives, and Oklahoma City, where he grew up. They are analytical photographs—more like a technician’s biopsy slides prepared for a microscope than the product of a craftsman’s hands—and certainly not the sentimental story we might expect of a man’s journey to his child-hood home.

As Eleanor Antin would have it,

Ruscha could fulfill the expectations of his critics only by violating his own (and our) experience. It is neither more real nor more abundant material they demand. They want literature, which Ruscha doesn’t want. His structure is deliberately sparse and casual and filled with holes, and it is here that actual experience resides.⁴⁵

Ruscha was not, however, seeking only the “actual experience” of the vulgar world described in his books. He also wanted the experience of making and disseminating a product essentially different from painting, “artistic” only by a new definition of the word. As his daydream story makes clear, he is (or, at least, was twenty years ago) absorbed by the image of his books in thousands of mundane situations—common objects integrated, to whatever degree, into everyday life, yet tethered to him by an imaginary lifeline of authorship.

He told an interviewer in 1965, after publication of his second book Various Small Fires and Milk, “It is almost worth the money to have the thrill of seeing 400 exactly identical books stacked in front of you.”⁴⁶ Today some 55,000 of these entirely sui generis objects are in circulation. It is that new interaction of the work of art in the culture, even more than the content of the books, that is significant.

Ruscha was adamant, in the early days, that his photographs were not the point of the books: “Above all, the photographs are not “arty” in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.”⁴⁷

Yet his use of photographs had an enormous impact on American art. Photographers, striving to break the conservative hold of the Eastern curatorial and publishing establishment, recognized that Ruscha’s books apprehended an essential fact: that photography’s “information purpose” was a valid and productive artistic arena.

At the same time, artists of a more conceptual bent were given permission by the success of Ruscha’s books to use the photograph when it suited their purposes, without regard for the traditional hierarchy of media. They very quickly accepted the attitude he expressed in an interview when he said, “I just use [the camera]. I just pick it up like an axe when I’ve got to chop down a tree. I pick up a camera and go out and shoot the pictures I have to shoot.”⁴⁸

DADA

Ruscha has described book making as “one of the private sides of me that is particularly strong” and a favorite aspect of his entire body of work. The personal satisfactions of producing books were surely great for an artist trained and experienced as a graphic designer. He had also worked for a letterpress book printer; as a result, he says, “I got a flavor of things from him and from that place, the smell of ink, etc., that I got under my fingernails and never got out.”⁴⁹

An even more powerful influence, however, was Marcel Duchamp, whom Ruscha met at the famous Dadaist’s Pasadena Art Museum retrospective in 1963—the same year Twentysix Gasoline Stations was actually printed. “Because of Duchamp, it was always an option to stop [painting],” Ruscha has said of the first artist to be celebrated for giving up art, “and that offered me a sublime solution if I had needed it.”⁵⁰ Clearly the books were an antidote to painting-on-canvas-for-collectors’-walls and a way to give primacy to the substance of art-the idea-over its form.

While Wallace Berman’s Duchampian frame of mind was important in bringing a neo-Dada sensibility to Los Angeles in the fifties and sixties and in introducing the photomechanically printed page as art, it was Edward Ruscha who broadcast this new awareness well beyond the region’s borders, particularly through the widely available books.

Ruscha’s bookworks almost single-handedly launched the artists’ books explosion of the 1970s. A tradition of the fine livre d’artiste, illustrated with original prints, had certainly existed for at least a hundred years, and on the East Coast in the sixties, Dick Higgins and the Fluxus group were experimenting with mail art and underground publication. But it was Ruscha who demonstrated the potential to reach relatively wide audiences with esoteric and challenging ideas via low-cost, artist-designed, artist-controlled book productions. Crucially, these books were themselves multiple originals; they were not collections of reproductions or illustrated texts, but final works of art in their entirety.

Todd Walker, a Los Angeles advertising photographer-turned-fine artist whose experimental approach to the medium more closely paralleled that of Heinecken and Robert Fichter, self-produced a sentimental first book effort in 1966, A Few Poems by John Donne and Photographs by Todd Walker. Within a few years he had purchased an offset lithography press and, moving toward a formalist interpretation of the artist’s book, was a major pioneer in technical printing innovation.

