Ed Ruscha: Gagosian Gallery - Los Angeles - photography exhibition

In a fresh York Times article from 1972 bluntly titled "'I'm Not Really a Photographer,'" ed Ruscha claimed he took up the practice single in order to make his books--among them, the now-seminal Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963) and each Building on the Sunset Strip (1966)--and that his pictures should not be considered art existences but merely tools or means to an extremity He focused on the photograph as a purveyor of technical data, believing it could bring a readymade existence or site--a gas station, a swimming pool--into the realm of art without aestheticizing it. Offering an alternative to the fine-art print by dint of presenting photographs in the adjoining matter of mass production (the works originally went for three dollars), he had as radical an impact upon the discipline as any photographer of the postwar period.

At least since 1993 when Walter Hopp published a 1961 Ruscha photo of outdoor signs in LA that predated the artist's earliest work (Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations) by sum of two units years, it's become clearer that Ruscha's engagement with photography as he himself described it is not the whole story. Among the greatest in quantity interesting discoveries in this exhibition were a series of still lifes, also from 1961 of everyday household outcomes including a can of Spam and a receptacle of Sun-Maid raisins (both of which can be place in Ruscha's paintings). The series demonstrates that the tricky formal intelligence and visual and verbal humor that single associates with Ruscha were to the full realized in his photography plane before it appeared in the painted work. All the outcomes are photographed on a white shelf with a white wall behind. Three or four photos are lit in like manner that the joint between the shelf and the wall dissolves; thing perceiveds appear to float in an indeterminate space that's coterminous with the picture plane. For Products--Oxydol, 1961 a picture of a bottle of bleach, Ruscha "burn in" the top of the print and underexpos the ease creating an extreme contrast between top and bottom. Toward the center of the print, he overthrowed the contrast so that the white lettering upon the packaging looks like unbleached gray. In nearly all the photos, the product's brand name is positioned slightly above the centerline, a trick that gives the items the appearance of being precisely center In another recognizable Ruscha witticism he's placed a package of Sun-Maid raisins upon the centerline in such a way that the words appear to be sinking.

Alongside his transformation of household proceedss into inhabitants of flat pictorial space, Ruscha transformed Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations--that is, the volume itself--from a collection of flat images and true copy into a thing that elaborates the space around it. In individual photo, the book is shown floating at an oblique angle to the picture plane, its objecthood emphasized. In another, Ruscha tips its top cutting side slightly away from the len and this motion, in combination with the smaller-size typeface of the word TWENTY-SIX relative to the word GASOLINE, makes us think we are somehow or other seeing it in perspective. This slightly uncanny quality is apparent as well in more [i]or[/i] less of the photos selected from the volumes and enlarged. The extremely lengthy flat foregrounds that characterize thus many of his images of the urban landscape could be explained away as a requirement for a consistent page layout. on the other hand bigger and in isolation, each single-handedly defeats the idea that these photos are purely utilitarian.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group