"Second City" Ed Ruscha and the Reception of Los Angeles Pop

Poster for The New Painting of Common Objects, exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, 1962.

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 such unequivocally favorable evaluations of his importance within contemporary artistic Yet when Ruscha first came to prominence in the early 1960s, he was in fact celebrated as one of the foremost of the practitioners of the ”L.A. Look," and his work was featured in many of the earliest Pop art exhibitions. [4] work was featured in many of the earliest Pop art exhibitions.‘ At first, critics did not tend to hold his position as a West Coast artist against him; over time, however, this 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 retrospectives 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 trajectory 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] 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 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 center 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.!” 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. The gallery thus provided one of the first means through which the East and West Coast branches of the burgeoning Pop style came together.

As Lawrence Alloway, the British critic and inventor of the term “Pop art,” observed in his 1974 exhibition catalog American Pop Art, Pop arose nearly simultaneously from several corners of the globe, including L.A., although it took some time for Pop to coalesce into an acknowledged “style”:

The term Pop art originated in England and reached print by the winter of 1957-58. Pop art and Popular art were both used at this time to refer approvingly to the products of the mass media. It was part of a tendency to consider mass-produced sign-systems as art, part of an expansionist aesthetic with a place both for Abstract Expressionism and Hollywood, the Bauhaus and Detroit styling.[11]

At the same time that British artists like Richard Hamilton made their first proto-Pop works in the late 1950s, American painters like Johns and Rauschenberg in New York, as well as Kienholz and Wally Berman in L.A., created art that reflected and engaged with popular culture.

The first comprehensive museum exhibition of work that considered “mass-produced sign-systems as art” was in fact mounted in California. The New Painting of Common Objects, now widely acknowledged as the first American survey of Pop art, was organized by Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum in September 1962.[12] It included work by Jim Dine, Robert Dowd, Goode, Philip Hefferton, Lichtenstein, Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, and Warhol: all artists who took “common objects”— everyday consumer products—as their subject matter and depicted them in a straightforwardly representational, often deadpan style.

Since The New Painting of Common Objects included artists from both the East and West—yet in terms of numbers, California artists dominated—it is not surprising that Artforum, then a California-based magazine, covered the show in depth. It was reviewed by John Coplans, the British artist-critic who envisioned himself as a crusader for West Coast art. He proposed an idea that Alloway would later reiterate: that the style of art in the exhibition developed simultaneously in many parts of the U.S. Coplans opened the article by outlining the disparate backgrounds of what he called the exhibition’s “dramatis personae”:

OUT OF NEW YORK: Roy Lichtenstein, age 42... . James Dine, age 35... . Andy Warhol, age 38.... OUT OF DETROIT: Philip Hefferton, age 29. ... Robert Dowd, age 28. ... OUT OF OKLAHOMA City: Edward Ruscha, age 24... . Joseph Goode, age 25... OUT OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: Wayne Thiebaud, age 45....

By stressing the diversity of the artists’ hometowns (interestingly, all those based outside New York eventually ended up in California), he suggests that “the new painting of common objects"— Pop—was a nationwide phenomenon. Coplans futher asserted that Pop's primary theme, everyday life, is best understood by American artists:

Practically every movement in the last thirty years has had a strong theoretical basis . . . [therefore] a whole visual environment was [largely] ignored. The lack of an empirical base and direct perceptual contact with the everyday world had serious consequences, leading to an inevitable trivialization of form and content. ... The intuitive understanding of this position differentiates to a great degree the American artist from his European counterpart and the result has been an art of direct response to life rather than to “problems.”[13]

He thus becomes one of the first critics to propose that the Pop preoccupation with material culture is quintessentially American. Moreover, he asserts that this tendency is particularly Californian: “the proverbial dumbness of most younger artists on the West Coast ...is a reflection not only of their deep understanding of the lie of the evolution of progress, but also an affirmation of the basis of both Jazz and Beat poetry, that art springs directly from life, with all its anguish.”[14] Linking Pop to the culture and preoccupations of the American West is a mixed blessing, for as much as Coplans does the California Pop artists a favor by proclaiming their originality and significance, he also associates their art with “the proverbial dumbness of the West Coast.”

Whether the California artists in fact intended to create art that “played dumb” is an important question, and one that has long haunted them, particularly Ruscha. One of the canvases Ruscha exhibited in The New Painting of Common Objects, Actual Size (1962), has a unmistakably absurd quality that indeed flirts with dumbness. A rigorously composed yet highly unconventional variation on the still life, it takes as its subject a banal “common object.” On the bottom half of the canvas, a can of the food product Spam flies through space, flames trailing behind it like a rocket. Rendered in its “actual size” (in the center of the flames, Ruscha has sketched the phrase “ACTUAL SIZE”), the can shoots across a white field splattered with blue-and-yellow skeins of paint (a reference perhaps to Jackson Pollock’s famous drips or Willem de Kooning’s vertical runoffs). On the top half of the canvas floats a large, billboard-like image of the word spaM. Painted in yellow against an inky blue background—the same colors and typeface as the product’s logo—it represents a distinct early example of Ruscha’s experiments in creating visual images of verbal language.

