In the reading, Two Way Street, Lydia Yee discusses photography from New Documents. She argues that this photo exhibit explored personal style rather than conveying a social message. The photographers involved with New Documents were more interested in living life than reforming it. Other artists involved in the Information exhibition embraced mass media and used photography to document their art. The banal is discussed again as Yee references to Ed Ruscha’s, Every Building of the Sunset Strip. In the late 60’s, Acconci, like Ruscha, balanced his work between street photography, photojournalism, and Conceptualism. Lee Friedlander's work influenced Acconci's Following Piece. By including his shadow, Friedlander's photographs exerted philosophical and reflective characteristics.
New York City, 1966. Lee Friedlander.
In Martha Rosler’s, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, she photographs the area in New York known as “skid row.” She includes words along with her photographs in an effort to criticize. The existence of the words breaks the debate between documentary and conceptual photography.
The Bowery In Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, Martha Rosler.
Using photography to archive the urban transformations in China, photographer Sze Tsung Leong documents historic areas reduced to rubble using a large format camera. Photographer Zoe Leonard has been archiving small shops disappearing in gentrifying neighborhoods. Nils Norman photographs in commercial and financial districts that include barriers toward its inhabitants. Francis Alys created a photographic archive through walking. All of these photographers utilize the street in their art. The complexity and ever shifting movement of the street provides artists with subjects being reinvented and paths to be remapped on a daily basis.
Francis Alys created a photographic archive walking through the streets of Mexico City. In a similar work, Green Line, he creates a metaphor about the history of Jerusalem. Using his body and a can of green paint, he emulated the concrete partitions separating Israelis and Palestinians by walking through a divided country. Alys' direct contact with the land was a performance that revealed the complexity of the inhabitants of the space. This work has been argued to blur the distinction between art and documentation.
Robin Rhode also used a simple line to create stop-action videos. He physically engages with his work, as Alys does. Both artists approach the representational power of the street by direct interaction with it.
Catch Air: Robin Rhode @ Wexner Center.
In the reading, The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony, Karen Jones addressed the powers of removal in historical terms by noting the Native American practice of Potlatch, which was the “destruction of property to an act of communal social exchange/negotiation value.” She stated that the practice of the potlatch is very similar to the riot. The 1965 Watts Riots challenged the systems of power and the modes of transformation within the city of New York. The merger of art practice and social behavior politicized events.
Merriam- Webster Dictionary.
Graffiti art emerged as urban youth claimed the streets as public spaces available for representation. Graffiti artists used public space to gain cultural validation and as a forum to comment on the social order. Their art was a representation of the experience of the postmodern city. The urban social conditions in New York during the late 70’s and early 80’s were unequal and graffiti art politicized these conditions. Jean-Michel Basquiat used graffiti to address and critique the dominating influences within the art world. His work revealed the separations within classes in a postmodern city.
Untitled, Basquiat.
The City of Chicago considers all types of graffiti vandalism and therefore, the gesture of graffiti is not a welcomed one.
The argument between graffiti as vandalism and graffiti as art continues to be an ongoing debate. But who is to decide what is considered art and what is considered vandalism?
A scene from Beat This! A Hip Hop History, 1984.
According to Jones, the word “riot” is synonymous with the re-negotiation of power. The act of resistance challenges an existing order and becomes social domain. Riots are political, social, and activate public space. She addresses the Tompkins Square Riot of 1988 as a significant conflict. The East Village art scene forced rents up and displaced residents who had been living there for a very long time, similar to what has happened in the Pilsen neighborhood. This transformed the neighborhood and displaced people, creating a recycled neighborhood. Because of gentrification, there were a large number of homeless people who had taken up residence in the Tompkins Square Park. The police tried to enforce a curfew, which they felt would clean the park of the homeless. The riot occurred through the effort of people to claim access to public space.
Wicker Park experienced a similar cycle of change in the 1990’s. Many of the artists that I knew, including myself, who lived in Wicker Park, moved to Pilsen because the rents in Wicker Park sky rocketed and the rents in Pilsen were more affordable, creating yet another cycle of gentrification.
The restructuring of the Tompkins neighborhood left its inhabitants feeling abandoned. According to Jones, homelessness is a result of urbanization and a technology based economy. This is a topic of discussion that has existed within all of the readings so far, and is a reality in society to this day. Gary Simmons's Everlast Champion is a comment on identity within the hip-hop culture which, according to the documentary, Beat This! A Hip Hop History, grew out "devastation, bad housing, gang wars, and desperation." In Beat This!, Dj Kool Herc takes a drive through the Bronx ghetto, exposing the abandoned.
