ART REVIEW : Wide-Angle Focus on Photography

LAGUNA BEACH — Once in a while, an analytical museum exhibition comes along at which you find yourself exclaiming, “Of course. It’s so obvious. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?” With straightforwardness and concision, it manages to uncover what was hitherto hidden--right before your very eyes.

“Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980,” which opened recently at the Laguna Art Museum, is that satisfying kind of show. In 95 works by 45 artists, it charts the topography of an unusual attitude toward camera work that has formed the historical foundation of some of the most provocative art of the past dozen years.

Ably organized by the museum’s director, Charles Desmarais, “Proof” turns a magnifying lens on one facet of a larger phenomenon first laid out in 1987’s watershed exhibition “Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946,” which had its premiere at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Simply put, both look at the ways in which 20th-Century Modernism had built a high wall around photography, as an ostensibly self-contained medium with unique properties and an independent tradition, and at how that fortress was breached by a number of diverse and challenging artists.

“Photography and Art” took an expansive view, surveying European and American efforts during the entire postwar period, in order to establish a rudimentary historical framework. “Proof” homes in on Los Angeles, beginning with four pioneers and ending just at the brink of the explosive 1980s.

Those four pioneers are loosely divided into two pairs: Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari, on one hand, whose early endeavors used photographs to examine the nature of art; and on the other, Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, for whom the ubiquity of photographic reproduction in contemporary life has woven a complex social web that can be manipulated to revealing effect in an artist’s work.

The division is convincing, in part because “Proof” is careful not to claim a rigid lineage or to invent narrow pigeonholes. Instead, it coaxes forth affinities among widely varied artists.

Most of the rest are seen to have developed from one of these two larger attitudes: the very different Conceptual narratives of Eleanor Antin, Allen Ruppersberg, William Wegman and so on, from the precedent of Ruscha and Baldessari; and, from Berman and Heinecken, the eccentric, material quality that marks the work of George Herms, Ellen Brooks, Carl Cheng and many more.

The Conceptualists tend to use photographs in a straightforward, as-is kind of way. The “materialists” typically print their photographs in a sculptural or painterly way. And a third group, which would include artists such as George Blakely and Susan Rankaitis, is something of a hybrid: They are frankly sculptors and painters who have chosen to use photographic emulsions and materials in the making of sculptures and paintings.

In deceptively simple terms, a 1970 gelatin silver print by Wegman suggests what many of these artists were up to. This particular black-and-white image is a deadpan, utterly inartistic portrait of a garage mechanic. It seems ordinary in every way--lighting, subject, composition--the kind of mundane picture you encounter dozens of times a day.

Framed and hanging on a gallery wall, however, you give it unusual scrutiny--until, eventually, you notice the odd name-patch stitched on the mechanic’s coveralls. His name, it says, is nhoJ , an unpronouceable appellation confirmed by the photograph’s title, which is also “nhoJ.”

As you quickly realize that the image has been printed from a flopped negative--the mechanic who stood before Wegman’s camera was of course John --a rude awakening occurs: Pictures lie. They lie with casual ease and nonchalance, whether they’re attempting to convince eager tabloid readers that there really is a two-headed mother of twins in Des Moines, or whether they’re trafficking in the high-minded, truth-telling precinct of art. As Wegman’s choice of a mechanic for the portrait suggests, how those inescapable lies are used as artistic tools is finally what counts.

“Proof” chronicles the emergence of this paradox into the established Modernist program, which had hitherto sought to find a pure and essentialist truth residing at the discrete core of paintings, sculptures and photographs. For art’s truth could be told only if both the artist and the viewer together understood one thing: Lies are the principal tools at the artist’s disposal.

The ironic title of the exhibition comes from a large 1963 collage by Dennis Hopper. A wedge-shaped printing block, which displays a floral pattern, is affixed to the surface of a board, together with a photograph of the block and a print made with it. Its image of a fragment of nature gets lost in a resonant hall of mirrors: A “proof” is defined as a test impression in printmaking and as a trial print in photography, which are here made equivalent to the “proof” that is the actual block of carved wood. As the curator puts it in the show’s handsomely produced catalogue, Hopper’s piece is “Proof” of “a basic unreliability” that resides in any representation of the world.

The exhibition, whose organization at the Laguna Art Museum was sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, inevitably raises the question of why this particular attitude toward camera work arose as it did in Los Angeles. There are doubtless many explanations, but the work of the four progenitors suggest that two explanations are of particular note.

Wallace Berman, in using a rudimentary form of a copier machine to make “instant artifacts” that are to our age what the Dead Sea Scrolls are to theirs, and Robert Heinecken, in slicing up and recombining magazine photographs to expose their unconscious social language, were exploring the peculiar nature and effect of mass reproduction. In a city where the imagery of mass culture had always been the dominant form of art, such an interest on the part of artists was perhaps inevitable.

As for Ruscha and Baldessari, their work more pointedly addressed the prevailing conditions of Modernist painting and photography of the day--not in order to expand the authority of either, but in an effort to undermine them.

Since early in the century Alfred Stieglitz had worked to establish photography as a respected, independent medium, while the emergence of American painting as an international force in the 1950s had been carried aloft on the banner of formalist criticism. Yet, both these developments had been centered in New York, far away from the tiny, provincial art scene of Los Angeles. For Ruscha and Baldessari there was no reason not to attempt a frontal assault, since there was nothing much to lose.

As it turned out, there was very much to gain. “Proof” wisely stops its survey in 1979, thus tacitly suggesting how significant these focused (yet wide-ranging) developments were to establishing an important foundation on which the emergence of Postmodern art was built in the following decade. That it occurred in concert with the emergence of L.A. as an internationally significant art center is probably no accident.

* Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (714) 494-6531, through Jan. 17. Closed Mondays.