Zinzin

Ed Ruscha

Words have no size: the corny magic of Ed Ruscha

Another Hollywood Dream Bubble Popped, Ave. Of Disgust, Baby Jet, Bliss Bucket, Bloated Empire, Dirty Baby, Easy Weepers, Fat Boy, Fly-Proof, Guacamole Airlines, Heavy Industry, Hot Rip Stop, Ice At Nice Price, It’s Only Vanishing Cream, Japan Is America, Lisp, Molten Polyester, Nothing And Everything, Pay Nothing Until April, Porch Crop, Smells Like Back Of Old Hot Radio, Public Stoning, Street Greed, Texas Hairspray, The Act Of Letting A Person Into Your Home, The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas, Tool And Die, Vital To The Core, Wall Rockets, Wazza Problm?, Whiz Kids, The End, are but a few of Ed Ruscha’s word paintings that have inspired me over the years.

And if you needed yet another reason to visit Omaha this spring, consider this: “Word/Play: Prints, Photographs, and Paintings by Ed Ruscha” is on view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, through May 6, 2018.

The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas (Part 1)

Ed Ruscha, 150 Miles, 1989. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 40 inches (61 x 101.6 cm). Collection of Richard Edwards, Aspen.
Ed Ruscha, 150 Miles, 1989. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 40 inches (61 x 101.6 cm)

“The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas” is a line from Mark Twain’s autobiography and the title of an exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that Ed Ruscha curated last year. In response to Clavin Tomkins’ wonderful July 1st New Yorker profile of Ruscha, titled “An artist in the right place,” I have pulled together 10 of my favorite works by the artist. First up is this incredibly blunt piece from 1989, simply titled “150 Miles.”

Readymade Nomenclature: Gaslight / Gaslighting

No this is not an Ed Ruscha painting. This magnificent opening film title still comes to us courtesy of Christian Annyas’ The Movie Stills Collecting Corporation. The 1944 mystery-thriller was Directed by George Cukor, produced by Arthur Hornblow Jr., screenplay by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch and John L. Balderston. The movie featured Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, and an 18-year-old Angela “Murder She Wrote” Lansbury in her screen debut. I was of course drawn to this by the visual, but stumbled into an incredible etymology in the process of researching the film. It turns out the the term “gaslight” as been co-opted by clinical and research psychologists to describe “efforts to manipulate someone’s sense of reality.”

Here is an excerpt of the origins of the term from Wikipedia:

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory and perception. It may simply be the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, or it could be the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term “gaslighting” comes from the play Gas Light and its film adaptations. In those works a character uses a variety of tricks to convince his spouse that she is crazy, so that she won’t be believed when she reports strange things that are genuinely occurring, including the dimming of the gas lamps in the house (which happens when her husband turns on the normally unused gas lamps in the attic to conduct clandestine activities there). Since then, it has become a colloquial expression that is now also used in clinical and research literature.

The term derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light (originally known as Angel Street in the United States), and the 1940 and 1944 film adaptations. The plot concerns a husband who attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment, and insisting that she is mistaken or misremembering when she points out these changes. The title stems from the husband’s subtle dimming of the house’s gas lights, which she accurately notices and which the husband insists she’s imagining.

Kerouac’s On the Road Scroll & Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print

Jack Kerouac - On the Road manuscript scroll

Robert Rauschenberg - Automobile Tire Print

Two significant artifacts or two-lane blacktop events that came to mind immediately after posting our piece, Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip”: Plotting a motorized city, paper route style the other day was the similarity between Jack Kerouac’s (1951) 120-foot-long rant, Robert Rauschenberg’s (1953) 23-foot-long tire track, and Ed Ruscha’s (1966) 25-foot-long survey.

First a brief history of the Kerouac manuscript for On the Road. Kerouac produced the single-spaced text without commas or paragraph breaks on one massive continuous scroll in only three weeks. The 120-foot-long player-piano-like (Jelly) roll (Morton) was created by taping semi-translucent paper together and feeding it through his “That’s not writing, it’s typing” 1928 Underwood Portable typewriter. But oh what a typist he was; according to legend (or Allen Ginsberg), Kerouac was clocked at speeds approaching 110-120 words per minute on the straightaways and perhaps those speeds can be attributed to the “nearness” of Kerouac to the subject matter.

