Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, Geneva, Switzerland Possibly 1989 - 2006

Lewis Baltz made this photograph of the CERN research facility in Geneva, Switzerland. The palette is cool, almost sterile – whites and greys with just a hint of warmth in the peach colored wall. Everything is so still, clean, and hard-edged. Look at the way the light flickers and bounces off the grid of the ceiling, casting these hard shadows. Then notice how this is reflected in the grid of the floor tiles, which in turn mirrors the modularity of the machines. The image has this overwhelming feeling of control and precision, an almost science fiction-like quality to it. This is like the anti-Abstract Expressionism; its the polar opposite of painters like Pollock. This feels like the death of the author – the work is so objective and dispassionate that there is no room for the artist's hand or personal expression. It's a kind of conceptualism that's more about ideas than feelings.