More in line with Ruscha’s low-tech, high concept approach were Heinecken’s altered Periodicals, a series begun in the late sixties; a book-a-day series of maquettes (never published) by Terry Allen from 1966 and 1967; and Allen Ruppersberg’s enigmatic 23 Pieces, 1969, and 24 Pieces, 1970. By the mid-1970s a number of Los Angeles artists were making conceptual, photographically based books, including Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, George Blakely, Robert E. Brown and Robert Cumming, and the practice spread widely: Franklin Furnace Archive, a New York-based nonprofit group founded in 1976 to preserve artists’ books, had built a collection of 11,000 works by 1984.⁵¹

If Ruscha’s books begat books, though, they also engendered a new attitude toward the photograph and, indeed, toward the art object in general. “There were no rules to be written, and no rules to be followed in the same sense that there are in painting and sculpture and other forms of art,” he has said.⁵²

The attraction of photography as information notwithstanding, Ruscha saw no reason, say, to stick to a chronological or geographical order when he published his pictures of gasoline stations along the route to Oklahoma. For the pictures are not ends, but means; they are the raw material of which the art object is composed. In assembling Various Small Fires, he says, “I went to a stock photograph place and looked for pictures of fires, there were none.”⁵³

The very use of the term “art object” in this context is problematic, and would have been particularly so in the 1960s. What mattered most to Ruscha and to those who valued his books were the ideas on which they centered—the art was in what they said, and not in their presence as objects. They may have an air of collectiblity today, but as late as 1972 Ruscha could argue in a New York Times interview,

I know my books are not thought of in the same way my paintings are. People take a painting and they put it in a vault somewhere, but these books they’ll just throw on a shelf… and eventually somehow it just kind of ends up in the trash, which is OKAY… it doesn’t bother me that much, that they might… not be thought of as “objects of art,” because they’re definitely not.⁵⁴

The critic Lucy Lippard once referred to “Ruscha’s extremely influential ‘antiphotography’ books,” missing the point entirely.⁵⁵ For, just as the books embrace art while assigning it a new role, so they are anything but anti-photography. The very source of their influence is their complete dependence on the photograph—their glorification of its anonymity, their wallowing in its surfeit of detail, their unmasking of its claim to truth, their acceptance of its inevitability.

BOREDOM

One artist who accepted Ruscha’s radical analysis of photography’s contemporary cultural function was John Baldessari.

A painter of Pop sensibilities in the early 1960s, Baldessari was, he says, “really taken with [Twentysix Gasoline Stations]. What I liked was they wouldn’t have been seen as art if they weren’t made by an artist.”⁵⁶ Further influenced by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Sol Lewitt and “writers that were not involved specifically in art—because I wanted to get fresh insights,” he eventually gave up painting and, in a now-famous gesture, had all past canvasses in his possession burned at the local crematorium.

As Robert Pincus has pointed out, a series of works from around 1967—enlarged photographs of nondescript street corners in the San Diego area—share both the look and the attitude of Ruscha’s photographic works.⁵⁷ Significantly, though, Baldessari’s pieces are printed on canvas, adding an extra dimension of irony. What’s more, he had a sign painter hand-letter the address of where the picture was shot, pointing up the nature of the photograph as cultural sign.

Since the late sixties Baldessari has been American art’s most prolific commentator on photography’s social workings. In another piece from 1967-1968, An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer of Facts, Which in This Case the Camera Has Had to Accept and Mechanically Record, he turns a withering eye on our assumptions about both art and photography. The art, of course, is not in the undistinguished photograph, or in the text—copied by a professional sign painter from a book. Nor is it in the “artistic” material of stretched canvas or an “artistic” arrangement of pictorial ingredients. It is in the artist’s sardonic combination of all these elements and his choice of an image that breaks the most rudimentary, photography-manual rules of composition. By knowingly taking the role of slavish announcer, Baldessari undercuts an artspeak bromide and takes his apparently mechanical record to the level of art.⁵⁸

For someone who absolutely refuses to be called a photographer, Baldessari has had a long history of contact with the medium. He told an interviewer

I always had a parallel interest in photography. I had a darkroom in high school; I went to photography exhibitions. But I never brought [photography and art] together until the 1960s. Before that I thought of art as painting, but at the same time I was using the camera to document things—I was looking for things that looked like my paintings. I began to realize that I was more interested in the image than the painting.