An scene from Beat This! A Hip Hop History
Just as art practices reclaim agency for people who are oppressed by the realities imposed by the postmodern city, the riot has become an urban event, and street art has become a form unrestrained revelry.
The functionality of the street was the primary subject contained within all of the readings. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, one of the definitions of the street is, “a promising line of development or a channeling of effort.” In the reading, The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City, Lytle Shaw speaks of Henry James’ return to Manhattan in 1904. James was revolted by the sense of impermanence and the modernization of his childhood neighborhood. The line of expansion created by urbanization channeled the efforts of developers in the 1970’s.
Many artists photographed this transition, documenting the removal of familiar buildings. According to Shaw, this removal was not just a physical one, but a mental and emotional one. It was a reflection and symbol of the loss of optimism in the modernization of cities.
Abandoned West Side Highway. Photo credit: Andy Blair, 1975.
Different concepts of the public arena are discussed, as well. Something that is considered public domain is exposed to the general view. Beyond the general definition of the word public are the varying conceptions of what is public. Shaw stated that one concept is that of the social normative but there is not one singular public as it is never all-inclusive. According to Deutsche, the concept of public art has a nostalgic and regressive use because he believed that it is never inclusive or universal. He also believed that urbanism is a tangible form of the public and is exposed to diverse critical discourse.
Artists have been critiqued using the regressive transformation of the city in symptomatic and critical ways. David Harvey felt that Cindy Sherman’s work, Untitled Film Stills, was symptomatic of the transformations taking place in Lower Manhattan at the time where Deutsche felt that Sherman’s work was used as a critical intervention. This debate contains two sides including totality and identity. According to Shaw, totality maintains accurate and objective points of view whereas identity is closely connected to the feelings and experiences of the artist.
Artists such as James Nares created work not intended as a confrontational public action. His film, Pendulum, exposes the desolation, isolation and decrepit industrial architecture of Lower Manhattan by filming the motion of a wrecking ball which brings attention to the transformation within the environment creating a metaphor between the action of the wrecking ball and the symbolism of urban development. Much of the street art created during this time symbolically represented the destruction of a city and the effects on its inhabitants, who were driven into active social responsibility and political consciousness.
A connection to one’s city is activated through history. Artists living in Lower Manhattan during the 70’s brought its history to life. America has survived a series of risings and perishing, removal and building, living and dying. I moved to Pilsen in 1999. I remember walking to the local grocer on my street and old women sitting on their porches called me puta as I walked by. Hand painted signs displayed in apartment windows said, "Gringo, go home." Many of the people living in that neighborhood had been there their whole lives. They were angry and threatened by my coming into their neighborhood and taking up residence, and I understood. These women maintained a sense of meaning and had a history of experiences connected to their neighborhood. I meant no disrespect to the old inhabitants. It was just the neighborhood that I could afford at the time. It was just the beginning of the cycle of gentrification in Pilsen.
Matthew Buckingham’s film, Muhheakantuck-Everything Has a Name, focuses on the landscape and the previous removal of Native American’s that made the settling of the city possible. He believed in the deactivation of urban names. This cannot be obtained without addressing personal vantage points and the differentiation between true history and claims to knowledge. The debate about the view of the city must be addressed by unlearning the familiar. Buckingham’s narrative touches on the machines of capitalism, a culture of violence, and the ethnocentrism of explorers. Through examining Lower Manhattan’s past, he brings forth a new history. The idea of public is an element of city life that remains transient. According to Shaw, documentary art is in gathering the overlooked rather than making a statement. A documentary photograph becomes documentary when it is articulated into a category. In Jimbo Blachly’s About 86 Springs, he remapped his way through the overlooked spaces through occupying, visiting, and moving within the space. History is created through a cycle of building and destruction, removal and gentrification. Because of constant cycles, the inhabitant’s of an urban city constantly have to remap their way through the familiar.
In the reading, Shifting Ground: Street Art of the 1960’s and 70’s, Frazer Ward discussed the status of the street in relation to art practices. Conflicting views of street art existed between the protest culture and the counterculture during the 60’s and 70’s. The protest culture focused on filling the streets with people in order to generate change. In turn people claimed the street as a public arena. According to Ward, the counterculture used the streets “for the appearance and performance of the new, anti-normative styles of behavior.” In referring to the Shaw reading, the protest culture made the street public. The counterculture created a self-positioning debate.
