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

IF 0.2 2区 艺术学 0 ART METROPOLITAN MUSEUM JOURNAL Pub Date : 2020-12-01 DOI:10.1086/712770
Douglas Eklund
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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. 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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
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“我所创作的最艰难、最卑劣的艺术”:爱德华·拉斯查的书
设计了著名的20世纪福克斯标志,使其通过划分海军蓝背景的光线的对角投影和规则线的透视喷雾来代表内部(黑暗的电影院)和外部(夜空),最终在黄色泛光灯前形成了史诗般的红色字体——这是在艺术过载的小学中呈现的奇观文化的开场白(techni)颜色。同样在那一年,鲁沙在《安妮》(图3)中暗示了现代主义的彩色白板,将同一历史时刻和意识形态光谱两端的两种视觉结构结合在一起。亚历山大·罗琴科(Aleksandr Rodchenko)于1921年创作了一套单色画布(纯红色、纯黄色和纯蓝色),通过作为新集体主题构建背景的作品,宣告了艺术家放弃绘画。Ruscha反常地将这部告别资产阶级艺术的生产主义作品与红发流浪儿小孤儿Annie(1924)结合在一起,小孤儿Anni是搞笑报纸中第一位真正的大众巨星,也是勇敢的天真无邪的人(由仁慈的大亨Daddy Warbucks拯救和抚养长大),她在那个时代非常出名,即使是现在,漫画标志中使用的Goudy Heavyface字体也象征着“二十年代”。“以他典型的困惑、做作的智慧,Ruscha将看似对立的现代性项目以其所谓的对立伪装——共产主义和漫画的Janus面孔——交给了同样的命运,Ruscha在一块海军蓝的场地上画了两个黄色的单词——WAR和SURPLUS,第一个更大、居中,第二个在下面,挤进去、更小,并用激进的乐器化“ArmyNavy”衬线字体的变体进行渲染,艺术家也将其用于第一本书《二十六个加油站》的封面,1963年1月出版,共有400册(图4、5)。8从封面来看,鲁沙的书看起来更像是一本教学手册,而不是《艺术家的生活》,它在艺术家经常从洛杉矶开车到家乡俄克拉何马城的旧66号公路上拍摄的随意构图的快照中展示了它所做的事情,在过去的四十年里,二十六个加油站似乎经常出现严重的错误转弯。也许其中最持久的是它与摄影书传统的关系,尤其是自20世纪30年代以来它的发展。二十六个加油站确实出现在那个历史上一个特别重要的时刻。沃克·埃文斯开创性的《美国照片》于1960年由现代艺术博物馆重新出版,詹姆斯·阿吉和沃克·埃文斯的《让我们现在赞美名人》的扩展版也出版了,这两本书自大萧条以来一直处于半地下状态,人们对林登·约翰逊的《反贫困战争》重新产生了兴趣,罗伯特·弗兰克出版了《美国人》,该书在照片和图片页面展示的主题中含蓄地提到了《美国照片》。David Bourdon是第一个明确将Ruscha的书与20世纪30年代的纪实摄影联系起来的人,其他人也将《二十六个加油站》与《美国人》联系起来,Ruscha表达了他对Evans和Frank的钦佩,即使粗略地看一下埃文斯和弗兰克的相似主题的图像,也会发现它们与鲁沙的加油站照片相比是多么刻意地构图。11尽管杰夫·沃尔断言“鲁沙的书破坏了‘摄影之书’的风格,但艺术摄影宣告其独立的古典形式”12当然是正确的图3 Edward Ruscha。安妮,1962年。画布油画,72� 67英寸(182.9� 170.2厘米)。私人收藏
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