With its nonsensical combination of contemporary commercial imagery and monochrome abstraction, the picture points to the profligacy of American consumer culture. Ruscha’s strategy, like that of many of his Pop colleagues, is to monumentalize such commodities, thus calling attention to their ubiquity in society. Were one to overlook the implicit critique in this glorification of consumer junk, one could construe it as mere stupidity, as many of Pop’s detractors historically have. But Ruscha, like many Pop artists, has often commented (arguably somewhat ironically) on his affection for the artifice and superficiality—the dumbness—of American mass culture,[15] and indeed, much of his work’s strength rests in its suggestion that, in its economic and social dominance, that culture is not as dumb as it looks.[16]

The New Painting of Common Objects also provided fodder for one of the most influential essays on burgeoning Pop. Barbara Rose’s “Dada, Then and Now,” published in the January 1963 issue of Art International, considers those whom she calls the “neo-Dadaists,” including Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Warhol, and Ruscha (to whom she mistakenly refers as “Roscher,” an index perhaps of his lack of prominence at the time).[17] Although Rose was writing for a broad audience—Art International was based in London, with a strong European and East Coast readership—she pointed to Hopps’s exhibition as one of the more revelatory showcases of the new art. Defining these artists by their “dedication to the image, the recognizable object as we encounter it in everyday experience,” she weighed the degree to which their work criticizes the popular and much of the discourse on Pop.[18] Rose's essay was one of the first to defend and theorize both East and West Coast pracitioners of Pop.

But while The New Painting of Common Objects placed West Coast Pop on an equal footing with East Coast Pop, it was arguably the last exhibition to consider the two strains as a cohesive whole. Today, the New York contingent of the show (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Dine), along with other East Coasters like Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, are widely considered to be the “original” Pop artists, with their West Coast colleagues relegated to secondary status. A primary reason for this shift may be attributed to the fact that, following The New Painting of Common Objects, most Pop exhibitions overwhelmingly featured New York-based artists. The next major Pop survey, organized by Alloway for New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, opened in spring 1963. Entitled Six Painters and the Object, it included work by Dine, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, and Warhol—New Yorkers all. The thesis of Six Painters and the Object appears to have taken its cue from the Pasadena show; in his catalog essay, Alloway also seizes upon the “common objects” theme:

What these ... artists have in common is the use of objects drawn from the communications network and from the physical environment of the city.... Each artist selects his subject matter from what is known not only to himself, but also to others, before he begins work. The subject matter consists of preexisting conventional signs and common images ...a known, shared subject matter.[19]

Although this passage might have also described Hopps’s show, the most important difference between the two exhibitions was Alloway's exclusion of West Coast artists. As Six Painters originated in New York, local interest may have played a role in Alloway’s choices, but given his 1974 assessment of Pop as a movement with roots throughout the U.S. and Europe, this seems an unsatisfactory explanation. Moreover, when Six Painters traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July 1963, Alloway added a second exhibition of California artists, also at LACMA. Entitled Six More, it featured Bengston, Goode, Ruscha, Hefferton, Thiebaud, and Mel Ramos.[20] That work by these artists appeared only in an auxiliary exhibition added on the occasion of Six Painter's West Coast venue signaled a decline in the prominence of California Pop.

Nevertheless, Six Painters and the Object and Six More were reviewed together in several national publications. Many critics remarked upon the geo-graphic diversity of Pop’s origins, although some also implied that this was not

necessarily a virtue. An unnamed but distinctly unenthusiastic Time magazine critic reported on this “Pop show with a coast-to-coast geographical spread,” observing that:

Pop art is popping out all over. ... To the casual eye, West and East (Coast Pop] seemed much the same... . Like their New York counter- parts, California Pop painters gaze ... upon the most banal man-made objects or the most routine images of everyday life. These things are the same all over the nation. ... But upon closer scrutiny the Californians shared common aspects and a sort of group triumph: their stuff was even drearier than that of the Easterners.[21]

Though the reviewer disdained California Pop even more than New York Pop, he or she nonetheless considered both to be equal parts of the same movement. By contrast, Artforum’s Don Factor also reviewed these shows together, but relayed a considerably more positive account. Perhaps reflecting the magazine's West Coast emphasis at the time, he remarked on the provincialism of the sole devotion of Six Painters to New York artists, and only its appendage, Six More, to Californians.[22]

For a brief period, some group Pop exhibitions continued to feature work from across the country. In 1963, Coplans organized a large-scale Pop survey for the Oakland Art Museum that included many West Coast-based artists, among them Ruscha. As is clear from its title, Pop Art—USA sought to demonstrate that Pop art constituted a national, as opposed to simply a New York, phenomenon. In a statement published in Art in America, Coplans wrote that whereas “Abstract Expressionism can be understood basically as a New York movement with a geo-graphically widespread younger generation of followers that rarely match the prime innovators in performance of inventiveness,” Pop art “is neither restricted to New York nor did it originate there. It appears as a simultaneous and fairly widespread movement on both the East and West Coasts with for the first time a number of California artists chronologically parallel to, or actually predating, their New York colleagues.[23] Arguing against Alloway's identification of Pop as a primarily New York-based movement, Coplans maintains that California Pop was just as significant as New York Pop, and that in fact Pop had developed nearly simultaneously in many parts of the country. As an illustration, he includes an image of Ruscha’s 1962 painting Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights. Rendered in primary colors against an expansive dark background, this homage to Hollywood shows the 20th Century Fox logo, complete with spotlights, much as it appears at the beginning of that studio’s films.[24] The painting’s long (over eleven feet wide) horizontal format echoes that of a movie screen. It also recalls advertising billboards, and the jutting diagonal lines and flattened planes of color point to the stylized graphic techniques of commercial art, in which Ruscha was trained and occasionally worked. By transforming the Fox logo from fleeting, flickering celluloid into the subject of a large-scale oil painting, Ruscha created an enduring emblem of L.A. Pop.[25]

