Week 7: Los Angeles in the 1960s - 70s

[Photo credit: Edward Burtynsky]

When Ed Ruscha first drew the sketches to Trademark Study it became an introduction to a centralized motif of using text within his work. When looking at Ruscha's work we can begin to dissect the issue of spectatorship, along with stressing the importance of having the viewer engage with his [the viewer] encounter to the material and spatial complexities of his work. This nature of looking that Ruscha starts to present and asks of his viewer was a strategy that pushed beyond the confines of artwork that was circulating in Los Angeles during the 1960s. This is important to note as his work actually responded to the spatial experience of L.A. as a new art scene emerged within this time.

[Photo credit: Ed Ruscha]

Ruscha became more aware of the agency in which he worked, asking the viewer to see the piece[s] in the way one could read a commercial sign, being conscious of the style of text. These associations are linked with speed, action, instantaneity - the photograph. How are we supposed to talk about represented space? Much like Jasper Johns, the goal is to suggest a physical relationship to the picture that is active, or at least shine a light on the possibility of that relationship. Ruscha utilized the typography of highly legible signage which dominated American streets, places and highways especially in Los Angeles, creating pieces like Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Experimenting with the qualities of an object, bodily scale and trompe l'oeil techniques as Ken Allan states really starts to examine the interplay of qualities used in given quantities as: medium, material and object which were beginning to surface. A book like Twentysix Gasoline Stations demanded a whole new kind of sensory skills required to handle the artwork, the actual object. Ruscha stated that this format moved away from the precious and limited edition, but to a mass-produced object of the nth degree. It was also a way of turning a small book into a monumental sculpture to be physically negotiated.

By looking at these visual supports, the artist is asking us to connect spectatorship and the spatial experience of the new urban landscape under the impact of heightened outdoor advertising, a new kind of visual pollution. Although Ruscha's paintings and photographic books of locales around Los Angeles can be read about how central the automobile is to the theme of L.A. itself, it also at the time was in direct relationship to the push for a cohesive arts scene within Los Angeles, to form a gallery walk, which occurred on La Cienega Boulevard. These art walks happened on Monday nights and many of Ruscha's earliest works were featured and seen within this environment first. It is important to note within this car centered city, were attempts to make things more walkable and pedestrian friendly.

A few of Ruscha's books like Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles begin to ask how the reader of these books need to feel compelled to answer questions the books raise. As the photographs explore the dynamics of spectatorship, a representation of urban space and a presentation of ways to reread an experience of L.A.; within these books it appears as though Ruscha is intending more to look at spaces, rather than presenting street photography or a narrative. As he quotes, "At the time, I was into making pictures that happened to be photographs, rather than making 'photographs'." Ruscha was able ask the viewer to closely examine the photographs, to really look at the spaces and places as he changes the size, scale and perspective of buildings, specifically in "The Dolphin", [found within Some Los Angeles Apartments]. With small details, we must bring the book closer and further away from us like a perpetual eye exam to continually examine what Ruscha presents. The books allow for the renegotiation of relationships to urban spaces, those which are typically recognized as some of the more alienating elements of the southern California landscape. This photographic work in book form is like much of Ruscha's paintings which ask the viewer to walk back and forth from the canvas to see things closer and away from the overall image, and vice-versa.

The physical negotiations of Ruscha's work appear to be most present in the book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. As he presents an unedited view of the street on both sides, the book is an accordian shape which allows for the viewer to reshape the book and put sections together that do not exist on the actual street. It allows to viewer to alter space and reshape reality. Henri Lefebvre states that this approach invites the the viewer to take an active role in the use of this book, it becomes a way of appropriating a dominated and dominating space. Within the vocabulary of looking at Ruscha's work, issues of spectatorship to Los Angeles appear secondary to Ken Allan as he argues this work responds to the surfaces and signs of Los Angeles, but also challenges conscious and unconscious bodily participation to unique and everyday aspects of the L.A. landscape. Ruscha continues to look at the relationships between the viewer and the art, seen both as material and object.

