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1. 1 2018-08-15T07:48:35-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 1960s Phil Ethington 1 Decadal Tag vistag 2018-08-15T07:48:36-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

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• 1 2018-07-19T18:12:19-07:00 Photography's Ironic Arrival as Fine Art: Ed Ruscha and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1970 6 image_header 2018-07-19T18:18:06-07:00 The Pop Art revolution had an enormous and highly ironic impact on the status of photography as fine art. Despite more than a century of efforts by fine photographic artists since Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and many others, the fine art establishment had successfully resisted photography’s inclusion in the halls of high culture. As late as the 1960s, fine art schools did not teach photography, galleries that showed easel paintings did not show photographs, and major museums did not hang photographs. Even the greatest photographs from established masters could be bought for a song.  In effect, it was only when artists showed total disregard for classical aesthetics that the medium was accepted.
  
  After his mentor James Dean's romantic 1955 death in a Porsche racing car, Dennis Hopper the actor Hippie became a Court Jester of the Hopps circle, working in various media but excelling photography.  From Kerouac's On The Road (1957) through the works of Kienholz and Ruscha in the 1960s, the Beat and sixties counterculture was fascinated with car culture and the roadside vernacular of signage and retail structures.  Gasoline stations, especially "Standard" stations, crew a satirical eye, and Hopper's Double Standard (1961) became a major reference point.  Hopper’s Double Standard contrasts sharply with Julius Shulman's affirmation of commercial design. In this carefully staged photograph. Hopper uses the car as an actor, a model, and agent in the whole scene. Caught in mid-intersection, the driver, Hopper, (who, like a vampire, does not appear in the mirror) must have held the camera, so this is a one-handed action shot, the other hand on the moving tripod, as it were—the steering wheel. The car for Hopper is an extension of the photographic equipment, just as it would in Ruscha’s Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966).
  
  Few artists did as much to transform photography than Edward Ruscha, who, while he is known best today for his painting, produced two photographic works that confounded critics and transformed the possibilities of the camera in the avant garde: Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966).
  
  Edward Ruscha (pronounced “rooSHAY”), born in 1937 in Oklahoma City, knew by his early teens that he wanted to study art in Los Angeles, a city his family had visited. Intending to be a cartoonist or an animator, in 1956 he enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute, founded by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879-1969) and supported financially by Walt Disney to ensure a steady supply of artist/animators. Ruscha was deeply impressed with the Abstract Expressionists, “but I saw finally that I couldn’t travel on this language. I couldn’t make abstract paintings.” Ruscha, like Hopps and Kienholz, was inspired by the “very pure art form” that the Abstract Expressionist had developed, but was much more interested in the visual landscapes of everyday America, particularly its popular culture.[14] Having intended to produce artwork for commercial popular culture, Ruscha instead transformed it into the subject of his artwork and became a founding figure, along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others.
  
  While still in art school, Ruscha began painting words, fascinated by their look and sound, such as SWEETWATER (1958). Drawn, like anyone interested in the avant-garde to Ferus Gallery, Ruscha recalled “It was almost like a jazz catalog, where there are a lot of different voices under the same record label….Each had a very distinctive take on the world and on his work, and so that made it a very vital place to aspire to and to be.”[15] Having seen Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), he was also powerfully influenced by roads, travel, and the every day cultural condition of North American culture. “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet,” he once said, “I’ve just got U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.”[16] There he became fascinated by vernacular commercial architecture and signage on gas stations and other ordinary building. “Popular culture to me is printed matter and sound matter, what comes in your eyes and ears….It’s a way of todayness as opposed to, let’s say ‘nature.’”[17]
  
  A signal breakthrough is the appearance of Edward Ruscha’s photographic books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) and Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966). “Photography had a reality to me then,” Ruscha recalled. “When I grew up in Oklahoma, photographers…were either nerds, or pornographers, or both. Then I saw Robert Frank’s Americans….I also started seeing the work of Walker Evans, which had a profound effect on me.” Walker’s intensely close, homely, unsparing documentary style was an inspiration to many in this moment, and the next, in the 1970s. For Ruscha, the inclusion of signs and words in Evans’s photographs was especially instructive. Even after this discovery, however, Ruscha still only considered photography “a secondary medium, and yet it had so much potential, I thought, for a painter.”[24]
  
  For Every Building, Ruscha mounted a motor-driven 35-mm camera in his pick-up truck and shot mechanically, in a mockery of Hollywood tracking or background cameras. The book is composed of a single, 27-foot long accordion-folded page, with the north and south sides of Sunset printed in continuous montage. Caption text records the address of every building, and no other text is offered for explanation. Ruscha had worked as a printer’s devil, which imbued him with a lifelong love for bookmaking. “That’s what I wanted to do most of all, really, to make a book, not necessarily to take photographs.”[25] As the implications of Ruscha’s photographic work began to sink in, the impact was profound. He had, at long last, liberated fine art photography from the standards of easel painting, and recast the camera as a tool that no longer claimed elevation above the situated plain of historical landscapes. The unaesthetic camera returned to the industrial world to redeem the artistic content of the everyday.
  
  Every Building is a colossal “found” artwork, following both Duchamp and Warhol. The bland black and white photography flattens the colorful diversity of the built surfaces and signage, exaggerating the mass-produced quality of Los Angeles’s commercial “strip” architecture. That is Ruscha’s joke: the “Sunset Strip” is a 27-foot continuous strip of paper. The lithography is carefully wrought (recall Ruscha’s love affair with book printing) to the specs of a slick catalog, are the conceptual equivalent of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. Warhol chose a can label that had not changed since the Coolidge Administration, exhibited originally in the Ferus Gallery as a single line of products on a symbolic supermarket shelf.   Warhol's own seeming mindless repetition of them followed Wallace Berman’s mid-50s experiments with the duplicating powers of Verifax machines and the gridding of found images.[26]  Likewise, Ruscha would repeat the gasoline stations of his unaesthetic photographs, in series of exaggerated-perspective paintings, "Double Standard," (1969) quoting Hopper's 1961 photograph and parodying the rectilinear obsessions of the Southern California Modernists.
  
  In 1970 Robert Heinecken became the first artist hired to teach photography on the fine arts side of a major American school of fine art: the UCLA School of Fine Arts. Until then, art schools taught photography in their commercial design programs.[30] His slogan became a mantra to hundreds of art students over the next three decades: “A photograph is not a ‘picture’ of something, but is an object about something.” Heinecken’s artworks are primarily composed of found images in magazines: he rarely used a camera. Thanks to the transformation of photographic art, the artistic visual force of a photograph can now be appreciated as fully situated.