In the exhibition’s catalog, Coplans writes that Pop is a national, as opposed to a regional, phenomenon, and he makes a point of arguing against the idea that Pop originated in New York. But despite Coplans’s best efforts, East Coast Pop continued to eclipse West Coast Pop. L.A.-based Pop artists did not disappear from the scene; the most prominent among them, including Ruscha, continued to be included in select group shows, which were in turn reviewed in various art publications. But increasingly works by New York Pop artists sold much faster and for far higher prices than works by Californians. In a 1964 article about the runaway success of Pop during the 1963-64 art season, New York Times critic John Canaday mentions no California—based artists, focusing instead on the sales and successes of New Yorkers like Johns, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, and Lichtenstein.[26]

Proof of California Pop’s marginalization came when Pop Art, the first comprehensive book on the subject, was published in 1966. Edited by Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art was far-reaching in its scope; in addition to a central, lengthy chapter on “New York Pop” by Lippard, it also includes chapters on “The Development of British Pop” by Alloway, “Europe and Canada,” also by Lippard; “Pop Icons,” by Nicolas Calas, and “Pop Art in California,” by Nancy Marmer. But while California Pop is given roughly equal billing with the other schools of Pop, it is ultimately treated as a noteworthy but peripheral part of the movement. In the first paragraph of her essay, Marmer acknowledges the debate over its importance and originality:

It is a moot point whether ... Pop art on the West Coast grew logically out of its own local antecedents, out of the same nationwide Zeitgeist or... “crisis” in art which produced the entire spectrum of post—Abstract Expressionist styles, or whether it developed rapidly after and only as a result of influences from New York. ... Whatever and whenever the ultimate sources, it is beyond question that... [California] Pop art did take root easily, early, and that it has flourished smartly, if diversely, in a milieu in which it could well have been invented.[27]

While she expresses uncertainty about the degree to which Pop might legitimately be said to have originated on the West Coast, she, like Coplans, identifies aspects of Southern California culture that seem emblematic of Pop style and subjects. Characteristic in her opinion of Pop in general and the highly finished “L.A. Look” in particular are Hollywood’s “hypertrophied ‘neon-fruit supermarket” and “the Los Angeles hot-rod world, with its teenage rites, baroque car designs, kandy-kolors, its notion of a high-polish craftsmanship, and perhaps most influential, its established conventions of decorative paint techniques.[28]

Ruscha’s work, Marmer asserts, exemplifies this paradigm: “his combination of original imagery based on the signs and products of commerce with an impeccable lettering and design technique taken from advertising conventions,” she writes, “brings him closer to ‘pure’ Pop than any other artists working in the style on the West Coast”; Ruscha’s Actual Size and his 1963 Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas are reproduced in her essay.[29] Standard Station resembles Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights in size, composition, palette, and “Western” subject matter, and forms a kind of pendant to that work. Behind the prominent Standard marquee blare three bright yellow spotlights, lighting up the filling station like Grauman's Chinese Theater. With its allusions to both Hollywood and West Coast car culture, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas is, despite its title, very much an L.A. picture-— and, Marmer suggests, a representative example of California Pop.[30]

Nevertheless, her assessment of Ruscha’s work is revealing because, though she is complimentary of California Pop, she compares it to an a priori standard of “pure Pop”"—which one can only assume to mean New York Pop. Following this comparison, she goes on to observe that “except for that work of ... Ramos and ... Ruscha, California painting seems utterly lacking in the bright brassiness of much East Coast Pop,” implying that for her, and presumably for many at the time, New York Pop con- stituted a gold standard against which L.A. and other “schools” of Pop must be measured.[31] That her essay was far shorter and less central to the book than Lippard’s section on “New York Pop” and Calas’s on “Pop Icons” (on Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz) underscored this privileging. With the publication of this soon-to-be-canonical book, West Coast Pop may have become locked into a sec- ondary position relative to work being made in the East. Once California Pop's initial prominence in The New Painting of Common Objects was overshadowed by such New York-centered exhibitions as Six Painters, this position was already well on its way to being established; with Marmer's essay—published in a book so influential that, even today, it is considered the standard text on Pop—its fate was sealed.

The Second City, 1963-1966

Although the odds of the L.A. Pop artists achieving fame and fortune equal to their New York counterparts never really stood in their favor, artists working outside New York were not totally ignored by the art press. L.A. received more media coverage any other “regional” American art city, but critics tended to dis- cuss L.A. artists condescendingly. This tendency was particularly apparent in a number of articles published by major art and general interest magazines from approximately 1963 to 1972. In these pieces, which I will dub “Second City” articles, critics focused on L.A. as a new if unlikely center for artistic production. While these articles promoted the art of the “second city” (New York, of course, being the first), they also exhibited an unmistakable disdain—veiled with varying degrees—for L.A. artists and their work.

The first was written by the L.A. critic Jules Langsner; entitled “Art Centers, Los Angeles: America’s Second Art City,” it ran in the April 1963 issue of Art in America and primarily chronicles how L.A.’s art community was then experiencing a growth spurt.[32] “In the space of half-a-dozen years,” Langsner observes, “the status of Los Angeles in the art community has changed from the home of the nuts who diet on nutburgers to a lively and vital center of increasing importance on the international art map”; L.A. had “become the country’s second city with regard to caliber and number of galleries, collectors, museum activities, and creatively prodigal painters, sculptors, and printmakers.[33] Among these new artists—he names Pop and L.A. Look stalwarts like Conner, Foulkes, Ruscha, Dowd, Goode, Hefferton, and Thiebaud—"the more gifted California adherents are as witty and inventive as their more celebrated counterparts in New York and Europe,” although “their renown is largely confined to the hip crowd in Southern California.[34] Though he praises the activities of the newly energized L.A. art world, he does so from the point of view of someone who cannot get over his surprise at the interesting things going on in so remote and peculiar a locale. (Without knowing that Langsner was based in L.A., one might mistake him for a dismissive New Yorker.) With his mention of nuts and nutburgers and his suggestion that the wit and inventiveness of L.A. artists might approach (but never equal) that of New Yorkers or Europeans, he adopts a bemused and somewhat patronizing tone that, while superficially complimentary, is also unmistakably negative.

