On Ed Ruscha’s Drawing Board
A total system. I have a copy of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), the book’s spine lightly tanned after fifty-one summers, its Mylar covered slipcase a distorting fun-house mirror. Opened, Every Building is a strip of paper seven inches wide by twenty-five feet long. On it, facing each other over a gutter of white space, are two rows of photographs that illustrate … well … every building on the Sunset Strip in the mile and a half between Laurel Avenue and Doheny Drive. My copy — from the second printing — would cost about $2,500 to replace.
Ruscha sold Every Building for eight dollars. It was produced like the commercial work Ruscha did in the 1960s — from a “dummy” mock-up to a “pasteup mechanical” to a printing plate to pages bound and books shipped in fulfillment of the client’s order. Ephemeral, generic, commonplace print shop work. The case that art historian Jennifer Quick abundantly makes in Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art and Design in the 1960s is that for Ruscha — in the 1960s and specifically in Los Angeles — the place his art would occupy and where that kind of work occurred were not two realms but one. That place was a drawing board.
What we should see in Every Building is not (or not only) a deadpan satire of mid-century Los Angeles or discourse on the photographic gaze or even Pop Art hijinks but the kind of work that’s done on a drawing board. It was collaborative labor that skilled workers did with X-Acto knives, wax, rubber cement, Rubylith film, and transfer lettering with Ruscha as art director and production manager. Synecdoche for this process is layout — a “total system” of tools, materials, and concepts that Quick covers in detail in examining how Every Building went from pencil sketch to product for sale.
Layout also gave Ruscha “habits of working and ways of thinking” that “structured Ruscha’s art and offered a framework to shape his own notions of what art could be and what it could represent.” In the assembly of Every Building, layout directed which photographs were butted together, where the accordion-style folds came, and how the folded strip was to be glued into its covers. Ruscha left nothing to chance except the fate of the work.
In 2022, Ruscha’s photo books are regarded as works of art, but what kind, Quick points out, is easily misunderstood. If Ruscha had been told in 1972 that they would be worth conserving, he would have answered, “That’s not it — you missed it.”[1] Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963 and Ruscha’s first book) was about “how well the typography works” and the photographs “nothing more than snapshots.”[2] Every Building is about “facts” on the Sunset Strip. “Streets are like ribbons,” Ruscha told an interviewer in 1981, “and they’re dotted with facts”[3] that can be archived, reused, and recomposed as other things, most boldly as the scratched and defaced prints he extracted from Every Building in 1995. Resistant facticity lingers in the layout taped to the drawing board where Ruscha is the anonymous commercial artist doing his job.
A paper object. A lean, grizzled Ruscha looms over Los Angeles in Kent Twitchell’s mural on the side of a hotel in the downtown arts district. Ruscha’s hands, clasped below his chin, are even more expressive than Ruscha’s level gaze across the rooftops. A younger, doughier Ruscha stood six stories tall in an earlier Twitchell mural until it was painted over in 2006, a fate that Ruscha, a former sign painter, would have anticipated. If Ruscha is known at all, he is known as an Angeleno and, along with other artists of the 1960s, he is famous for having made Los Angeles cool. Ruscha’s nonchalance may be the most Angeleno thing about him. Asked if the city had grown disappointing in the years since he arrived in 1956, Ruscha replied (and not in resignation), “Nah, it can go any way it wants, and I’ll still be here.”[4]
Although Quick’s focus is on the space of Ruscha’s drawing board and what is performed there, actual places in Los Angeles are centered in Ruscha’s work. They’re shabby, ordinary places: dingbat apartment buildings, parking lots, suburban swimming pools, and gas stations. Quick imagines an “image morgue” from which Ruscha retrieved Los Angeles places and used them across different media, in different tonal ranges, and at different scales. Places are abstracted to a grid of streets in the series of grisaille Metro Plot paintings (1998) but without ceasing to be places in Los Angeles. The grid — seen from above obliquely as if looking over a map — shows the order of the streets Ruscha crossed when going from his home to his studio. This is conceptual art as memoir.
Concept could be history, too, but the habits of the drawing board limited Ruscha’s ability to use its tools critically. Post-war prosperity had been denied to Black Los Angeles, the denial brutally enforced by the Los Angeles Police Department, until Los Angeles south of downtown went up in flames in 1965. Ruscha set his own fires in the years around the burning of Watts: Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire (1962), Burning Station (1965-1966), and The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–1968). But as Quick points out, Ruscha’s fires stay “relatively restrained, locked into the airless world of his paperscapes, in which even the rawest and most untamed of elements are influenced by the stringent laws of perspective.” Burning Los Angeles is just part of the design. If there was more to be said about the optimistic modernism projected by the diagonals of Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) and Standard Station (1966), the critique is only suggested. The gas pumps and projecting canopy of Burning Station appear to be “on the verge of being consumed,” but the looming catastrophe is static — a layout for the printed page.