LSU Public Relations, Peace Rally, 1970. Photo credit: University Archives, LSU Public Relations.
Summer of Love, 1968.
Jacques de la Villegie’s, Decollage was a way to reclaim a form of public expression and bind together tensions of the time. He used the street as a political arena. He viewed the overlooked urban environment as a struggle between the everyday and the recast.
Decollage, Jacques de la Villegie.
Claes Oldenburg’s The Street, conveyed the struggle between the modernist renewal and used, leftover materials, similarly to Nares wrecking ball.
Announcement: The Street, Claes Oldenburg.
Fluxus was a name given to artists who combined different mediums in their work. These artists were lured to the street and blurred the distinction between what was considered art and non-art through performance. Some artists used the street as a way to express the every day and the ordinary while others saw it as a place where behaviors were shaped by the mass media. Artists such as Valie Export and Yoko Ono addressed the distinction of women as real human beings juxtaposed to the women that are represented in the media. In Ono’s Rape, the street is rendered a dangerous place, which shreds a person’s privacy. It also portrays the street as surveillance. Vito Acconci’s Following Piece explored the relations between voyeur and object. A distinction between public and private is established when the subject stops at an apartment building’s door. His location of the self is positional. This establishes the street as an object of inquiry that isn’t allowed to seem neutral or natural as Shaw stated, meaning that subjectivity to it isn’t neutral or natural, as well. Acconci’s view was more personal and positional whereas Export’s and Ono’s were representational of women as a whole.
Fluxus Manifesto by George Maciunas, 1963.
Adrian Piper’s, The Mythic Being series accentuates the relationship between identity and representation and accentuates that race is connected within representation. David Wojnarowicz’s series of Arthur Rimbaud in New York also explores identity and representation. The street is constantly changing and transforming itself. Artists shift through the streets and used them as a critique of art creating a subtle political character in a public sphere.
In the reading, Two Way Street, Lydia Yee discusses photography from New Documents. She argues that this photo exhibit explored personal style rather than conveying a social message. The photographers involved with New Documents were more interested in living life than reforming it. Other artists involved in the Information exhibition embraced mass media and used photography to document their art. The banal is discussed again as Yee references to Ed Ruscha’s, Every Building of the Sunset Strip. In the late 60’s, Acconci, like Ruscha, balanced his work between street photography, photojournalism, and Conceptualism.
In Martha Rosler’s, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, she photographs the area in New York known as “skid row.” She includes words along with her photographs in an effort to criticize. The existence of the words breaks the debate between documentary and conceptual photography.
Using photography to archive the urban transformations in China, photographer Sze Tsung Leong documents historic areas reduced to rubble using a large format camera. Photographer Zoe Leonard has been archiving small shops disappearing in gentrifying neighborhoods. Nils Norman photographs in commercial and financial districts that include barriers toward its inhabitants. Francis Alys created a photographic archive through walking. All of these photographers utilize the street in their art. The complexity and ever shifting movement of the street provides artists with subjects being reinvented and paths to be remapped on a daily basis.
In the reading, The Urban Event: Spectacle, Resistance, and Hegemony, Karen Jones addressed the powers of removal in historical terms by noting the Native American practice of Potlatch, which was the “destruction of property to an act of communal social exchange/negotiation value.” She stated that the practice of the potlatch is very similar to the riot. The 1965 Watts Riots challenged the systems of power and the modes of transformation within the city of New York. The merger of art practice and social behavior politicized events.
Merriam- Webster Dictionary.
Graffiti art emerged as urban youth claimed the streets as public spaces available for representation. Graffiti artists used public space to gain cultural validation and as a forum to comment on the social order. Their art was a representation of the experience of the postmodern city. The urban social conditions in New York during the late 70’s and early 80’s were unequal and graffiti art politicized these conditions. The graffiti gesture isn't a welcomed one in the city of chicago.
