Skip to main content

Lewis Baltz with works by Carl Andre and Charlotte Posenenske

Stills, Edinburgh until July 9th
Four stars

The word 'Ideal' (1970) forms the title of a key image by the late American photographer Lewis Baltz in The Prototype Works (1967-76), one of three series of images seen in parallel with two text-based pieces by Carl Andre and a sculptural construction by Charlotte Poseneske. Framed in close-up monochrome as one of ten prints taken from this early selection, the elaborate music-hall turn of a font that beams out from 'Ideal' also points to the false optimism of post World War Two suburbia that never quite delivered.

As a prime mover in the New Topographics wave of 1970s landscape photography, Baltz captured the built-in obsolescence of the Californian desert once its untamed public space was co-opted and domesticated by developers across the decades. If The Prototype Works show off worlds already inhabited but destined to be gentrified, fetishised and restyled as 'vintage', the thirty-three images of Park City (1979) show half-built ideal homes sitting unoccupied beside mountains of rubble.

A decade later, Candlestick Point (1989) tracks what at first glance looks like a seemingly unspoilt idyll, before a far-off flat-pack city emerges beyond the telegraph poles and dumping ground of old tyres. Viewed side by side like a cartoon strip or flick-book stills, such wide open spaces frozen between moments in motion resembles the panoramas of Wim Wenders or Michelangelo Antonioni.

Andre's One Hundred Sonnets, BIRD and One Hundred Sonnets, TREE (both 1963) are concentrated concrete impressions of their subject, while Poseneske's Vierkantrohre Serie D (1967-2014) is a wilfully functionless steel air-shaft-like arrangement that comes from and goes nowhere. Like the silver tiles of Andre's Aluminium Sum Ten (2003), which grows grubby from being walked on, it is designed to be taken apart and reassembled, so, like the bare patches of scrubland in Baltz's images, the wear and tear traces of humanity make their mark.

The List, May 2016

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...