In a subsequent article published in the May-June 1963 issue of Craft Horizons, Langsner offers a second assessment of West Coast Pop. Cultivating a knowing voice, he opens the “letter from Los Angeles-style” article by reporting that “this season, ‘le dernier cri’ in Los Angeles art circles has been thrust onto center stage of Neo-Dada and Pop art.[35] The Pop interest in making “common objects” the subject of fine art has, he reports, infuriated L.A.’s nascent art establishment, although “efforts of the stuffed shirt loyalists to fix arbitrary limits to the field of art are, of course, absurd” and “attempts to disbar these efforts from the domain of art are about as futile as pummeling the wind.[36] Pointing out that “the history of art is cluttered with visual wits working [in] veins remarkably similar to that of Neo-Dada and Pop art"— Langsner cites Arcimboldo, Hogarth, Grandville, and, more predictably, Duchamp, Schwitters, and Ernst—he concludes that “the kind of visual wit captivating the self- consciously naughty-naughty fringe of the Los Angeles art community all too often is burdened with moth-eaten and hackneyed devices.[37] Though he would eventually become known as a foremost advocate of California Pop, Langsner was remarkably critical of the work that he supposedly endorsed.

During the summer and fall of 1964, the L.A. art world experienced a surge of energy, for the new, expanded Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened late that year. Nearly all the major art magazines ran articles on, or in some cases dedicated special issues to, the new museum and the L.A. art scene.[38] Though these articles conveyed a strong sense of the city’s civic pride, one of the most provocative commentaries on the new museum came from a local artist, Ruscha. He began painting Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965-68) soon after the new LACMA opened. Monumental (eleven feet across) in scale yet painstakingly detailed, this work shows the museum and its grounds from above (what Ruscha has often called an “aerial oblique” perspective) —with orange flames shooting discreetly off to the building's rear. Despite the conflagration at its core, this picture is, with its unified palette, elegant composition, and licked surface, remarkably serene.

Ruscha’s stately image depicts the museum with a gravitas suggestive of the legitimacy that, with its opening, L.A.'s art community strove to achieve. Nevertheless, setting the new landmark on fire indicates an obvious ambivalence on his part, which critics have interpreted in numerous ways. Most have viewed the painting as a metaphorical torching of artistic institutions and traditions; others have seen it as a declaration of the ascendant L.A. art scene’s being “on fire” (read: hot), or, alternatively, as an allusion to the arson that swept L.A.’s Watts neighborhood during its 1967 race riots.[39] Ruscha has rejected such readings, insisting instead that he was primarily interested in capturing an image of paradoxical calm amid chaos. But Ruscha’s choice of the celebrated new LacMA—and by association the local artistic community it symbolized—as the subject of this ambitious if ambiguous work indicates a certain willingness to serve as both a representative of and commentator on the city’s burgeoning art scene.

The next major article to be published on West Coast Pop appeared in the January-February 1966 issue of Art in America; written by Rose, it was titled “Los Angeles: The Second City.” (The “second city” appellation, first used in reference to the L.A. art scene by Langsner three years before, seems to have stuck.) Rather than suggesting, like Langsner, that L.A. art was categorically derivative of the New York avant-garde, Rose credits L.A. artists for their “vitality and diversity,” but discusses their work in terms so overwrought as to seem almost satirical. Comparing L.A. to New York art, she writes, “Like American art in general, California art is closely tied to its environment, so one is not surprised to find that the brilliantly sunny, palm-studded, Day Glo-spangled Los Angeles landscape inspires an art quite different from that made in reaction to New York's frigid lofts and littered slums.[40] (Rose points to Standard Station, Amanillo, Texas as an example: “Although set in Texas, Edward Ruscha’s filling station has the brash newness of L.A.’s born-yesterday culture.”[41] Even her praise of L.A., however, could be read as a slight; in her emphasis on its shiny surfaces, she implicitly suggests that California art lacks substance relative to New York art's grit.

Ultimately, Rose asserts, “the most striking aspect of Los Angeles art is its pervasive eroticism.” She reports, rather breathlessly, that:

One cannot call this element sensual, and one hesitates even to qualify it as sensuous, although the emphasis on polished, slippery surfaces in sculpture and creamy or touchable textures in painting, not to mention the erotic nature of the forms themselves, seems to call for such a description. On the contrary, the eroticism of the art only appears to reflect the charged, generalized sexuality of the ambience, with its nearby beaches crowded by acres of tanning flesh and colonies of body builders. Nor is it surprising that, given the perverseness of body culture in the civilization of the Pacific, the result has not been the mens sana in corpore sano of Mediterranean civilizations. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald, an unhappy transplant from the East, put it, honi soi qui Malibu.[42]

Though she seems enamored of the sexiness of Southern California art and culture, her evocation of Fitzgerald's famous insult implies that she finds it essentially frivolous. Her description of California art evokes L.A.’s other, more familiar cultural export, the Hollywood movie; it’s fun, she seems to suggest, but slight. Her concluding bons mots seal this impression:

If, after a few days in L.A., one begins to fear that New York may break off from the mainland and float back to Europe, then the prospect of joining the lotus-eaters has its undeniable attractions. For even if there is no calme in Los Angeles, there is sufficient luxe and volupéé in its life and art, if not to evoke the spirit of Henri Matisse, then at least to permanently lay to rest the shade of Cotton Mather. Visiting the galleries along La Cienega, one begins to picture Europe as the Renaissance, New York as the avant-garde and L.A. as the “orgiastic future” that year by year becomes more actual and immediate, replete with an art already actual and immediate.[43]

L.A. art is, Rose suggests, hedonistic and enjoyable, but fundamentally inferior to the serious art being made in New York. Her opinion helped secure the L.A. artists’ position as interesting if remote novelties in the contemporary art scene.

L.A. Art into History, 1971-1972

Throughout the late 1960s and early '70s, L.A. artists continued to appear in national art magazines, and the most prominent of them (including Ruscha) increasingly exhibited in New York and Europe. But by the dawn of the 1970s, the tenor of these articles and exhibitions began to shift. Up until about 1969, coverage of L.A. art tended to emphasize the novelty and distinctiveness of the California scene, but as the decade drew to a close, such accounts started to take on a retrospective tone—and conflicting histories of Pop began to develop. For example, Lippard wrote in 1966, “Considering the communications network in today’s art world it is strange how little art from Los Angeles (or the West Coast in general) we see here {in New York], and even how little is reproduced”; by contrast, Elizabeth C. Baker reported in 1971 that “the characteristic Los Angeles art of the 1960s was extensively exhibited in New York.”[44]

In some ways this shift was inevitable. By the early 1970s, Pop art had been around for ten years; its novelty had worn off and the art world’s attention had turned to newer styles and media, namely language-based art, video, performance, and site-specific sculpture. However, California Pop’s change in status from “new” to “historical” may also be attributed to the fact that the first retrospective museum exhibition to include L.A. Pop, West Coast 1945-1969, was held at the Pasadena Art Museum from November 1969 to January 1970. Organized by the ubiquitous

Coplans, it received mixed reactions from critics. Some reviewers expressed surprise that the time had already come for L. A. Pop to be “memorialized” with a retrospective; Los Angeles Times critic Henry J. Seldis wrote that “It is far too early to write history on the past twenty-five years. Nor can history be written by simply ignoring what happened, just because the historian deplored much of what took place.[45] He also complained that a disproportionate number of Ferus artists (of whom Ruscha was one) had been included in the exhibition. It may or may not have been unfair that Ferus artists so dominated the L.A. scene in the late 1950s and '60s, but Seldis’s comments signal that the Ferus artists’ work was well known enough to have passed into the recent history of art.

The integration of this work into the fabric of art history was confirmed by a December 1969 article entitled “Patrons of Pop,” published in the Los Angeles Times West Magazine. In it, critic William Wilson reports on the collections of various eminent Angelenos, among them several prominent Hollywood figures. Although California Pop never sold as well as New York Pop nationally or internationally, these collectors bought it in bulk. According to Wilson, L.A. art patrons took naturally to the Pop style, which he attributes to the oft-stated observation that L.A. is itself a “Pop” city: “It is inescapable that this unique carnival-and-country-club environment has affected the style, subjects, and procedures of artists who have blossomed in the sixties.”[46] In identifying L.A. as an explicitly Pop environment, Wilson echoes sentiments expressed previously by Rose (and subsequently by Plagens, Ruscha, and others). But even as he touts the popularity of Pop among L.A. collectors, he suggests that these artists were starting to lose ground to practitioners of other styles. “LA. is changing,” he observes. “Art is moving, as art must. Students now regard Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell and other wild ‘Studs’ of the influential old Ferus Gallery as Old Masters. They are the established original fact of California's coming of age.”[47] Wilson hints that the breakdown of the Ferus crowd (precipitated by the closing of the gallery in 1967, soon after which Blum himself moved to New York) caused a decline in the popularity of many of its artists.

When, merely two years later, Art in America published an updated letter from L.A., “Los Angeles, 1971” by Baker, this shift was complete. The city’s contemporary art scene was considerably transformed, and Baker goes so far as to suggest that L.A.’s contemporary art boom was as good as over:

The Los Angeles art scene is alive and well—somewhat. There are so many artists in Los Angeles that one might be tempted to characterize the situation as thriving. But this presents a paradox: for if institutional liveliness—museum sponsorship of new art, frequent gallery shows, wide critical response and press coverage—or even a competitive, garrulous, part-social, part-professional exchange between artists means anything, the Los Angeles art scene appears to be newly dead.[48]

If one accepts Wilson’s assertion that the closing of Ferus accounted for this loss of momentum, then this change might be viewed as a positive development. As Baker herself points out, many former Ferus artists were doing quite well, having moved on to international prominence. Ruscha, for example, was by that time extremely active on the East Coast and abroad, and had become close to many important New York-based artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson.[49]

Many in the L.A. art world (Seldis, for example) resented the Ferus group’s disproportionate dominance of the local scene, and may have been glad to see the gallery go. But Baker also asserts that the newly diversified and decentralized L.A. art community failed to offer a cohesive community for local artists—a state of affairs very different from New York.[50] That no new galleries as ambitious and dynamic as Ferus had opened to takes its place was, she suggests, particularly problematic:

Basically, Los Angeles dealers are not very engaged with Los Angeles art, either established or new; yet even the youngest of the New York avant-garde is shipped in. A sleepy inactivity hangs over the spiffy galleries of La Cienega Boulevard, some of which are fading after the boom of recent memory. ... Many of the best-known L.A. Artists (Bell, Irwin, Ruscha, and others) have no gallery there—by choice. At the same time, young L.A. artists are likely to show first in the more reputation-oriented centers of New York, or even Dusseldorf.[51]

Baker argues that, with the passing of Ferus as the center of a lively (if arguably limited) L.A. art world, a new generation of Angeleno artists found themselves in a difficult situation.