Even in high school, he recognized that people thought about photography differently from the way they approached other media. “I didn’t see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences,” he says. He wondered, “Why does that interest photographers and not artists?”⁵⁹ (In a 1980 interview he asked, “What photographer would stand to have a finger-print on his photograph? A painter could conceivably allow it.”)⁶⁰

Presumably because he wasn’t interested in sand dunes, Baldessari studied art—painting—in the 1950s. But he found his own art and the southern California scene uncomfortably “provincial.” Much has been written about his philosophical and artistic journey to leadership in the Conceptual art arena, but he can be quite succinct about it: “A lot of artists around the world got bored at the same time. I was hired at CalArts to teach painting but I just kind of got bored. I guess [as a teacher] I attracted other people who were bored.”

The year 1970 was pivotal—it was the year Baldessari burned his paintings and the year he moved from San Diego to join the faculty at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). It was also the year he began to work almost exclusively in photography and related media, unleashing a frenzy of production that has gone unabated since. He said in 1980,

The real reason I got deeply interested in photography was my sense of dissatisfaction with what I was seeing. I wanted to break down the rules of photography—the conventions. I discovered I was more of a “thinking” person than a “working” person. Photography allowed me to register my ideas more rapidly than painting them They grew out of a sense of urgency. If you’re stranded on a desert island and a plane flew over, you wouldn’t write “HELP” in Old English script.⁶¹

“Art for John Baldessari has to do with… the establishment of certain qualitative levels of order while accepting the formation of other levels of disorder,” one critic wrote in 1972, referring specifically to Aligning Bells of that same year.⁶² Art for Baldessari also has to do with humor, derived, in part, from the nonsense our world sometimes disguises as order.

The rule of order he established for Aligning Bells is simple enough to understand and to follow. Written down, it might read: Make a series of photographs of a ball to be hung on the wall in a horizontal line. But Baldessari’s interpretation of the mandate points up the capriciousness of rules, for it is not the photographs that are to be hung in line, but the images of the balls within.

Baldessari says that each picture can be read as a photograph either of the ball or of the scene, and that is so. But in the aggregate the series of pictures is also a classic tale of failure to see the forest for the trees: the world around us is reduced to background. Old sing-along movies (“Follow the Bouncing Ball”) might come to mind, or Southern California earthquakes (along fault lines?), or even hovering UFOs, but the mundane neighborhood “documented” in these photographs virtually disappears.

Norma’s Story, 1974, is one of many works that show how the photograph, set free from its mooring of verbal or visual context, can drift from meaning to meaning. This work takes utterly unrelated, found pictures and creates an apparently sequential story; the blanks are readily filled by the viewer, who must have narrative even at the cost of truth or accuracy.

A pair of works from the Pathetic Fallacy Series, Injured Yellow and Stoic Peach, 1975, give the most minimal photographic information—what could they possibly prove? By anchoring the pictures to emotion-charged titles, however, they take on significance. Their meaning is colored, in other words. And just as the pictures and their titles may have shades of meaning, so are the photographs physically altered according to Baldessari’s private and obscure system of color codes.

COOLBED

“If works of art are a hypothesis about what art can be,” James Collins wrote in 1973, “Baldessari has shown that objects don’t have to be without reference, tedious, or difficult to be important—and interesting.”⁶³ Baldessari’s example had particularly strong resonance in Los Angeles and environs, even though (as he wryly points out at any opportunity) his work was not widely shown in the region during the 1970s.

For his part, Baldessari emphasizes that Conceptual art and its employment of photography were international phenomena. He places the development of Los Angeles art and photography during the sixties and seventies in an international context, too: “It was a period of moving from Local Art to International Art,” he says, “with all the resulting tension and battles. Specifically it was moving aesthetically away from [1930s Regionalist painter] Millard Sheets to Duchamp and beyond.”

Indeed, artists like Vito Acconci, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long and a host of others made extensive use of photographs in sophisticated ways that went beyond mere documentation. In Los Angeles, however, we can discern a particularly tenacious strain of works primarily dedicated to unmasking the photographic lie.⁶⁴

A number of artists were on parallel tracks to Baldessari in this respect. A goofy humor and self-deprecating humility are marks of this work of the early seventies—characteristics Baldessari’s work shared. Among such innovators were Eleanor Antin, who knew Baldessari from his San Diego days; William Wegman, who shared a studio with him in 1973; Robert Cumming and Allen Ruppersberg.

