Frigid land, Warm photos
Chicago Art Institute Pins Up Ed Ruscha Photos

Ed Ruscha and Photography, to read in a new window, click AT Ed Ruscha
Mar 1 to June 1, 2008

by Terry Talty
Mar. 1, 2008

Ed Ruscha Painting

CHICAGO –  I wish I had lived my experience of the Ed Ruscha photo exhibition at the Art Institute in the reverse order. I’ll tell it backwards so, you dear readers, will get the new and improved experience.

Reviewed what Ed Ruscha did by looking at the exhibit in the lower level photography galleries at the Art Institute (and let's walk through the show backwards): prints of the Standard gas station (photo above); landscapes with words over them; books of images made similar because Ruscha categorized them so, with a flipable quality — like the books we used to make to understand how animation worked; an accordion-folded book of every building on Sunset Strip in 1966; 28 Gas Stations, (photo below) photos of complex modern architectural forms placed on the horizon by the composer of the camera image in dramatic ways like the distended one-point perspective used in the Standard gas station paintings. Then snapshots of Europe.

Ed Ruscha Photograph

We understand from reading the card beside these frames that the snapshots were taken before Ruscha started thinking about gas stations. One can look and think how the young person who took these snapshots could make the work that Ruscha made. Maybe taking those photos taught him photo-composition or that technique film directors were thought to use — thumb and index finger held up in opposing “L” shapes.  Somewhere along the way, Ruscha learned to isolate an image, and this was crystal clear in the first photos one would have seen if this viewer had walk the way the curator intended.

These photographs of turpentine and oil cans made in 1961 are the climax of the show for me, demonstrating how Ruscha can convey immense reverence on any object. I have an artist friend who can do this, too, and someday he'll have to credit Ruscha for teaching him that. Hanging out with him, or Mr. Ruscha, I'm guessing, if you hear “hey look at this,” it's worth looking, even if it is just a ... can. Lucky for Ruscha and us, he could isolate an image with his camera so well that a photograph could say "hey".

Now, we go backward to the first day we started thinking about the Ruscha photography show, in a bitter cold city that is lucky to be nicknamed "Windy" — a day of symposia on the subject. At the end of the day, we listened to a staged conversation with Ruscha, the curator of the photo exhibition and art critic Dave Hickey, where Ruscha explained that he was not a photographer. A photographer, to someone born in 1937 as Ruscha was, is creepy, a Peeping Tom or a guy that lured nude women to his “studio.”

Ruscha said he used photography, but thought of himself as a painter even in the 1970s when he made the books of photographs: Colored People, photos of cactus, Real Estate Opportunities, vacant land, and others in this exhibition. These and his famous accordion book called Every Building on the Sunset Strip, are art made with photographs, and while the group really didn’t discuss what it meant to make art with photographs, Sylvia Wolfe, the curator from the Whitney Museum, asked Ruscha if he thought she was over-reaching for including snapshots he took when on his European vacation with his mom in 1961-2.

She said they showed how Ruscha was starting to look at things. But yes Silvia, you overreached. These are not art and don’t belong in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art, which is bizarrely where they now are. They belong in the Archives of American Artists, interesting as they may be.

Earlier that day, Ruscha had given us a first-hand account of his influences. He called it a “conventional” slide show, like one every art school student has seen once too often, yet he delivered this show with such dry gushing Oklahoma humility and wit, he entertained all.

He clicked on a slide of a target-on-flowers-in-a-vase painting he’d just bought from a Dutch artist who paints on thrift-store paintings. His next slide was this painting on top of a Kleenex box sitting on top of his toilet — and it was a beautiful Ruscha image. Maybe this painting was feeling demeaned being relegated to the bathroom, but Rushca loved the compliment the spray of a single Kleenex made to the array of flowers in the painting.

Then he said how disrespectful he’d felt for setting the painting on the toilet, but , hey, the Dutch guy had started the disrespect by painting on someone else’s painting.

He talked then about a slide of a 1950 Ford round gear shift knob. He compared the elegant, simple round form on a stick to another oblong style, and said he’d always been a Ford man. Click, and he then talked about the admiration he had for a band leader called Spike Jones, a real showman, he said.

Ruscha then started clicking through slides of artwork, H. C. Westerman, Kurt Schwitters, Johannes Vargil, Jasper Johns’ Flag, a sculpture called Eternal Mussolini, Roy Lichtenstein, then the barn-roof paintings of a guy he called the Barnyard Rembrandt, an L.A. freeway exchange designed by Marilyn J. Reese and a Terry Allen painting of a stump.

Ruscha easily talks about other people’s work and why it was good – for him. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say why his own were good. He just showed them and told us where the idea came from, or from whom?

The curator, apparently, thinks anything he touched was art. And as my companion said, the exhibit seemed nostalgic. In a time when new art seems messy, nudie, violent, and figurative, I was nostalgic for clear, humble vision. I saw it, and it was worth a trip to Chicago.

 

Terry Talty is an Art Tourist, traveling to see art projects as if they were the new Seven Wonders of the World.