San Quentin Point, no. 35 Possibly 1982 - 1985

Lewis Baltz made this photograph called 'San Quentin Point, no. 35', we don't know exactly when, but the grey tones are very evocative. It looks like a gloopy mess of some kind of industrial sludge, but I keep looking. The texture is so tactile; you can almost feel the slickness of the substance and the rough ground it's sitting on. There's this tension between something man-made and something totally natural. It reminds me of those Robert Smithson earthworks, but in miniature, and kind of accidental. There's a spot where it looks like a fragment of something bigger, like a broken piece of machinery, and this sits awkwardly among the natural detritus. Looking at Baltz's other work, especially his series on industrial landscapes, you see him doing this again and again. He makes you question our relationship to the environment, but without being preachy. It's like he's saying, "Here it is, make of it what you will." And that's what I love about art; it doesn't give you answers; it just asks better questions.