Ilene Segalove and Alexis Smith have each acknowledged a debt to Baldessari, and took his unabashed humor and freedom in incorporating text and collage as a kind of permission to experiment in those areas. Segalove worked as his assistant in the early seventies and audited classes at CalArts; one Baldessari work, Word Chain: Sunglasses (Ilene’s Story), 1975, is composed entirely of Segalove photographs and text assembled according to minimal instructions.

Having been hired at the inception of CalArts, Baldessari had a major impact on the school and, thus, on contemporary art in Los Angeles and nationally. The school became, he says, not hotbed but a “coolbed” of Conceptual art. He was instrumental in bringing on Douglas Huebler, who had close affinities to the LA Conceptual scene, as Dean in 1976. Others who came to teach, often at his invitation, included Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Robert Barry, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Kosuth, Sol Lewitt, Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner.

Among his students Baldessari can count some of the most visible contemporary artists, many of whom, even among the painters, exhibit a sensitivity to the power our society grants the photograph. Ross Bleckner, Barbara Bloom, James Casebere, Eric Fischl, Mike Kelley, Matt Mullican, David Salle and James Welling are a few of these.

TWENTY YEARS

Twenty years—roughly the span between the birth of a child and graduation from college—is a long time.

In 1960 the United States entered the New Frontier with the election of John F. Kennedy; in 1980 the Silent Majority expressed its will, bringing Ronald Reagan to the presidency. It seems almost trite to recount the many ways in which our society was stripped of its illusions: a bloody, losing war; a shift from drug turn-ons to drug overdoses; political “dirty tricks.”

In Southern California, where illusion is a key industry, some artists tracked the inevitable breakdown of trust that followed. There were those who did this more or less off-handedly, as a byproduct of more pressing interests; others, particularly later in the twenty-year period, made it the central theme of their work. For the most part, their art was not polemical, nor did they face our loss of innocence with great regret. On the contrary, a considerable amount of glee accompanies their defrocking of photography as the minister of Truth.

In the work from this period of most of these artists, however, there is also an element of hope. Some, of course, have given up art, or nearly done so. Others learned what they could from their flirtations with the photograph and have proceeded on to work with other media, at least for the moment. But someone who keeps at a question clearly hopes to find an acceptable answer.

For many of those who continue to work with the photograph, the answer now seems to lie in a synthetic art practice, which recognizes the malleability of photographic meaning and uses it to advantage.

NOTES

Throughout this book, quotations undocumented by footnotes are taken from written answers to a two-page list of questions prepared by the author. Most of the artists responded between January and April 1992; these written responses are in the curatorial files of the Laguna Art Museum. Occasional, minor adjustments of obvious spelling and punctuation errors have been made, but the artists’ choices of words and punctuation are otherwise intact.

Quotations from personal interviews or conversations with artists are so identified in the notes.

1. One of the basic tenets of modernism is faithfulness to the medium; if painting in its highest form is about paint and surface, then photography presumably should be about illusionistic space, information and narrative-and never the twain shall meet. Moreover, photography requires different skills from drawing or sculpture, a technological distinction that historically was cast as a qualitative one: handmade was seen as better than mechanically or chemically assisted.
   
   Sociological effects followed on the historical: practitioners of the “inferior” medium created a self-sufficient—but isolated—subculture, within which independent standards of achievement were developed. Thus, artists separated at first by a technical choice were divided into camps separated by an ever-widening gap of jargon and internal reference. ↩︎
2. Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91 ; he bases his claim on use of the term in his 1979 essay “Pictures.” The Benjamin piece quoted is his famous “A Short History of Photography.” ↩︎
3. “It should have become abundantly clear,” the critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau confesses, “especially during the Reagan years, that the function of criticism, for the most part, is to serve as a more or less sophisticated public relations or promotional apparatus” (Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics,” in Carol Squires, ed., The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography [Seattle: Bay Press, 1990], 59). Solomon-Godeau also provides an excellent bibliographical guide to the establishment of “the conception of postmodernism in the visual arts as a critical practice” in a footnote on page 61.
   
   It should be noted that the term “Postmodernism” has been applied to certain non-photographically based work, and is used (with varying definitions) in the performing arts, literature, architecture and elsewhere; however, the photograph is the lynch-pin of postmodernism in the visual arts.
   
