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
landscape focusing on the Los Angeles.
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
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