According to Jones, the word “riot” is synonymous with the re-negotiation of power. The act of resistance challenges an existing order and becomes social domain. Riots are political, social, and activate public space. She addresses the Tompkins Square Riot of 1988 as a significant conflict. The East Village art scene forced rents up and displaced residents who had been living there for a very long time, similar to what has happened in the Pilsen neighborhood. This transformed the neighborhood and displaced people, creating a recycled neighborhood. Because of gentrification, there were a large number of homeless people who had taken up residence in the Tompkins Square Park. The police tried to enforce a curfew, which they felt would clean the park of the homeless. The riot occurred through the effort of people to claim access to public space. Wicker Park experienced a similar cycle of change in the 1990’s. Many of the artists that I knew, including myself, who lived in Wicker Park moved to Pilsen because the rents in Wicker Park skyrocked and the rents in Pilsen were more affordable, creating another cycle of gentrification.
The restructuring of the Tompkins neighborhood left its inhabitants feeing abandoned. According to Jones, homelessness is a result of urbanization and a technology based economy. This is a topic of discussion that has existed within all of the readings so far, and is a reality in society to this day. Just as art practices reclaim agency for people who are oppressed by the realities imposed by the postmodern city, the riot has become an urban event.
Political corruption and Chicago have been synonymous since the middle of the 19th century with the manipulation of elections and organized crime payoffs to the police. Recent federal investigations into the Richard M. Daley administration have proven that this corruption stands strong today. These investigations led to indictments, trials and convictions caused by the skimming of city contracts, using political work as a basis for awarding jobs and promotions in city departments, and manipulating real estate markets. As Mayor, Richard M. Daley has stepped into his father’s shoes and has established himself as one of the most powerful and influential big-city mayors.
Richard J. Daley was notorious for being the boss of Chicago when he was mayor from 1955-1976. He was responsible for massive downtown development in an attempt to maintain Chicago’s power on a national economic position. In his first year in office he built the Prudential Building, which provided residents with jobs and the city with tourists. This appealed to investors and developers. This would mark the beginning of the revitalization of the city since the Great Depression. Daley faced the challenge of suburbanization and what was called “white flight” as mentioned in the Jane Jacobs reading. Chicago was viewed as a city surrounded by affliction. The dismantling of this blight would call for the mass razing of neighborhoods, land clearance, and displacement of people and marked the beginning of class, racial, and political upheaval.
Up until the University of Illinois, a four-year college didn’t exist in Chicago or in Cook County. Daley chose the University of Illinois location. He stood against residential opposition who felt that they were promised more housing. Much like Jane Jacobs' fight against Robert Moses in her attempt to save Washington Square Park, resident Florence Scala led most of the protesting but to no avail. She did, however, persuade university trustees to preserve the Jane Addams Hull House.
Florence Scala speaking in the garden of the Jane Addams Hull House Settlement, 1963.
Clearing of the University of Illinois site, 1963.
This decision was monumentally historic as the affects of it were still being felt in the late 1990’s and today. When the university was built, a retail market thrived on adjacent Maxwell Street. This market was the largest open-air market, known as the Ellis Island of the Midwest and the birthplace of Chicago Blues. University officials decided against keeping local businesses and slowly began expanding south, buying land in the Maxwell area, and demolishing buildings. Residents petitioned to make the Maxwell area a historic district but Daley ultimately turned down their petitions. This proves to be another seminal example of how Daley Jr. implemented the work of his father.
Sign indicating that the fight for Maxwell Street will continue, with activists signatures. Photo Credit: Steve Balkin, 2000,
Young boy with sign protesting the destruction of Maxwell Street. Photo Credit: Steve Balkin, 2000.
According to the reading, To Collect Photographs is to Collect the World, Richard Nickel refused to lecture on the demise of architectural art because he felt that it wouldn’t be worthwhile. He said, “Everything good and decent will have been wiped out by the shysters, hucksters, and money grubbers.” I suggest instead the production of a short film, the most cutting, sarcastic production imaginable to show what a bunch of clods and gangsters and twaddlers run this town.” The destruction of the Maxwell area is an example of the mass destruction of the architectural masterpieces Nickel was photographically documenting. He fully understood what he was photographing by researching perspective of the ideas behind the buildings and photographing them over and over again. He discovered the character of the buildings he photographed by being objective. He attempted to show what people were ignoring about the magnificent architecture surrounding them. He witnessed their destruction and felt a responsibility to watch and record what he saw. The demolition of historical buildings has always been and remains a topic of discourse within the city of Chicago. A sentence within the Nickel reading reverberates; “Money built these buildings and money will destroy them.” The following video provides a historical summary of Daley, the University of Illinois in conjunction with the Urban Renewal Act, and the effects on Maxwell Street.