   The most ambitious discussion of photography’s relationship to painting and other media is in Andy Grundberg and Kathleen McCarthy Gauss, Photography and Art: Interactions since 1946 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987); the book accompanied a 1987 exhibition of the same title. ↩︎
4. Christopher Knight, “The Word Made Flesh: L.A. Pop Redefined,” in Maurice Tuchman, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981), 26. ↩︎
5. The full statement continues, “in that one is obliged to produce a mental/conceptual idea without subjective references. And etc., etc., on that.” ↩︎
6. It goes without saying, perhaps, that not every individual discussed in this book feels the same way about every topic. John Baldessari, for instance, in a telephone interview with the author (4 March 1992), was asked whether the proximity of Hollywood and the film industry was an influence. “Instinctively, I want to say no,” he said. “But I can’t say—subliminally it may have had some effect on me.” He went on, however, to say, “The only reason I used film stills is that they were cheap; you found them all around.” ↩︎
7. Quoted in Charles Desmarais, “Faraway Feeling: Kenneth Shorr,” Exposure 17, No. 2 (Summer 1979): 5. ↩︎
8. Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of photographic Meaning,” Artforum 13, No. 5 (January 1975): 37. Today, almost twenty years later, Sekula says, “Los Angeles is perpetually in the grip of a generalized, often hallucinatory idealism. The art world perpetuates this in various ways. It’s logical that Los Angeles should be the site of the counter-myth that photographs ‘don’t tell the truth.’ I’m interested in a less insipid, more dialectical view of the matter.” ↩︎
9. Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946), 368-9. McWilliams misidentifles Anderson as “Anthony.” ↩︎
10. Robbert Flick, Interview by Irene Borger for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Inglewood, CA, 5 August 1981, transcript page 26, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. ↩︎
11. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, “Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the Arensbergs,” in Bonnie Clearwater, ed., West Coast Duchamp (Miami Beach: Grassfleld Press,1991), 25-45. ↩︎
12. The author thanks Kathleen Travers, who provided this information from Los Angeles area telephone directories. ↩︎
13. John Coplans, “Circle of Styles on the West Coast,” Art in America 52, no. 3 Uune 1964): 33.
    
    Seven years later—during the period when the Pasadena Art Museum was at its peak—much the same opinion was expressed. “The Los Angeles Art scene is alive and well—somewhat,” a New York writer observed. “There are so many artists that one might be tempted to characterize the situation as thriving. But this presents a paradox: for if institutional liveliness—museum sponsorship of new art, frequent gallery shows, wide critical response and press coverage… means anything, the Los Angeles art scene appears nearly dead” (Elizabeth C. Baker, “Los Angeles,1971,” Art News 70, no. 5 [September 1971]: 27). ↩︎
14. It would be preferable to ignore completely the once-maintained distinction between the artists in this exhibition who showed and were considered in photography contexts-the “photographers”—and those who, at the time, were seen as artists. Alas, to do so would be to ignore history and thus to distort the record.
    
    It is possible with hindsight, however, to see this distinction for what it really was: not a theoretical difference, but a social one. As John Baldessari says with regard to this issue, “You are known by the company you keep” (telephone interview with the author, 4 March 1992).
    
    It is interesting to note that photographers who figured this out made the transition to artist rather easily. Thus, Ellen Brooks, who moved to New York and got a good gallery, is now seen as part of the Postmodern mainstream, where Robert E. Brown and George Blakely, for example—both brilliant conceptualists with postmodern sensibilities—work today in relative obscurity.
    
    Robert Fichter shared the following notes with the author, which highlight the gulf that existed in 1970: “MacMillan [sic] allows as how he’s trying to shift his image from photographer to sculpturer or artist/he wants to make [it] on his art alone and god knows I am sympathetic to that problem of labels and about that time the lady from Multiples shows up/is introduced all around/Jerry is careful to say ‘teaches art at UCLA’ and fortunately she doesn’t say what sort/so we can order and all of us sit at the same table and know the same kind of inner state; art conscienceness. so we start talking about how it is colder in LA today than New York… going back and forth like that. MacMillan starts talking about how Robert Frank stayed with him when he was on the west coast and how Frank seemed to him to be very serious, only showing a sense of humor when ladies were around and about then the Lady from Multiples Sez `Who’s, Robert Frank?’ I don’t have to tell you again about the triple layer understanding I received then of the SUPERORGANIC reality that we laughingly call the art scene” (“Script for ‘Transitions and Translations of Photographic Responce,'” a slide show/performance piece presented at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, 1970; idiosyncracies of spelling and punctuation have been maintained). ↩︎
15. If the number of general art galleries and museums in Los Angeles was slow in its growth, the validation and sales opportunities afforded specifically to photography were fewer still. In the 1960s there was virtually nothing; beginning in the 1970s college and university galleries occasionally showed photo-derived works (the University of California campuses at Los Angeles—through its Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts—and Riverside—via the California Museum of Photography—also collected). The artist-run Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies held exhibitions in other organizations’ spaces for several years until opening a modest downtown gallery in 1980.
    