The next occasion on which numerous New York critics turned their attention to California art was the mounting by Manhattan's Sidney Janis Gallery of a group exhibition called Los Angeles '72 in the spring of that year. This survey of art by the latest crop of young L.A. artists—the generation following the Ferus group—included work by such (now-forgotten) artists as Thomas Wudl, Patrick Hogan, and Scott Greiger. In general, New York reviewers were underwhelmed. The then L.A—based Schjeldahl offered a thoughtful assessment of the current state of L.A.-New York rivalry: “For some years it has been fashionable in some circles to opine that California—and, in particular, Los Angeles—will eventually equal New York as a fountainhead of American art and culture. Indeed, some claim it has already happened.”[52] But Schjeldahl does not ultimately believe that L.A. artists can compete with their New York counterparts: “Most of our really viable and influential art and literary (as opposed to life) styles, meanwhile, continue to enjoy their richest and hardiest growth here by the Hudson."[53] Schjeldahl asserts that, though stylish, L.A. art is ultimately derivative of the more substantive work being made in the East. He concludes, “It is, finally, perhaps a little foolish to speak of California art versus New York art. New York's gravitational pull is so strong that any American working in a mainstream (New York) mode will, should he become influential, more or less automatically be a “New York artist.'"[54]

Schjeldahl does cite one exception: Ruscha. Of a current exhibition of Ruscha’s prints (devoted to his recent Insect edition and held at Multiples Inc.) he writes: “Ruscha’s art—an uncanny emulsion of Surrealist punning, Conceptualist ‘rigor,’ and California glossiness—is shrewdly modest. ... [His] tactic ...is to make an unlovely subject visually appealing; [his] strategy, which succeeds, is to communicate a strange mixture of humor, pleasure, and disquiet.”[55] While Ruscha’s art may encapsulate California culture—and while he had by that time brilliantly assumed a role as spokesman for California art—he nevertheless cannot, in Schjeldahl's opinion, negate the problems that L.A. art had been suffering for more than ten years.

Soon after Schjeldahl’s article appeared, Harold Rosenberg reviewed Los Angeles '72, along with two other exhibitions, for The New Yorker.[56] As each of these exhibitions focused on “regional” (i.e., non—New York City) artists, he structured his review around “the idea of locality.” He opens with the question, on many critics’ minds at the time, of whether art made outside New York really matters:

If New York is the site from which art history is launched, to be present there would seem indispensable to the creation of an art that matters.

One who fails to respond to the New York note is considered to be an exile from both past and future. On the other hand, for the art of a place to differ from that of New York, and dare to be satisfied with its difference, is to have achieved an identity of its own—a “school” that deserves attention. Regionalism today, in art as in politics, is the revolt of geography against history.[57]

Though never questioning New York's eminence as the seat of the art world (he was, after all, one of the figures who made it such), Rosenberg admits that significant activity took place beyond the Hudson. Much of that activity coalesced, he continues, in California, and especially around the “Los Angeles School.” But while intrigued by the idea of “regionalism,” he is not impressed by Los Angeles '72, asserting that “the works at the Janis Gallery contained not a single positive feature of locality, whether of mood, lie of the land, surface texture, or way of life."[58] Toward the end of the article, he quotes lengthily from Schjeldahl’s negative review of the same show, agreeing with all of it—save his fellow critic’s favorable assessment of Ruscha’s work. The latter, he found, smacked of Hollywood-style commercialism, referring presumably to Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, he writes, “even the takeoffs of film-company insignia by Fd Ruscha... [were] superceded by studio conceits.”[59] For Rosenberg, no generation of L.A. artists was particularly worthy of note, let alone praise.

Plagens's 1974 book Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970 offered final proof that, although L.A. Pop became historicized in the early 1970s, it faced an uphill battle for acceptance within the broad art-historical establishment. The first comprehensive history of postwar California art, Sunshine Muse remains the foremost text on the subject. Prior to its publication, Plagens had already secured a niche for himself as a California critic, writing frequently for Artforum on West Coast art. In the book’s opening chapter, he positions himself as someone who, as a native Californian, understands his state’s stepchild position within the art world and can defend it against New York’s bullying. His first order of business is to take on the idea of regionalism and its relationship to New York. Regional art, he observes, is

either initially schizophrenic or rendered so when it hits the big time. Should it be gauged against the “mainstream” (deliberately art historical art produced where it counts—New York) or should it be sized up from exactly the opposite point of view (quaintness, funkiness, antihistoricality—in short, for its regional character)? Serious artists living in the regions must chose: Am I playing the mainstream game, and, if I am, am I chicken or foolish for not moving to New York?