[Ed Ruscha handling Every Building on the Sunset Strip]

The photographs within the book Every Building on the Sunset Strip were made with motion picture film, using the camera mounted atop a moving car and from this the views of and from the car speak to the auto culture of Los Angeles. It is the car and our experience from and around the automobile that shape the spaces within L.A.. The car becomes the centralized lifestyle to a city and Ruscha seems to cast this subject matter within a perpetual problem. What appears to structure our encounters with works of art as objects is the dynamic between the pictorial, mental and actual space. Even in Ruscha's early paintings, he seems to be asking the viewer to start questioning the space and perspectives in comparison with the memory of the actual object represented. By employing compositional strategies that subtly link the space to the experience of viewing simple juxtapositions of text and everyday objects, Allan states that Ruscha asks his viewers to engage with his work by active bodily participation.

This entire mode of looking becomes dependent on the idea of the pedestrian, as the work shifts, it is to be viewed about highway centered environs of L.A., by an act of "walking". By presenting actual photographs of hands flipping through a book like Twentysix Gasoline Stations, it shows that the format of the book enables to viewer to understand the flexibility and impact of the photographs within the medium. You can flip to one page or another, in no particular order or go through it in a very strict pattern. This much allows the self an editing freedom. The photographs of the actual hands with the book are reminiscent of the photographs taken of installations/performance pieces by the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark, to show the piece as a document, but later shifting to an idea of how to reinterpret the piece. This diversity of flipping options enables a performance aspect as well by allowing the viewer to edit at will and provide an option of keeping it open or putting it away. This book format not only dictates the way the art is viewed but also enables liberty of choice for modes of viewership.

Within typical complaints about how a city like Los Angeles operates, many like Langsner commented on how the city was alienated from the rest of civilization and was so auto-focused that it has no grip on reality. In comparison "what every other city was seemingly doing" became linked to an idea that L.A. had no connection to local history, which has lead to the rootless and frivolous lives of its city dwellers. Within their dependency on the car, the author also remarks on how the entire view of the city and the interaction of the people with the city is shadowed behind the glass of a car as you are zooming by a space or place. Ideas like these provide key reasons for the development of a walkable gallery area, as to create something of a focal point for people in which to look and respond to art.


[La Cienega Boulevard currently and Ferus Gallery past]

Cecile Whiting also examines artists in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 70s who are working around and in the city as a place under the obsession of car culture. The fetish of 'kar kulture' as the epicenter of a place is creating an entire gaze of objects that shifts as everything is determined from mobility, the speed of the automobile. The visuals are predicted and determined by the observational experiences seen from a car, through a car and around cars. In direct opposition to the flaneur who viewed things slowly under a mindset of "the faster we see things, the less we see", the occupier of L.A. is in constant transitory movements through an urban space of faster, faster, faster.

[Still from film American Graffiti]

Artists like Dennis Hopper and Ed Ruscha were able to observe the banalities and rhythms of modern Los Angeles appearances through a car. Layouts presented in the single image or book format allow the viewer to scan over what is showcased, not to rest on things for too long. The actual subject matter seems to dictate how it is viewed, especially when the subject matter and way it is presented have no change, climax or conclusion within their structure; instead the imagery further pushes the spatial experience from that of a driver's vantage point. The driver looks with quick glimpses of the commercial vernacular.

[Photo credit: Dennis Hopper]

When looking at a book like Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles, the aerial agency takes root from the prominence of helicopters at the time, a rise in the machines due to massive freeway expansions. Whiting remarks that these photographs highlight standardization over singularity. These kinds of photographs are a contemporary example to what Reyner Banham speaks of in the film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. He states that photographs and cinema provided an image of the city that made him already know L.A. even before he arrived in the city. Many of the conventions in which these photographs were made act as the graph/map/diagram to help aid in the evolution of urban planning, whilst at the same time also look to how these artists and residents can examine how people in these urban environments actually viewed their city and oriented themselves within these spaces. Whiting refers to Kevin Lynch's models of viewing a city written out in The Image of the City, asking how the residents of L.A. orient themselves within a city that is laid out in distances for high speed travel only?

[Photo credit: Ed Ruscha]