Walter Wittel

As Is is pleased to present Walter Wittel: Before–After, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together selected works from the 1970s, the exhibition revisits a distinctive body of work that emerged within the Southern California art scene of the period.

Anticipating a future for himself in science, Walter Wittel casually, almost accidentally, entered the discourse of art as an undergraduate student at UC Irvine in the early 1970s. His idiosyncratic artworks and quirky style of self-presentation—the button down shirt with plastic pen protector which has since become the iconic sign of the professional engineer—quickly found a sympathetic audience among Irvine’s older more art-savvy graduate students, some of whom have since gone on to prominent art careers. Not Wittel however because almost as casually as he entered the art discourse he soon left it, returning to science and to the long career in the Seattle area high-tech corridor that followed.

This small, highly focused exhibition of Wittel’s 1970s era production provides a timely case study in what one art historian has recently characterized as the “casual” style in Southern California photo-conceptualism—a self-mocking, self-trivializing critique of high art that shifts attention from the art object to the various “lifestyles” that surround and enable it. In this, Wittel was one of several. But unlike some other artists who pursued their own art careers with unrelenting commitment even while feigning indifference within their artworks, Wittel’s embrace of the casual style is such that it has allowed him to enter, to exit and then years later to enter the art-world again, each time with a relaxed posture that is fully coextensive with the posture of the witty and provocative artworks he once produced.