West Coast Pop Art Art 109A: Art since 1945 Westchester Community College Fall 2012 Dr. Melissa Hall
Nov 02, 2014
West Coast Pop Art
Art 109A: Art since 1945
Westchester Community College Fall 2012 Dr. Melissa Hall
Ferus Gallery Los Angeles became a leading center of Pop art in the 1960’s
The Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 1962 Artnet
Ferus Gallery The Ferus Gallery showed Andy Warhol's Campbell Soups cans in 1962
Irving Blum with Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, 1962. Photo by William Claxton. Pacific Standard Time, GeSy Museum
Ferus Gallery Walter Hopps curated Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum -‐-‐ one of the first major Pop art exhibiVons in the country.
Ed Ruscha Ed Ruscha began painVng commonplace words like “OOF” and “HONK” and presented them on canvas, isolated from any context that would give them meaning
Ed Ruscha, OOF, 1962 (reworked 1963) Museum of Modern Art
Ed Ruscha The words come from the world of comic books, where their meanings seem to be simple and clear
Ed Ruscha, Annie, 1962
Ed Ruscha But dislocated from their context they become abstracVons, like Jasper Johns’ Flags and Targets
Ed Ruscha, OOF, 1962 (reworked 1963) Museum of Modern Art
Jasper Johns, Target, 1958
Ed Ruscha In 1963 Ruscha published a book of photographs of gasoline staVons taken along Route 66
Ed Ruscha, Twenty Six Gasoline Sta:ons, 1963
Ed Ruscha The photographs are idenVfied simply by locaVon and are dispassionate in approach
Ed Ruscha, Phillips 66, Flagstaff Arizona From Twenty Six Gasoline Sta:ons, 1963
Ed Ruscha Completely lacking in poetry or aestheVc value, the pictures operate like “found objects”
They capture the bland impersonality of the highway landscape, and its mass-‐produced sameness
Ed Ruscha, Twenty Six Gasoline Sta:ons, 1963
Ed Ruscha
“The series was meant to portray the standardizaVon of industry visually overtaking the country: each of the photographs was taken along Route 66 on the way from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, which Ruscha traveled several Vmes a month. The myth Jack Kerouac invoked with his novel "On the Road" crumbled in Ruscha’s uniform landscapes populated by idenVcal signs. Trips no longer seemed like adventures, but like an endlessly monotonous repeVVon of the everyday.” “The Dark Side of Pop,” Db Artmag hSp://www.db-‐artmag.de//2004/8/e/1/279.php
Ed Ruscha, Twenty Six Gasoline Sta:ons, 1963
Ed Ruscha Ruscha then began to make painVngs and silkscreens based on the gasoline staVon photographs.
Ed Ruscha, Standard StaVon, Amarillo, Texas, 1963, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
Ed Ruscha In another photographic work Ruscha mounted a camera to his car and drove up and down Sunset Boulevard taking photographs
Ed Ruscha holding his book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1967. Pacific Standard Time, GeSy Museum
Ed Ruscha The resulVng pictures were assembled in an accordion-‐fold book Vtled Every Building on the Sunset Strip
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on Sunset Strip, 1966 Art Gallery of North South Wales
“Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) is a 27-‐foot accordion-‐fold strip of photographs that give you exactly what the Vtle promises, with one part of each building at the top of the page and the other upside down at the boSom, as if the middle is the asphalt along which your eyes are driving” hSp://www.frieze.com/issue/review/ed_ruscha_and_silke_oSo_knapp
Ed Ruscha The work recalls the deadpan approach of Warhol’s Empire, and translates the cinemaVc experience to the staVc format of a book