“His subject was himself and his method was to write as spontaneously as possible…What resulted he would later transcribe for forwarding to his publisher, but never revise, in principle he regarded revision as a form of lying.”
~The New York Times

“I’m just reading what I wrote all night. There are better things coming than what I wrote all night. Straight from the mind to the voice”.
~An excerpt from On The Road, Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, Rykodisc (1999)

Straight from the mind to the voice. This desire or act of accepting /embracing things for what they are, flaws, flies in the ointment, warts and all, is a reoccurring aspect to Robert Rauschenberg’s work as well. Rauschenberg is perhaps best known for his late 1950s, early 1960s Combines. But for me Rauschenberg’s most significant work besides Erased de Kooning (1953), is his 1953 collaboration with his ‘printer and press’ John Cage entitled “Automobile Tire Print. This 23-foot-long “print” was executed with black house paint, twenty sheets of typewriter paper, and a Model A Ford one weekend on a semi-deserted street in in Lower Manhattan.

Unfortunately it rained. Fortunately it rained. Thankfully it rained. Just by chance it rained and everything was salvaged. Or as Rauschenberg explains in this wonderful 1999 interview at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: ‘And I just poured the paint on the… it rained… and the paste didn’t really hold up too well… yeah I salvaged it all, but anyway it didn’t have to rain… and so I pored it in front and I told John to really… I poured it in front and I told John to drive just as straight as he could you know, be careful, keep going straight you know and John was fascinated by the fact we were doing this and he did a good job.’ Yes a lovely effort indeed.

Additional Video:

Unrolling the On The Road scroll:
“On the Road Again with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank”
Indianapolis Museum of Art – IMA

Additional Audio:

Jack Kerouac’s Famous Scroll, ‘On the Road’ Again
National Public Radio: All Things Considered
by Andrea Shea
July 5, 2007

See also: “Tire,” by Roy Lichtenstein, which arrived in 1962, nine years after the Rauschenberg/Cage tire track print.

Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip”: Plotting a motorized city, paper route style

Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ed Ruscha

Click the image to enlarge. It is an excerpt from the 1966 Ed Ruscha book of photographs, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a continuous folded print of exactly what the title says it is, over 296 inches long when unfolded (seen here in a slideshow).

From the Modernism 101 page for the book:

Starting in 1963, with the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha began a series of photographic art books that documented ordinary aspects of life in Los Angeles. For Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha mounted a motorized Nikon to the back of a pick-up truck and photographed every building he passed. The resulting book, with the pictures printed in order and labeled with their street numbers, achieved an effective non-judgemental and almost anthropological record of previously unexplored details and aspects of the urban experience. Ruscha exercised control over each step of the bookmaking process and with the use of inexpensive offset printing, standard paper, and simple, paperback bindings, he created a new genre of art book designed for commercial distributors rather than art galleries. Ruscha’s books, which became a staple of Conceptualism, were extremely influential to younger generations of artists.

… “The Sunset Strip satisfied one of Ruscha’s early ambitions: ‘In Oklahoma City, I delivered newspapers riding along on my bicycle with my dog. I dreamed about making a model of all the houses on that route, a tiny but detailed model that I could study like an architect standing over a table and plotting a city.’ As a result of his subsequent fascination with the Sunset Strip, this unrealized youthful idea resurfaced in a different form. Ruscha reportedly photographed the Sunset Strip with a motorized camera in a pickup truck in the time that it took to drive the two miles and back, but the piecing together of the photographs and the folding and gluing of the printed sheets by hand took more than nine months. Moreover, this was not a one-time photo shoot, for in 1979 Ruscha said that he had photographed all of the Sunset Strip in each of the previous five years. ‘I begin early on a Sunday morning when no one is around. I use a 250 Nikon, change the film real fast, and just go along and document [it].’ Indeed, the artist has continued to document the street to the present.”

