Information at The Signal: A Conversation With Ed Ruscha

Filed under Art, Artists, Features, LA Iconoclasts

ED RUSCHA is as much a part of LA as its sunsets, freeways, wildfires, and beaches. Lest we limit him as a regionalist, let us remember that California itself is a slippery character, an idea as much as a place. As the artist incisively observed in one of his late 70s pastels, “Hollywood is a verb.” Ruscha moved to LA from Oklahoma to attend Chouinard Art Institute in 1956. While a student there he fell in with what he jokingly refers to as the “wrong crowd”: artists like Billy Al Bengston and Robert Irwin, pioneers of LA Pop and the Finish Fetish movement, which appropriated the seductive sheen of Southern California topography, car culture, and surf culture. Ruscha and his colleagues were key progenitors of California cool. Working in relative isolation compared to New York, the contemporary art center of the 60s and 70s, Ruscha is a prolific producer of paintings, drawings, photographs, and books that draw directly and indirectly from LA as a subject, and have played a critical role in creating its cultural mystique today. He spoke to Fabrik about the germinal days of the LA art scene and his evolving relationship with the city.

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