“Second City”: Ed Ruscha and the Reception of Los Angeles Pop* Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287053148120/1751200/0162287053148120.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ Critics greeted Ed Ruscha’s recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art with a chorus of near-universal praise.1 Peter Schjeldahl declared in The New Yorker that Ruscha “is one of the four most influential artists to have emerged in the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Bruce Nauman,” while Roberta Smith proclaimed in The New York Times, “these shows confirm Mr. Ruscha not only as a first generation Pop artist, but also as a post-Pop innovator on a par with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.”2 With these accolades, it became official: Ruscha is hot.3 Both Schjeldahl and Smith presented their assessments of Ruscha’s art historical stature as news, and to a degree, it was: never before had critics offered * My thanks to Ann Temkin, Huey Copeland, Suzanne Hudson, and Tricia Paik for their incisive editorial suggestions; Maria Gough, Alex Potts, Howard Lay, and Ed Dimendberg for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this text; and Lisa Pasquariello for many stimulating discussions about this material. Portions of this essay are drawn from my doctoral dissertation, “Designing Ed Ruscha: The Invention of the Los Angeles Artist, 1960–1980” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2004). 1. These exhibitions were Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha and Ed Ruscha and Photography, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from June 24–September 26, 2004. 2. Peter Schjeldahl, “Seeing and Reading: Ed Ruscha at the Whitney,” The New Yorker 80, no. 20 (July 26, 2004), p. 94; Roberta Smith, “Ruscha in Retrospect, With Signs of Heat Beneath California Cool,” New York Times, June 25, 2004, p. E31. 3. In the past five to ten years, Ruscha has experienced something of a “late blooming” on the art market. He has been the subject of five major museum retrospectives in as many years, including Edward Ruscha: Editions, 1959–1999 (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, 1999–2001); Ed Ruscha (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Miami Art Museum; Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 2000–2002); Edward Ruscha: Made in Los Angeles (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2002); Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2004–2005); and Ed Ruscha and Photography (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2004); new books on the artist appear, it seems, almost monthly, including my own Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, by Ed Ruscha, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Richard Marshall, Ed Ruscha (London: Phaidon Press, 2003); and Pat Poncy, ed., Edward Ruscha, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 1, 1958–1970 (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2004); in 2003 one of his 1960s-era paintings fetched over $3.5 million at auction; and in October 2004, he was chosen to be the United States representative to the 2005 Venice Biennale. OCTOBER 111, Winter 2005, pp. 23–43. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 24 OCTOBER such unequivocally favorable evaluations of his importance within contemporary artistic production. Yet when Ruscha first came to prominence in the early 1960s, he was in fact celebrated as one of the foremost practitioners of the “L.A. Look,” and his work was featured in many of the earliest Pop art exhibitions.4 At first, critics did not tend to hold his position as a West Coast artist against him; over time, however, this Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287053148120/1751200/0162287053148120.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 changed, and he came to be, as Schjeldahl put it, widely “patronized as a Los Angeles—that is, a marginal—artist.”5 His principal detractors were found within the East Coast, especially New York, art establishment, and the 2004 Whitney retrospec- tives marked his first solo New York museum appearances in nearly fifteen years.6 This essay chronicles how, after initially meeting with a degree of success unprecedented among West Coast artists, Ruscha and his L.A. contemporaries were pushed to the margins of contemporary art reception. It focuses on the first major style to emerge in the city in the 1960s, Los Angeles Pop, whose develop- ment was closely followed in the national art press. Although in the early 1960s L.A. Pop artists garnered a good deal of attention from critics, curators, and scholars throughout the world, they were increasingly overlooked in favor of their New York colleagues, who commanded the lion’s share of gallery, museum, and press coverage, and consequently sold more work at higher prices. Only a handful of L.A. artists, Ruscha perhaps most prominent among them, managed eventually to transcend these obstacles. I suggest that this may be explained by the historical critical perception of Ruscha’s work as exemplary of L.A. Pop—a perception that the artist encouraged, to a degree. I also examine Ruscha’s dual role as both a representative of and commentator on L.A. Pop, and consider how this role influenced the trajec- tory of his career. Ferus: An Introduction Peter Plagens maintains that the sixties era in L.A. art in fact began in 1957, with the opening of Ferus Gallery and the birth of the “L.A. Look . [which] provided L.A. with its first claim to international success as a modern art center.”7 4. The term “L.A. Look” was used slightly differently by different critics. In his 1974 history Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970, Peter Plagens offers a general definition: “Just as there was no New York School . there was no L.A. Look. The latter term refers generally to cool, semitechnological, industrially pretty art made in and around Los Angeles in the sixties by Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Kenneth Price, John McCracken, Peter Alexander, DeWain Valentine, Robert Irwin, and Joe Goode, among others. The patented ‘look’ was elegance and simplicity, and the material was plastic, including polyester resin, which has several attractions: perma- nence (indoors), an aura of difficulty and technical expertise, and a preciousness (when polished) rivaling bronze or marble” ([Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974], pp. 120–21). 5. Schjeldahl, “Seeing and Reading,” p. 94. 6. His only previous New York exhibitions were The Works of Edward Ruscha, a midcareer retrospective (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982; toured to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Vancouver Art Gallery; San Antonio Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1982–1983) and Edward Ruscha: Los Angeles Apartments, also at the Whitney, 1990. 7. Plagens, Sunshine Muse, p. 117. Ed Ruscha and the Reception of Los Angeles Pop 25 Founded by Edward Kienholz, critic and curator Walter Hopps, and a former furniture salesman, Irving Blum, Ferus started out as a center for Abstract Expressionism and California “Funk,” exhibiting the work of Angelenos such as Kienholz, John Altoon, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, and Ed Moses. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, Abstract Expressionism Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/0162287053148120/1751200/0162287053148120.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 began to lose its hold, due in large part to the wide-scale acceptance—in America as well as Europe—of work by “proto-Pop” artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.8 Though these artists came out of New York, the Pop movement also had roots in Southern California, whose mythic status as the cen- ter of American popular culture—with Hollywood, hot rods, beaches, palm trees, blondes, and suntans—epitomized the Pop environment. Younger artists such as Ruscha, Larry Bell, Bruce Conner, Joe Goode, and Kenneth Price later joined the Ferus stable. As spokesmen for what was commonly labeled their “California cool” image, they became known collectively as the “Ferus Studs.”9 That Ferus became one of the foremost exhibitors of West Coast Pop is hardly surprising given the interests of its founders: Kienholz’s assemblages, with their found materials and references to popular culture, might be called proto- Pop, and Hopps maintained a long-standing interest in Duchamp, Dada, and Surrealism—widely considered Pop’s antecedents.10 Nearly all of the L.A. Pop artists who received the most attention in national museums and magazines during the 1960s were in the gallery’s stable. Ferus gave artists like Ruscha, Bell, Conner, and Price numerous group and solo shows throughout the 1960s; in many ways, Hopps and Blum made these artists’ careers (Kienholz became less involved in the gallery after its first years). But Ferus also played a pivotal role in promoting many East Coast Pop artists. It was one of the first galleries outside New York to exhibit Johns’s work, mounting a groundbreaking show called Johns/Schwitters in September 1960. In July 1962, Ferus exhibited the work of the then-unknown Andy Warhol: generally perceived as the preeminent New York Pop artist, he was first embraced by the L.A. art world—a fact that has been largely overlooked by historians. Along with fellow New Yorkers such as Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd, both Johns and Warhol showed frequently at Ferus throughout the 1960s.