Reading America by Jean Baudrillard as a young post-grad almost a lifetime ago, it felt contemporary and urgent, it’s references topical – “Boy George, Michael Jackson, David Bowie. . . Whereas the idols of the previous generation were explosive figures of sex and pleasure, these new idols pose for everyone the question of the play of difference and their lack of differentiation.” (America, Jean Baudrillard).
The topicality of Baudrillard’s writing – whose main area of inquiry was ‘media’, the image, and the challenge of engaging in a world coded by ‘signs’ and ‘images’ – can also make the work feel dated. Unless you were a Marxist planning a revolutionary utopia, ‘future-proofing’ wasn’t an idea knocking around 80s philosophy departments. Which is why the California Dreaming project by Camberwell Illustration graduate Lindsay Lombard is such a refreshing take on Baudrillard’s thinking.
California Dreaming turns Baudrillard’s America into a handbook, a usable tourist guide to California as seen by Baudrillard. Lombard gives each observation a different treatment, it’s not an exercise in style. The question of the power relationship between text and image – a cross it seems that every illustrator has to bear – is swerved like a Venice Beach skater. Lombard takes the original work and makes it her own. Baudrillard’s America is philosophy as a Road Trip, and it’s taken the imagination and insight of a young illustrator to see that and deliver it as a visual, conceptual, tourist guide (all tourism is an exploration of images). So what is California dreaming of?
It dreams of driving, of overcoming the idea of distance through endless driving, in Lombard’s illustration of driving as time divided by endless visual repetition.
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