    A photography department—the only one in a Southern California art museum before the past decade—was founded at the Pasadena Art Museum in late 1969; it showed signs of increasing vitality until it was abruptly shut down by the Norton Simon takeover of the museum in 1974. (In New York, by contrast, both the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have had major photography collections since the 1930s.)
    
    The commercial gallery scene was only slightly better, beginning in a West LA living room with Randolf Laub’s Ohio Silver Gallery in 1971. (Laub says, “The sale of photo books kept me going. I was selling Imogen Cunningham prints for sixty dollars and Ansel Adams for ninety—and I couldn’t sell them at that. But we would have five hundred people for an opening—and that was in my house!” [Telephone interview with the author,15 May 1992.]) Ohio Silver closed in 1976.
    
    Starting in the mid-1970s the G. Ray Hawkins (opened February 1975), Stephen White and Susan Spiritus Galleries cultivated small circles of (mostly conservative) collectors. Nothing, however, of the scale and variety of the East Coast market existed and only Hawkins, under director David Fahey, regularly showed advanced work by Southern California artists. ↩︎
16. Robert Heinecken, interview with the author, Chicago, 3 June 1990. ↩︎
17. Darryl Curran, “Photography in L.A.,” LAICA Journal 1 (June 1974): 40. The other artists included were Lewis Baltz, Michael Bishop, Claire Henze, Leland Rice and Edmund Teske. ↩︎
18. Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990), 23; John Coplans, “Art Is Love Is God,” Artforum 2, no. 9 (March 1964), 26. ↩︎
19. Solnit, Secret Exhibition, 5. George Herms feels that “we have had a Duchamp on the West Coast in Wallace Berman,” and Walter Hopps, curator of the 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, thought to ask Berman’s prior opinion on such a show (he pronounced it “a cool idea”) (“Appendix C: West Coast Duchamp Symposium, Santa Monica Public Library, 8 December 1990,” in Clearwater, West Coast Duchamp, 121). ↩︎
20. Parlor-bound amateurs of the nineteenth century sometimes cut up and reassembled their pictures into surreal scrapbook collages. Their unselfconscious efforts were directed toward the creation of a new and humorous or strange kind of reality and not (of course) to a critique of the alternate world photography, in its ubiquity, would one day propose.
    