Quick calls out what had been consumed between 1963 and the early 2000s: the manual trades that had made mid-century Los Angeles a center of visual culture. In the ten paintings collectively titled Course of Empire, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Ruscha’s nondescript, utilitarian buildings enact the transitions from skilled work in a job shop to office work in a service economy to vacant “real estate opportunities” in a post-industrial Los Angeles. Quick finds drawing board habits in Ruscha’s Course of Empire series, but they now result in images of gentrification, globalization, and economic disparity. The images in more recent paintings — ghostly oil wells, sunsets in shades of drying blood, title cards reading The End, consumer debris in the Psycho Spaghetti Western series — cluster around themes of waste, extraction, and desolation. Ruscha, Quick suggests, had found a way within the conventions of layout to be other than cool.
Trash, which is okay. When Ruscha picked up Every Building from the printer in 1966, he “was ready to have a heart attack on the spot.” The printer ignored the notations on the layout that showed the twenty-five-foot strip ending at the right edge of the last photograph. Now the strip was slightly too long. An extra, two-inch flap of blank paper had to be folded under, and none of the other folds fell where Ruscha wanted them. “I showed [the printer] the dummy so they could see that it was not folded right and I said, ‘You’ll have to do this over,’ and they started to argue with me and I just broke out in hives. I really had spots on my face.”[5] High anxiety for a book Ruscha said buyers would “just throw on a shelf … and they put it away and eventually somehow it just kind of ends up in the trash, which is OKAY”[6] [emphasis in the original]. Today, the “wrong” first printing of Every Building—the one with the extra flap—can cost twice as much as the “correct” second printing.
The drawing board as metaphor almost reconciles Ruscha’s premeditation and his indifference. The details, in Quick’s generously illustrated study of the mid-century design conventions that Ruscha embodied, will be of interest to specialists, but for the rest of us, Back to the Drawing Board is a sharp reminder that Ruscha’s art began with the know-how and materials of pre-digital advertising, signage, and package design. These disciplines — equally routines of the hand and the imagination — “presented Ruscha with a richly layered landscape of forms, images, and methods, as well as a way of thinking and seeing and being in the world … woven into the very fabric of Los Angeles.” An industry of drawing boards brought cultural products into being, and Ruscha flattened them into charmingly baffling, playful, and oddly serene renderings even as they acquired an ominous cast. You could say they’re a bit like Los Angeles itself.
[Published by Yale University Press on May 17, 2022, 208 pages, $50.00 large format hardcover.]
For Ron Slate’s review-essay on Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Books (2014, MIT Press), click here.
Shown above:
(Fig. 1) Ed Ruscha, pasteup for Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Gelatin silver prints and labels on board with annotations, 25 3/4 x 37 1/8 in. (65.4 x 94.3 cm). Edward Ruscha photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2012.M.1.1.3. © Edward J. Ruscha IV/Gagosian Gallery. Photo © The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
(Fig. 2) Ed Ruscha, Roof Top View #3, 1961, from the series Six Rooftops, 1961/2003. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm), edition of 8. Private collection, Los Angeles. [PE2003.46]. © Edward J. Ruscha IV/Gagosian Gallery. Photo provided by Ed Ruscha Studio.
(Fig. 3) Ed Ruscha, The Old Tool & Die Building, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 52 x 116 in. (132.1 x 294.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President. [P2004.37]. © Edward J. Ruscha IV/Gagosian Gallery. Photo provided by Ed Ruscha Studio.
Essay Notes
[1] A. D. Coleman. “I’m Not Really A Photographer.” New York Times, 09-10-1972.
[2] John Coplans. “Concerning Various Small Fires: Ed Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications” Artforum, 02-1965, 24-25. Rpt in Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages by Ed Ruscha. Alexandra Schwartz, ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002), 69.quoted in Mary Richards, ER: Ed Ruscha (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 23-24.
[3] Transcript of a film directed by Gary Conklin. Mystic Fire Video.1981. Rpt in Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages by Ed Ruscha. Alexandra Schwartz, ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002), 224.
[4] Transcript of an interview by Carolina Miranda, NPR Weekend Edition Sunday (KCRW, Santa Monica), 09-22-2013.
[5] Willoughby Sharp. “‘A Kind of a Huh’ – An Interview with Edward Ruscha.” Avalanche, Winter–Spring 1973, pp 30–39. Rpt. in Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages by Ed Ruscha. Alexandra Schwartz, ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2002), 69.
[6] A. D. Coleman. “My Books End Up in the Trash.” New York Times, 27-08-1972