He continues, “critics, historians, collectors, dealers, and others once-removed from art-making” must then decide if, for example, “Ed Ruscha is only just as good as Warhol or Oldenburg in his knife-edged banality, or if he’s a lighthearted Hollywood gadfly, whose value lies in work that doesn’t give a damn about expanding the boundaries of art, but does about expanding those of comfort and leisure.[60] Plagens summarizes the dilemma faced at the time by ambitious artists wishing to launch their careers from “the regions”: if an L.A. artist chose to stay in California, his or her work would inevitably be compared with that of New York artists, and the highest praise would often be that it was “as good as” that of an East Coast counterpart. Is it worth it, he asks, for “serious” artists to resist joining the New York “mainstream”?

Ruscha, whose seriousness few critics today would dispute, steadfastly refused to join the New York mainstream, and he paid dearly for his resistance.[61] Now, at the age of sixty-eight, he finally finds himself ranked alongside such luminaries as Warhol, Judd, Nauman, Polke, and Richter, but his ascension to this rarified circle was a long time coming. One could speculate endlessly as to why so many critics are suddenly so enamored of Ruscha. Chalk it up to the whims of fashion and the market; to L.A.’s increased prominence within the art world (now that L.A. art is no longer widely disdained, Ruscha has, as that community’s favorite son, turned from antihero into hero); to numerous young artists’ current fascination with 1960s California culture; or to the revisionist urge to transport peripheral figures into the center (although among formerly marginalized artists, Ruscha—a straight white male—is entirely unthreatening to the status quo). Regardless of its explanation, Ruscha’s day in the sun is remarkable because, had
he and his L.A. contemporaries not been erased from the history of Pop art practically from its inception, the current rediscovery of his work would never have
been necessary.

Alexandra Schwartz

Notes

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 Sofia, 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: Wntings, 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.

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: permanence (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.

8 Johns sold out his debut show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1955; it took a few years afterward for the tide to change—and for these changes to reach California.

9 This appellation originated with a 1964 Ferus exhibition entitled The Studs. Presented, according to its announcement, “as a public service,” it included work by Bengston, Irwin, Moses, and Price. There exist many photographs from that era showing the participants in various pin-up poses.

10 Notably, Hopps organized the first large-scale American retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work. Shown at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, it was a landmark exhibition that affected many artists, including Ruscha.

11 Lawrence Alloway, American Pop Art (New York: Collier Books, 1974), p. 1. Alloway coined the term “Pop art” in his article “The Arts and the Mass Media,” Architectural Design (February 1958), pp. 84-85.

12 Interviewing Ruscha in 1980 for the Archives of American Art Oral History Project, Paul Karlstrom asked, “Would you mark the Pasadena show, along with the [Ferus] Warhol show, as an introduction of what became known as Pop art?” Ruscha answered: “Well, yes, historically it is. Walter’s was the first of any organized show of that kind of work. ... I thought that was really good, the way he defined it as the ‘New Painting of Common Objects’... he had a way of nailing a subject down. ... The Pasadena Art Museum ... was a real jewel of a place. It had its own private interest. Even artists as far away as Europe, artists from New York—everybody knew that the Pasadena Art Museum was a hot thing” (Karlstrom, “Interview with Edward Ruscha in his Western Avenue, Hollywood Studio,” in Leave Any Information at the Signal, p. 138).

13 John Coplans, “The New Painting of Common Objects,” in Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 45; originally published in Artforum 1 (November 1962).

14 Ibid.

15 Ruscha has commented particularly on the role and myth of Hollywood in American culture. In a remark somewhat reminiscent of Warhol’s pronouncements about Coca-Cola and Campbell’s soup, he once reflected, “The idea of Hollywood has lots of meanings and one—to me—is this image of something fake up here being held up with sticks. That to me had more in meaning with the term ‘Hollywood’ than the other usual associations” (L.A. Suggested by the Art of Edward Ruscha, produced and directed by Gary Conklin, Mystic Fire Video, 1981; transcript reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 220-24).

16 In my dissertation, I argue that Ruscha also strategically played into this notion of “dumbness” through his public self-fashioning, in the mass media and other outlets, as an artist-cum-Hollywood star—a complex issue that is beyond the scope of the present article.

17 Barbara Rose, “Dada, Then and Now,” in Pop Art: A Critical History, originally published in Art International7 (January 1963), pp. 57-64.

18 Ibid., pp. 58-59.

19 Lawrence Alloway, Six Painters and the Object (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1963), n.p.

20 According to John Coplans, Alloway organized the second show after a visit to the West Coast around the time the first show opened (Coplans, “Pop Art—USA,” Art in America 51 [October 1963], p. 26).

21 Anonymous, “Pop Pop,” Time, August 30, 1963, p. 40.

22 D{on] Flactor], “Six Painters and the Object and Six More,” Artforum 2 (September 1963), pp. 13-15.

23 John Coplans, “Pop Art, USA,” p. 27.

24 Around the same time, Ruscha also made numerous drawings and studies of the 20th Century Fox logo.

25 Notably, though Coplans used Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights as an illustration for his article, it was not actually included in the exhibition.

26 John Canaday, “Pop Art Sells On and On—Why?” in Pop Art: A Critical History, pp. 118-23; originally published in The New York Times Magazine, May 31, 1964.

27 Nancy Marmer, “Pop Art in California,” in Pop Art, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), pp. 139-40.

28 Ibid., p. 140. Marmer seems to be alluding to Tom Wolfe’s influential essay on car cultures, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” originally published in Esquire and reprinted in an eponymous collection of his essays in 1963.

29 Ibid., p. 149.

30 Ruscha has, over the years, made numerous images of Standard and other gasoline stations, including related paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, as well as his celebrated 1962 photo book Twentysix Gasoline Stations—all considered hallmarks of his ongoing chronicle of Los Angeles.