During the 1950’s, the automobile changed the face of the city. The prospect of connecting cities with super highways and improving conventional roads gave way to trucks competing with trains and local business owners competing with roads, facing the demolition of entire neighborhoods to make way for the new highway system. The highway construction cut across neighborhoods claiming slum removal, creating a mainline linkage to the coasts and provided a major economic bounty. Jacobs called the automobile the, “erosion of cities.” These highways left large holes in neighborhoods and dislocated people, businesses and institutions. Automobiles were paramount in the readings from last week, as well, specifically in addressing Los Angeles as a car city.
Chicago is also synonymous with racial inequality. Established immigrants fighting for their territory and political stance caused the race riots of 1919. Race riots occurred yet again during the 1950’s. The city decided to redevelop the Black Belt, which made the problem worse by causing friction. Race has always been an impetus for political appeal and power, as well. With regards to public housing, racial segregation was the guiding principle of the federal government and city planners. The Chicago Housing Authority was struggling with the difficulties of Depression Era housing. Public housing historically represents the failure of the city’s attempt to solve these problems. The multiple examples listed in the Pacyga reading further reinforce the severity the publicly funded, postwar urban renewal systems had on the land and the residents of the city. Often these public housing complexes were placed in desolate places without any neighborhood institutions. This calls attention to the issues Jane Jacobs addressed in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs believed that public housing developers possessed a meaner quality, “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretend order achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
As the only sanctioned place where Chicago's black citizens could live or own property, the Black Belt became overcrowded with apartments like these, from a 1941 photo, that were eventually torn down as slums. Photo credit: Library of Congress.
During the 1960’s, race was at the fore with the issue of school integration. This issue is yet another example of how political power was the decisive proponent on any issue within the city. In regards to Chicago, Martin Luther King stated, “I have never seen such hate, not in Mississippi or Alabama, as I see here in Chicago.” Public policy, race relations, and political power were tantamount during Daley’s reign and continue to be discordant issues in Chicago.
The 1968 Democratic Convention and the King Riots changed the face of Chicago forever. Daley ordered the police to “shoot to kill” arsonists and to “shoot to maim” looters. This decision attracted national attention. According to the Pacyga reading, Daley was seen by the media as a “rampant reactionary.” The convention produced several nights of protests and violent confrontations with the police. The results of this historical event forever changed the Chicago Police Department, as well.
Police and demonstrators clash during the Chicago Democratic Convention, 1968. Photo Credit: Les Sintay
The Chicago machine quickly lost national power and influence. However, Daley Sr. remained in power while his allies were indicted on corruption charges. Based on recent events, Richard M. Daley has mirrored his father, choosing the same paths his father walked over 30 years ago. Placing “big brother” cameras on various street corners and making city assets privatized, like the parking meters, have enraged voters and lessened the power Daley has maintained over the city for years.
Throughout his work, Ed Ruscha examined the act of looking using different mediums. His art explored the spatial experience of the pedestrian and driver in a mass produced city. This led to a unique visual presentation in the nature of his paintings and photographs. He explored the three-dimensional nature of canvas as an object and the way in which the viewer is to perceive it. In his work, Trademark Study, Ruscha combined graphic imagery with text, often on large canvases exaggerating perspective, forcing a person to become physically involved while viewing his work. He believed in the close examination of his work, which represented the connectivity of a visual and mental experience associated with the idea the mobile urban environment. A landscape built around cars. A car culture.
Jasper Johns, Robert Frank and Robert Rauschenberg influenced Ruscha. But Ruscha was not a pop artist. He posed a cool indifference toward mass reproduction leaving his work open to objectivity. His focus was that of the pedestrian in a transitional movement, which created modes of looking at his work. In Actual Size, the viewer is faced with observing the work from a distance because of its size but is forced to inspect the painting closer, creating a heightened awareness and new way of seeing the canvas as an object in relation to spatial politics. This active participation of the viewer, the act and experience of looking and the active participation of the physical body is a correspondence that Ruscha evokes throughout his work. He was interested in the idea of art participation.
