The Act of Watching and Being Watched

The chilliness of the three big photographic murals by Lewis Baltz in a new “Focus Series” show at the Museum of Contemporary Art is underscored by the vast emptiness of the gallery in which they’re installed. Cut in half lengthwise by a long wall, the crisply painted white room has been split into imposing parallel corridors, each one brightly lit.

Unlike rooms, which physically invite you to linger awhile and look around, hallways coax your passage through them. Baltz’s big photomurals, which are rectangular montages composed from as many as two dozen Cibachrome prints mounted on thin board and left unframed, are lined up along three of these long walls. Entering the corridor-like spaces, you approach them with a side-wise glance.

Seen first out of the corner of your eye, the photomurals are immediately endowed with an aura of surreptitiousness. And with good reason. The icy installation, austere in the extreme, enhances the works’ relentlessly distanced, stealth-laden imagery.

Made in 1991-92, “Ronde de Nuit”--or “Night Patrol”--shows fragments of an urban environment as if seen through a scope on a rifle. “Docile Bodies” (1994) brings together pictures from a medical operating room, where endoscopic surgery is underway, using high-tech cameras and monitoring systems to probe around inside a patient’s body.

“The Politics of Bacteria” (1995) combines pictures of men in suits, police in riot gear, shifty-looking people in crowds, surveillance-camera views of tunnels and blankly modern buildings, unusual metal canisters, computer data streams and more. Although nothing untoward or inappropriate is actually witnessed in these pictures, a queasy feeling of unfocused threat is inescapably conveyed.

Baltz’s recent work comprises a photography of paranoia, but it’s neither melodramatic nor sensational. It’s quietly relentless. In “Docile Bodies,” which is the most compelling mural of the three, you slowly begin to realize that every photograph you see has been shot off a video monitor or shows someone looking at a video monitor (or, in a couple cases, perhaps both). A stark clash occurs between disembodiment and the extreme visceral invasiveness of surgery.

The clash is replicated, in a lower key, in the experience of Baltz’s own photomural. There is no narrative of individual life and death unfolding in this montage of pictures, no visual “ER” teleplay of human frailty amid the promise and the terror of modern technology. Baltz instead composes his photomontage like visual poetry, repeating certain images for effect, using internal echoes of shape and line and exploiting overlays of color--especially red--to establish tone.

He even conjures Renaissance painting: a body sliding into a CAT-scan machine recalls Mantegna’s grim reminder of mortality in his famous, feet-first depiction of the dead Christ.

In the show, which was organized by MOCA curator Connie Butler, what makes the experience visceral for the viewer is suddenly noticing that, up in the corner of the gallery, just above the mural, a small, white security camera is unobtrusively recording your every move as you peruse Baltz’s pictures. In fact, I counted five video cameras scattered unobtrusively around the show’s ceiling, just as they are in any modern and well-equipped museum; each one sends a steady stream of encoded information through untold miles of cable threaded through the building’s walls and leading to unknown monitors in unseen rooms sequestered somewhere in the bowels of the institution.

Docile bodies, indeed. Nothing much is happening in any of Baltz’s murals--except for the disconcerting fact that they picture various manifestations of what’s happening surreptitiously in the room in which you’re standing.

Baltz was born in Newport Beach (in 1945) but has lived in Europe for the past decade. He first gained notice for a 1975 group of flat-footed documentary photographs, descriptively titled “The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California.” These 8-by-10-inch black-and-whites chronicled the proliferation of concrete-slab facades and cookie-cutter industrial sheds that were rapidly erasing Southern California’s agricultural landscape of lettuce fields and orange groves.

Forget Ansel Adams. Baltz went out of his way to drain every ounce of romance from the celebrated modern tradition of Western landscape photography.

Irvine’s flourishing industrial buildings were photographed head-on, unembellished, filling the frame and without a living human being anywhere in sight. The photographs’ style was rightly compared to the geometric repetitions and industrial fabrications of Minimalist art, but it also suggested nothing so much as an especially bloodless corporate annual report.

This new landscape bore certain resemblance to the one being photographed in Germany by the slightly older husband and wife team, Bernd and Hilla Becher. But, where the Bechers chronicled the legacy of industrialization from earlier in the century, Baltz was up-to-the-minute and reportorial, documenting radical change virtually as it happened.

There’s a decided formal elegance to these gelatin silver prints, but they’re hardly congenial pictures. Baltz’s industrial parks, together with a 1979 series recording the rapid suburbanization of the formerly rugged wilderness around Park City, Utah, exposed new and disturbing meaning for the word “park.” These parks weren’t pastoral, bucolic or publicly held, but bleak, monotonous and privately controlled.

As it happens, Baltz’s Irvine and Park City photographs are also currently on view at MOCA, included in a diverse survey of paintings, sculptures, installations and photographs drawn from the permanent collection and aptly titled “American Vernacular.” They’re worth taking a look at in their own right, and as harbingers of things to come in Baltz’s photomurals.

The disappointing aspect of Baltz’s show is its catalog. The curator’s essay in the slim volume manages to rely on the writings of most every fashionable French philosopher of the last 30 years--Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari--as if their academic pedigree is necessary to prop up Baltz’s art, when in fact it’s the other way around. Discussing Baltz’s photographs--especially the pictures taken in a surgical suite--in terms of “the late capitalist body” is not very helpful.

Whenever I see the words “late capitalist” in a publication about art, I reach for my Pepto Bismol. This academic cant is a sure sign that we have entered a self-deceptive realm of wishful thinking; for while no one doubts that ours is indeed an intricate capitalist society, deeming it to be “late capitalist” is merely an example of the very manipulation of institutional power supposedly being decried.

The only way to diagnose when the “late” phase of an epoch has begun is after the epoch is over. For all we know, today’s capitalist condition is an adolescent stage in a socioeconomic evolution that has a very long way to go. Baltz’s photomurals might just be pictures of the invisible network of relations experienced by “the early capitalist body.”

That possibility serves to make Baltz’s work even more disconcerting. It’s a drag when museums build a fence around art.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through July 19. Closed Mondays.