31 Marmer, “Pop Art in California,” p. 146.

32 Jules Langsner, “Art Centers, Los Angeles: America’s Second Art City,” Art in America 51 (April 1963), p. 127.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., p. 130.

35 Jules Langsner, “Exhibitions: Painting and Sculpture: The Los Angeles Season,” Craft Horizons 23 (May-June 1963), p. 40.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Art in America 53 (June 1964), Artforum 2 (Summer 1964), and Art News 64 (March 1965) were dedicated to coverage of the new museum and the L.A. scene.

39 The first reading was recently made by Kynaston McShine in his 1999 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect; the second by the critic Toby Mussman in his review of the exhibition in which the painting debuted (“L.A. on Fire: Rew-Shay, Cause Célébre,” Arts Magazine 42 [March 1968], p. 15); and the third by Mike Davis in his City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 67. In several interviews, Ruscha stated that the idea for the work stemmed from his admiration of the painting Withdrawal from Dunkirk (1940), by the little-known British war painter Richard Eurich (see, for example, Karlstrom, “Interview with Edward Ruscha,” p. 189).

40 Barbara Rose, “Los Angeles: The Second City,” Art in America 54 (January-February 1966), pp. 110-11.

41 Ibid., p. 113.

42 Mens sana in corpore sano: “You should pray for a sound mind in a sound body,” attributed to Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis, A.D. ca. 55-ca. 130); honi soi qui Malibu is a play on Honi soit qui mal y pense (Evil to him who evil thinks), attributed to Edward III (1312-1377) and said of the Black Prince at the battle of Crécy (1349).

43 Rose, “Los Angeles,” p. 114.

44 Lucy R. Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International 9 (May 1965), p. 54; Elizabeth C. Baker, “Los Angeles, 1971,” Art in America 70, no. 5 (September 1971), p. 28.

45 Henry J. Seldis, “Pasadena’s Lopsided Survey,” Los Angeles Times, November 31, 1969, p. 78 (Calendar).

46 William Wilson, “Patrons of Pop,” Los Angeles Times West Magazine, December 7, 1969, p. 26.

47 Ibid., p. 26.

48 Baker, “Los Angeles, 1971,” p. 27.

49 Smithson himself tackled the L.A.—New York split—which by this time was widely acknowledged within the art world—as the subject of a film called East Coast, West Coast (1970). Though born in New Jersey and based in New York, Smithson worked on many Earth art projects in the American West. The artist portrays a pot-smoking Earth artist-hippie from California who, throughout the film, spars with the artist Nancy Holt (also Smithson’s wife), playing a high-strung, intellectualizing Conceptual artist from New York. Paradoxically, the fact that prominent New York artists focused on the art world’s coastal divide as the subject of a film signals that California artists had in some way “arrived” in the East. The film is hilarious in its parody of both California and New York art and culture, and it proves that although artists on both coasts were aware of regional stereotypes, at least artists like Smithson and Holt did not take them too seriously. Interestingly, Ruscha and Smithson planned at some point to make a film together, but these plans were never realized (Ed Ruscha, conversation with author, New York City, November 21, 2004).

50 From a historical standpoint, Baker’s position is problematic. During the 1960s, L.A. was home to many active artistic communities apart from the Ferus group, including many women and minority artists. But the Ferus artists garnered the lion’s share of national attention, and Baker seems to have been unaware of the other, marginalized groups. In 1981, when the first full-scale retrospective of 1960s-era L.A. art, Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, was held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and featured primarily Ferus artists, it drew crowds of protestors whose placards demanded “WHERE ARE THE WOMEN AND MINORITIES?”

51 Baker, “Los Angeles, 1971,” p. 28.

52 Peter Schjeldahl, “L.A. Art? ‘Interesting—But Painful,” New York Times, May 21, 1972, p. 25.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Chicago Imagist Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Chicago and A Sense of Place at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, Long Island.

57 Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World: Place, Patriotism, and the New York Mainstream,” The New Yorker, July 15, 1972, p. 52.

58 Ibid., p. 54.

59 Ibid.

60 Plagens, Sunshine Muse, pp. 9-10.

61 In his 1980-81 oral history, Karlstrom queried Ruscha about his decision not to move to New York:

KARLSTROM: Apparently your experience in New York wasn’t such that you felt it necessary to relocate there, which . . . has happened increasingly with California artists.

RUSCHA: Yes, it’s like a standard move.

PK: Why was that then, do you suppose? It seems that you felt you could very successfully and satisfactorily carry on your career right here in L.A.

FR: I thought so. I didn’t look at it on a vocational level, as to whether I could, say, get a gallery and make a better living there. Well, I’m sure that I could have, but also I would have been chewed up by the whole machine.

PK: It worked out all right.

ER: Yes, I’d say so, in the sense that I was able to see New York as an onlooker. I consequently made a lot of friends among artists back there. I’ve been lucky enough to maintain myself out here. . . .

PK: What was the attraction for you to come back to Los Angeles from New York? You apparently then viewed L.A. as your working place.

ER: Yes, I did. I developed a real closeness to the place. It has to do with the movies, it has to do with palm trees, it has to do with a collage in your mind of what this place is all about. . . . There was a definite art community here that I was becoming a part of, and so I was just drawn back here. ... Maybe a couple of times I was tempted to move off and go back to New York because of the big apple side of it, but I have a suspicion that my work would have been chewed up and spit out. You see, the paintings I was doing at the time were being overlooked by the people in power who are all centered in New York (Karlstrom, “Interview with Edward Ruscha,” p. 129).