    Pablo Picasso’s incorporation of photomechanically printed elements in his cubist collages of 1912 and later, and the work of Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others in ensuing years, stretched the possible artistic uses of the photograph beyond the notational, usually toward surreal purposes or for graphic impact. John Heartfield, in Germany in the years before World War II, constructed photomontage political cartoons from images found in newspapers and magazines; he recognized the visual propaganda strategies of official Nazi images and laid them bare by recycling and recontextualizing them. Proto-Pop artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi used similar sources and techniques for their ironic commentary on middle-class British values in the 1950s. ↩︎
21. David Meltzer, “The Door of Heaven, The Path of Letters,” in Hal Glicksman, Walter Berman: Retrospective (Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, 1978), 100. ↩︎
22. Anne Ayres, “Impure Pop: L.A. Painting in the 1960s,” in Ayres et al., L.A. Pop in the Sixties (Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1989), 15. ↩︎
23. Rather than a magazine, Semina was more an envelope filled with associated scraps and pieces mailed to a small number of friends and acquaintances. Nine issues were produced between 1955 and 1964 in editions of about 200. See Solnit, Secret Exhibition, for a wide-ranging discussion of the journal and its influence. ↩︎
24. Solnit, Secret Exhibition, 20, 22. Herms is apparently committed to his statement; he used almost the identical words in a 1982 interview (see Robert L. Pincus, “George Herms,” in Forty Years of California Assemblage [Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989], 156). ↩︎
25. John Coplans, “Wallace Berman: Art Is Love Is God,” Artforum 2, no. 9 (March 1964), excerpted in Coplans et al., Assemblage in California Works from the Fifties and Early Sixties (Irvine: University of California, Irvine, 1968), 8. Rebecca Solnit argues persuasively against such characterizations of Berman: “The obstacle to understanding Berman’s role seems to be the continuing insistence on the medium of assemblage as the significant factor and common denominator” (Solnit, Secret Exhibition, 102-3). Primarily concerned with the Beat, neo-Dada, neo-Surrealist roots of her book’s subjects, however, Solnit fails to see the Postmodern aspects of Berman’s sensibilities. ↩︎
26. Peter Selz, Llyn Foulkes: The Sixties (New York: Kent Gallery, 1987), 8. ↩︎
27. William Jenkins, “Introduction,” in James Enyeart, ed., Heinecken (Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1980), 11; Robert Heinecken, “The Photograph: Not a Picture of, but an Object about Something,” ADLA (October 1965), n.p. ↩︎
28. Enyeart, Heinecken, 139. ↩︎
29. This important work is dated 1963 in the major Heinecken monograph (Enyeart, Heinecken, 66 [plate 40]), but has been reproduced elsewhere with the later date of 1965. Heinecken himself says that he made a study in 1963 but did not assemble the final work until it was shown two years later (telephone conversation with Lisa Buck, 22 May 1992). The Information File of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, contains a Photocopy of Robert Heinecken’s Master List of Prints (now also in the curatorial files of Laguna Art Museum); that document indicates a date of August 1965, which has been accepted here. ↩︎
30. Except for Suda House, who studied with Curran at California State University at Fullerton, these artists all received master’s degrees at UCLA. House says that people assumed she was Heinecken’s student “because of the type of work… I was doing at the time.” She did assist him as a technician with work on the 3M Color-in-Color copy machine, and sat in on graduate seminars at his invitation. “It was through these encounters that I was greatly influenced by Heinecken.” ↩︎
31. Robert Heinecken, “Introduction,” in Celebrating Two Decades in Photography: Recent Work by UCLA/MFA Recipients (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California, Los Angeles, 1985), 9-10.
    
    Of course, short-term visitors, artists who would only later reach artistic maturity, and those working outside the dominant mixed media and image-recycling strategies also contributed to the intellectual and aesthetic excitement of the program. Significant among those in the period 1962-1980 were perhaps twenty-five people, including major artists like Michael Bishop, Jo Ann Callis, Lee Fricdlander, Kenneth McGowan, Philip Melnick, Patrick Nagatani, Pat O’Neill, Bart Parker, Sheila Pinkel, Keith Smith and Edmund Teske.
    
