Lewis Baltz, Textes

Jeu de Paume is organising a presentation of Textes, a book by Lewis Baltz. Excerpts from the book will be read by Anne Bertrand, who wrote the preface to this French edition, and then commented on by the translator, Bertrand Schefer.

An artist whose medium is photography, an American based in Europe from 1985, Lewis Baltz (1945–2014) wrote about his own work (“Notes on Park City”) and that of his peers (Robert Adams, Jeff Wall), but also about photography generally (“American Photography in the 1970s: Too Old To Rock, Too Young To Die”) as well as art (Burden and Sekula, Gonzalez-Torres) and cinema (“A Film about Kim Novak”).

His essays were published between 1974 and 2012 in journals, exhibition catalogues and books. Theoretical or critical, sometimes political, they may also be more literary in their intentions. As Matthew Witkovsky points out in his Introduction: “In his writings, Lewis Baltz maintains that utopian impulse characteristic of the best avant-gardes, which consists in ‘using” art – making it, exhibiting it, thinking it – as a way of understanding significant historical change, and he does so in a way that is as simple as it is perspicacious.” The texts here convey the depth and scope of his thought, and the acuity of his expression.

Lewis Baltz, Textes, introduction by Matthew Witkovsky, preface by Anne Bertrand, translated from the American by Bertrand Schefer, Haute École des Arts du Rhin, Strasbourg, 2019. This is the French version of Texts, the anthology originally published by Steidl in Göttingen in 2012. It is the second volume in the collection “Que dit l’artiste ?”, after the inaugural volume Tacita Dean, Écrits choisis 1992-2011, published by Éditions de l’École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg (now the Haute École des Arts du Rhin).

Discussion in Jeu de Paume educational space, Tuesday 9 April at 7 pm.

Admission free, first come first served.