The Politics of Bacteria, Docile Bodies, Ronde de Nuit

This exhibition catalogue gathers three of Lewis Baltz's large-scale color trilogies: Ronde de Nuit, Docile Bodies, and The Politics of Bacteria, the body of work in which he traded the black-and-white seriality of his early career for saturated, multi-panel color installations.

Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles with Ram Publications to accompany Baltz's first American presentation of the three trilogies together, the catalogue reproduces the panels in four-color and black-and-white plates across sixty pages, with an essay by curator Cornelia H. Butler. The exhibition followed Baltz's internationally traveled retrospective Rule Without Exception and marked his turn toward subjects drawn from surveillance, medicine, and information technology.

Where Baltz's 1970s work treated the American landscape as a record of unchecked development, these color trilogies apply the same procedural eye to the interiors of laboratories, hospitals, and control rooms. Butler's essay reads the shift as a continuation of his earlier interest in institutional power, now traced through the body and the network instead of the tract house.