Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph 1960-1980

by Charles Desmarais

Catalog from exhibit curated by California's Laguna Art Museum. As the museum " Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980 examined, for the first time, the LA contribution to ideas which gained currency worldwide in the last decade. Much of today’s most vital art draws upon mass and popular media, and particularly on photography, the most compelling metaphor for the Real World. Photography is half truth, half artifice. The exhibition examined work which addressed this dual potential of photography, and challenged the evidentiary value of the medium. Beginning in the early 1960s, Los Angeles artists John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken and Edward Ruscha began to use the photograph in radically new art contexts. Their work and ideas were different. As were their circles of colleagues and friends, but they each fostered varying but complementary approaches to the use of photography in an art context. Berman composed collages from found photographic images using an early photocopier and Ruscha made his own photographic notations, from which he compiled a series of conceptual artist’s books. By the 1970s, the Los Angeles area was a hotbed of photographic innovation. The shared new attitude toward photography as plastic and anti-documentary was a new phenomenon, and it spread through Los Angeles and California like a chaparral hillside fire. Drawing from virtually every art world phenomenon of the sixties and seventies, from Assemblage, Pop, and Conceptual Art to Performance and printmaking, the work in this exhibition presents a broad array of experiments with new materials, processes and, above all, new ideas."

142 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992