“The Toughest, Meanest Art I Was Making”: Edward Ruscha’s Books

Abstract

ed the famous 20thCentury Fox logo so that it represented both interior (darkened movie house) and exterior (night sky) through a diagonal projection of light dividing the navy blue background and the perspectival spray of ruled lines culminating in the epically scaled red lettering before yellow floodlights—the opening credits of spectacle culture rendered in arthistorically overloaded primary (techni)colors. Also that year, Ruscha alluded to the modernist chromatic tabula rasa in Annie (fig. 3) by combining two visual structures from the same historical moment and opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. With his 1921 suite of monochrome canvases (Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, and Pure Blue Color), Aleksandr Rodchenko heralded the artist’s abandonment of painting via works that would serve as the backdrop for the construction of the new collective subject. Ruscha perversely conjoins this Productivist farewell to bourgeois art with the redheaded waif Little Orphan Annie (1924), the first true mass superstar of the funny papers and plucky ingenue (rescued and raised by the benevolent tycoon Daddy Warbucks), who was so famous in her day that even now the Goudy Heavyface typeface used in the strip’s logo metonymically stands in for “The Twenties.” With his typically bemused, pokerfaced wit, Ruscha consigns the seemingly antithetical projects of modernity in their supposedly opposing guises—the Janus face of communism and comics— to the same fate.6 T W E N T Y S I X G A S O L I N E S TAT I O N S The first thing Andy [Warhol] said when he saw my book—I gave him Twentysix Gasoline Stations—was “How do you get all these pictures without people in them?” In 1962, Ruscha painted two words in yellow—WAR and SURPLUS—on a navy blue field, the first larger and centered, the second below, squeezed in and smaller, and rendered in a variant of the aggressively instrumentalized “ArmyNavy” serif type that the artist also used for the cover of that first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, published in January 1963 in an edition of four hundred copies (figs. 4, 5).8 Judging from the cover, Ruscha’s book looks more instructional manual than livre d’artiste, showing what it says it does in casually composed snapshots taken on the old Route 66 that the artist regularly drove from Los Angeles to his hometown of Oklahoma City.9 More than the other fifteen books that followed, Twentysix Gasoline Stations seems to have often invited critical wrong turns over the last four decades. Perhaps the most persistent of these is its relationship to the tradition of the photographic book, particularly as it had developed since the 1930s. Twentysix Gasoline Stations did appear at a particularly significant moment in that history. Walker Evans’s seminal American Photographs was republished by the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, and an expanded edition of James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men also came out, both of which had enjoyed a semiunderground status since the Depression and were looked upon with renewed interest in the years of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” A year earlier, Robert Frank had published The Americans, which in the subject of its photographs and picturetoapage presentation referred back implicitly to American Photographs. David Bourdon was the first to explicitly connect Ruscha’s book to 1930s documentary photography, and others have linked Twentysix Gasoline Stations to The Americans as well.10 While Ruscha’s deliberately spare design of righthand-page photographs with facing page captions does in fact recall the layout of American Photographs (in its 1960 second edition), and Ruscha has expressed his admiration for both Evans and Frank, even a cursory look at Evans’s and Frank’s images of similar subjects reveals how deliberately composed they are compared to Ruscha’s rigorously deskilled pictures of gas stations.11 While Jeff Wall’s assertion that “Ruscha’s book ruins the genre of ‘the book of photographs,’ that classical form in which artphotography declares its independence”12 is certainly true Twentysix fig. 3 Edward Ruscha. Annie, 1962. Oil on canvas, 72 � 67 in. (182.9 � 170.2 cm). Private collection