    Finally, teachers in the art department but not in the photography program—among them Llyn Foulkes, Stanley Mock and Alexis Smith—were part of the interaction at UCLA. ↩︎
32. A.D. Coleman, “Heinecken: A Man for All Dimensions,” New York Times, 2 August 1970. ↩︎
33. The Museum of Modern Art Department of Photography maintains meticulous records of past exhibitions, including detailed checklists, press releases, wall texts and annotated installation photographs keyed to the checklist. The author is grateful for access to these files. ↩︎
34. Peter Bunnell, interview with the author, Chatham, MA, 26 October 1991. ↩︎
35. The exhibition was also presented at Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; Rice University, Houston; Fort Worth Art Center; Vancouver Art Gallery; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Phoenix Art Museum; and San Francisco Museum of Art (Peter C. Bunnell, “Photography into Sculpture,” Artscanada 144/145 [June 1970]: 25). ↩︎
36. Hilton Kramer, “Modern Museum Displays Photography as Sculpture,” New York Times, 9 April 1970. ↩︎
37. A.D. Coleman, “California Report: A Break with Tradition,” New York Times, 5 July 1970. ↩︎
38. Thomas Albright, “New Role for the Camera,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 December 1971. ↩︎
39. Kramer, “Modern Museum Displays Photography as Sculpture”; Bunnell, “Photography into Sculpture,” 26. ↩︎
40. K[athleen] M[cCarthy] G[auss], “Breaking the Mold,” in Grundberg and Gauss, Photography and Art, 111. ↩︎
41. Susan Kismaric, California Photography: Remaking Make-Believe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 12. ↩︎
42. “Interview between Ultra Violet and Edward Ruscha,” 6 July 1971, unpublished typescript, roll 1869, Margery Mann Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. A slightly longer passage, including supposedly original interview responses, appears without attribution in A.D. Coleman, “My Books End Up in the Trash,” New York Times, 27 August 1972. ↩︎
43. A.D. Coleman, “I’m Not Really a Photographer,” New York Times, 10 September 1972. ↩︎
44. Richard Marshall, Edward Ruscha: Los Angeles Apartments 1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990). ↩︎
45. Eleanor Antin, “Reading Ruscha,” Art in America 61, no. 6 (November-December 1973) : 66. ↩︎
46. John Coplans, “Concerning ‘Various Small Fires’: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications,” Artforum 3, no. 5 (February 1965): 25. ↩︎
47. ibid. ↩︎
48. Coleman, “I’m Not Really a Photographer.” ↩︎
49. Edward Ruscha, oral history interview conducted by Paul Karlstrom, 1980-81, transcript page 81, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. ↩︎
50. Quoted in Robert Pincus, “Quality Material…’: Duchamp Disseminated in the Sixties and Seventies” in Clearwater, West Coast Duchamp, 93. ↩︎
51. Joan Lyons, ed., Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985): 228. ↩︎
52. Ruscha, interview by Karlstrom, 82. ↩︎
53. Coplans, “Concerning ‘Various Small Fires,” 25. ↩︎
54. Coleman, “My Books End Up in the Trash.” ↩︎
55. Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object… (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 11. ↩︎
56. John Baldessari, telephone interview with the author, 4 March 1992. Unless otherwise documented, all Baldessari quotations are taken from this interview or from the questionnaire described in the introduction to these Notes. ↩︎
57. See note 50 above. ↩︎
58. Coosje van Bruggen reports (John Baldessari [Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990], 36) that Baldessari saved the list of quotations from which he drew the title of Slavish Announcer (though she mistakenly says they are from a book on photography; they are clearly drawn from a text on the use of photographs in art). The list bears repeating, for each potential title, read with its intended irony, is a clue to Baldcssari’s complex understanding of the relationship of the photograph to art:
    
    One should adapt from a photograph with imagination and not feel obligated to represent the picture exactly as the camera does.
    
    What the camera has done is to show us what to concentrate upon; and consequently, what to leave out.
    
    The photographer can change his position, but the result would be a different kind of picture.
    
    For many years now the artist has increasingly welcomed the assistance afforded by the photographer.
    
    The practice of basing a painting on what the mechanical eye of the camera records has been greatly overdone.
    
    Very rarely does a photograph of Nature fulfill all the requirements of a good composition.
    
    Without design a photograph will be but an announcement.
    
    In a mere photograph there is a real danger of losing a picture’s chief attribute, its design.
    
    At first glance a photograph will often appear to add up to the conditions of an adequate composition.
    
    Here is a typical case of a striking photograph that contains elements from which a good composition can be made; as it stands, it cannot be literally copied without asking for trouble.
    
    Study in expression: the figure conveys to the viewer that this man has something to say.
    
    Your photograph should convey the mood of your subject. ↩︎
59. “John Baldessari,” Current Biography 52, no. 6 (June 1991): 7. ↩︎
60. Quoted in Robert Pincus-Witten, “Blasted Allegories! The Photography of John Baldessari” in John Baldessari (New York: New Museum, 1981), 53. ↩︎
61. Ibid., 51-52. ↩︎
62. Henry Martin, “Milan Letter,” Art International 16, no. 6 (Summer 1972): 106. ↩︎
63. James Collins, “Pointing, Hybrids, and Romanticism: John Baldcssari,” Artforum 12 (October 1973): 58. ↩︎
64. This is not to say that other approaches have not been taken in Los Angeles, of course. Conceptual pioneer Bruce Nauman, for instance, used photographs in his own, thoroughly idiosyncratic, way, and Chris Burden is but one example of a major artist who regularly used photographs, but generally as no more than journalistic notations.
    
    A thorough history of the Conceptual movement has yet to be written, but when it is Los Angeles will be seen to have played an important part. For example, two of the earliest galleries to regularly show such work were based in LA: Seth Siegelaub (widely thought to be the first to deal regularly in Conceptualism) and Eugenia Butler. ↩︎