Based on the scale and juxtaposition of objects and text in his work, Ruscha had an interest in the issues of spectatorship. He wasn’t interested in copying commercial signage and consumer advertising. His interest was focused on the shifting points of views, active relationship of the viewer and the perspectives of space in an urban environment. Using text and leaving empty space, his paintings defied visual logic forcing the viewer to lose an awareness of the threshold of the frame. The physical involvement of the viewer created an experience of space and scale in relation to urban developments and commercial signage of the time. He created a visual experience that required the viewer to be an active participant in the interpretation of his work, which coincided with the pedestrian experience of the urban
Ruscha’s early work focused on the flat, endless, urban landscape of Los Angeles. Because of this space, Los Angeles is car-centered city and created the fleeting perceptions of its inhabitants. The lack of people on the street and the scattering of pivotal focal points led to the idea that Los Angeles was a city that lacked culture. This is reminiscent of Jane Jacobs’ belief that pedestrian oriented neighborhoods were safe, well adjusted neighborhoods. The proliferation of artists in Los Angeles during the 1960’s spawned a pedestrian oriented, walk able arts district that redefined Los Angeles in the art world.
Ruscha’s Standard Station with Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half is a reflection of a pedestrian’s way of looking while in a car. His work was identified with Pop artists but the way he presented it was distinguishable from it. He used photography and bookmaking to exemplify the physical demands between his work and the viewer’s interaction with it. The act of picking up his book Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations becomes an act of performance and an editorial act on the viewer. He also addresses the repetition of the landscape as the repression of built environment. The viewer gets the impression that a person living in Los Angeles as seen in Some Los Angeles Apartments is void of cultural connection to the city because of the monotonous, uniformity of the architectural sovereignty. The formless space along the bottom of the pages in this book is reflective of the speed of urban change and the actual space.
The representational space of Ruscha’s work is a reflection of the passive experience of the driver and pedestrian in urban Los Angeles, stressing that the car is central to the urban experience.Through Ruscha’s art, the visual spatial experience of Los Angeles is examined using the encounter of the viewer to his work in relation to living with monotony of a constantly changing, urban development. He believed in generating an embodied viewer and the status of art and an object tactile enough to create a new approach to the spatial experience of an urban city.
To further art’s examination of the car culture in Los Angeles during the 1960’s, artists turned to the car for inspiration. A custom car culture grew in the city and still is prevalent today. Artists began to use the same techniques to create paintings. Artists such as Billy Al Bengston, who incorporated car and bike parts into his canvases, and Judy Chicago, who went to auto body school to learn the art of spray painting, adopted techniques developed by the custom car culture. A sense of sensuality has stemmed from the art of customizing cars. Much of this may be attributed to advertising and mass production of media. Judy Chicago linked the art of custom car making to sexuality in her work Car Hood. Kenneth Anger made a film, Kustom Kar Kommandos, which further drew interest to the subcultures connection to sensuality and sexuality. Ed Kienholz, Back Seat Dodge, exposed the seedy underbelly of interior exploitations within car doors. This is directly opposite of Ruscha’s prevalence in his work in relation to the drivers experience and connection to the commercial, transitory landscape that surrounds him. Whereas Bengston, Chicago, and Anger were interested in the actual surfaces of cars, Ruscha’s art explored the connection between that aesthetic perceptual experience of his canvases and canvas of the city.
Ruscha documented the uniformity and mundane infrastructure cataloging the systematic commercialism that is urban development. His work lacked emotion because his perspective was detached. In Pop L.A., Cecile Whiting referred to him as a modern day flaneur. Urban planner Kevin Lynch believed that a successful city is one that aids its inhabitants with “mental maps.” With the advent of urban sprawl, spatial disorientation occurs.Ruscha’s work inspired architects and urban designers to be receptive, objective, and tolerant to the building of the Las Vegas strip. The perspective of the pedestrian as driver and the straightforward, documentary approach of Ruscha, led to the size and wordplay in the signage of the commercial environment and a new approach to communication within the urban aesthetic.
Las Vegas Strip Map
Las Vegas Strip
David Hockney was interested in the city’s architecture with regards to color and texture. As a flamboyantly gay man living in London, the magazine Physique Pictorial was a bodybuilding magazine that shaped his view of Los Angeles. Which was reflective of his work. The men portrayed in this magazine are flawless, just as Hockney's glossy view of Los Angeles. He was interested in the single family home and placing erotic images of gay men by the pool. His paintings conveyed the artificiality of the architecture as a metaphor for the people in the city. This was a very different perception than he personally had of the city. He moved to Los Angeles and celebrated the city for the things that other people condemned it for: the banal architecture, absurd iconography, and the shiny gloss that coated it. Hockney had an aesthetic for surfaces as Ruscha did. They were two artists experiencing the city and conveying their experiences from different points of view.
Physique Pictorial
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures), 1972
