Catalog from exhibit curated by California's Laguna Art Museum. As the museum states: "Proof: 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."

Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph 1960-1980

Arts & Photography

Desmarais, Charles

Photography & Video

Fellows of Contemporary Art

Specially bound exhibition catalogue and A signed limited edition multiple by Tim Hawkinson titled "Homunculus" which is a polymer resin sculpture measuring approx 5 3/4 by 2 1/4 by 1/2 inches which was cast and hand-finished entirely by Hawkinson. Produced in an edition of 100, numbers 81-100 are in the possesion of the artist, only the first 80 were available for sale. Each work is signed and numbered by Hawkinson in pencil on the verso. This multiple is number 62/100. The piece is presented in a hand-made portfolio case together with a hard-bound copy in cloth of the exhibition catalogue for which this multiple was created. Both the portfolio holding the multiple and the hard bound exhibition catalogue are housed in a matching silver slipcase. This exhibition was the first museum solo show of Hawkinson, which traveled to Cincinnati, Akron, San Francisco and Winston-Salem in 1996, nine years prior to his popular solo show at the Whitney in New York. The exhibition catalogue was only otherwise issued in softcover and is long sold out and out of print. All in fine condition, but for a couple of small faint stains to the title page of the catalogue. An over-the-top amazing production with a beautiful and fascinating signed artwork by this important artist. Scarce.

Humongolous: Sculpture and Other Works by Tim Hawkinson

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Contemporary Arts Center

Ilene Segalove: Why I Got into TV and Other Stories

Laguna Art Museum

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Books by Desmarais, Charles