Photographing an entire street from a pickup truck, using a motorized camera, also anticipates Google Street View, by forty-one years! Life imitates art imitates life. And Ruscha continues to re-photograph the Sunset Strip, as noted in an interview with the artist Richard Prince for the article, “Ed Ruscha: the original master of California cool has never been hotter,” in Interview magazine, July, 2005:

Richard Prince: “I hear you’re doing Every Building on the Sunset Strip again [published by Steidl as Then & Now]. What’s there right now?”

Ed Ruscha: “I photograph it every year or so. Anytime I get up to the Strip I’m confronted by two things: How many buildings still do exist, and how much things have changed. But they will soon be doing plenty of Rambo-Vegas-style projects that will span Sunset Boulevard with skywalk bridges and mirrored escalator malls that will be cruel to the eyes. It’s cancerous and ultimately fatal. I wish time would stand still.”

The art critic Dave Hickey writes in a January, 1997 ArtForum article about Ruscha’s earlier book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and the process of “reading” the book as analogous to reading a map or going on a journey, “speaking to us in some odd language of analogue and incarnation.” Hickey continues,

In that moment, I became an art critic – or, more precisely, an art dealer, since I bought all five books. Because it wasn’t just personal. Ruscha’s book nailed something that, for my generation, needed to be nailed: the Pop-Minimalist vision of the Road. Jack Kerouac had nailed the ecstatic, beatnik Road. Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady were, at that moment, nailing the acid-hippie Road, and now Ruscha had nailed the road through realms of absence – that exquisite, iterative progress through the domain of names and places, through vacant landscapes of windblown, ephemeral language.

Books by Ed Ruscha:

Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963
Various Small Fires, 1964
Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
Thirtyfour Parking Lots, 1967
Royal Road Test, 1967 (with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell)
Business Cards, 1968 (with Billy Al Bengston)
Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968
Crackers, 1969 (with Mason Williams)
Real Estate Opportunities, 1970
Babycakes with Weights, 1970
A Few Palm Trees, 1971
Records, 1971
Dutch Details, 1971
Colored People, 1972
Hard Light, 1978 (with Lawrence Weiner)
Country Cityscapes, 2001
ME and THE, 2002
Ed Ruscha and Photography, 2004 (with Sylvia Wolf)
OH / NO, 2008
Dirty Baby, 2010 (with Nels Cline and David Breskin)

On the Road with Garry Winogrand

As a follow-up to Sightseeing with Garry Winogrand, we uncovered an image of a late Winogrand contact sheet of Los Angeles photos (see below) on a 2007 blog post by a blogger named “J.T.”, who offers his own take on Winogrand’s late work. J.T. begins by ruminating on “Figments of the Real World, Winogrand’s massive, out of print 1988 MOMA monograph,” from which he quotes several passages, interspersed with his own commentary. The first thing he mentions from the catalog are more exact numbers for Winogrand’s unseen output near the end of his life: “At the time of his death, it was discovered that Winogrand had been sitting on 2,500 rolls of exposed, but undeveloped film, and an additional 6,500 rolls of developed, but unproofed, film. That’s 9,000 rolls of film that he shot but never bothered to look at.”

The thing we found most interesting, however, is that J.T. came to a similar conclusion as us, that Winogrand, in the end, had become more of a conceptual artist than the “street photographer” he had been and is known for: “Could it be possible that, through these tectonic shifts in methodology, Winogrand was undergoing an honest-to-god sea change in his approach to his medium (a change that privileged the act, not the results?) Is it an accident that the late contact sheets bear more than a passing resemblance to the medium-subverting projects of John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha? Was Garry Winogrand becoming–in his own stubborn, round-about, contrarian way–a conceptual artist?”

A change that privileged the act, not the results. Whether Winogrand “lost his mind” or “evolved his thinking” is a moot point. We have to take what he left the world and make of it what we will. And if most of the images are more interesting as part of a conceptual idea than as individual images, then so be it, because the idea is really interesting, a gift to the future from a dying artist who remains a force to be reckoned with.

Garry Winogrand contact sheet 1982-83
(Click image to enlarge)