Leafing Through Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha’s Photographic Books Steven Jacobs

© Ashgate Publishing Ltd

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14

Leafing Through Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha’s Photographic Books

Steven Jacobs

Los AngeLes: CApitAL of the LAte twentieth Century

In the late 1960s and early 70s a major shift in the history of American urban photography occurred. The immediate, 35 mm aesthetic of the snapshot street photography of Robert Frank, William Klein or Garry Winogrand was exchanged in favour of the cooler, slower and more architectural and topographical approach of the so-called New Topographics and the Becher school.1 This new aesthetics went hand-in-hand with the depiction of a new kind of urban landscape. Whereas the street photographers had preferred hectic streets in dense city centres, or the evocation of neighbourhood community life, a new generation of urban photographers turned their cameras towards the suburban fringes or non-descript landscapes of low-density housing, roads, parking lots, billboards, wastelands and office parks.

Artists such as Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha were pioneers in exploring this post-urban landscape of late capitalism.2 Not coincidentally, these artists worked in environments in which the new spatial logic manifested itself most clearly: Smithson and Graham in New Jersey, and Baldessari and Ruscha in Los Angeles and Southern California.

Although often criticized, ridiculed or simply neglected by the professional elite of architects and urban planners, Los Angeles unmistakably became the paradigm city of the late twentieth century – in his seminal historical survey of the American city, Jon Teaford speaks of the ‘Los Angelesization of America’.3 Urban theorists such as Edward Soja,4 Mike Davis5 and Michael Dear6 have interpreted Los Angeles as the pre-eminent urban embodiment of the postmodern condition: a realm characterized by spatial, social and cultural fragmentation, determined by the politics of a globalized economy and shaped by the visual instruments of mass media. Los Angeles, in short, instead of becoming a new urban model, was presented as a segment of a post-urban condition. At best Robert Fishman labelled it, somewhat contradictorily, as a ‘suburban metropolis’,7 while William Fulton called it a ‘reluctant’8 metropolis.



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CAMERA CoNSTRUCTS212

14.1 Ed Ruscha, Detail of EVERY BUILDING oN THE SUNSET STRIP, 1966. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever

Ruscha’s exploration of Los Angeles’ architecture and topography in the late 1960s coincided with an increasing understanding of its spatial specificity. Robert Fogelson’s classic study of the historical development of the city appeared in 1967,9 and about four years later Reyner Banham published his highly influential Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.10 Closely connected with the development of Pop Art and its fascination with mass-produced urban culture, Banham used a broad definition of architecture that included hamburger bars and other Pop ephemera.11 Banham did not attempt to interpret Californian modern architecture by means of stylistic and art historical categories, but by analysing its exceptional topographical and historical context. In contrast with the dominant professional opinion, which considered Los Angeles as a both incomprehensive and objectionable urban entity, Banham described it as a realm of unlimited possibilities, making full use of its ‘ecologies’ of hills, beaches, plains and freeways. Banham’s original and unbiased look found its equivalent in the contemporary discovery of Los Angeles by other European intellectuals, artists and filmmakers such as David Hockney, Jacques Demy and Michelangelo Antonioni.

rusChA: peintre de LA vie postmoderne AngeLesienne

In the late 1960s and early 70s, local artists also started to explore the area, and Ruscha’s name in particular became an obligatory entry in any Los Angeles encyclopaedia.12 Art critic Peter Schjeldahl once said that ‘to know the art of Ed Ruscha, you should know something about Los Angeles, and the reverse: knowing something about Ruscha’s art will help you with Los Angeles. He is the artist of that city as Manet was the artist of Paris.’13 Ruscha’s fascination with Los Angeles characterizes his entire career. It is expressed, for instance, in his paintings of the 1960s and 90s, and in his canonical silk-screens showing urban icons of the Los Angeles area, such as short words in the style of billboards, gas stations and movie studio trademarks, including the Hollywood sign (1968). This sign, of course, is the appropriate monument for a postmodern city: consisting only of a surface of letters, it demonstrates that the city lacks density and is constructed as a landscape of mere signs.



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LEAFING THRoUGH LoS ANGELES 213

First and foremost, however, Ruscha explored the urban landscape of Los Angeles through the medium of photography,14 in particular in a series of 16 photographic booklets.15 Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963) compiles gas stations situated along Route 66 between Los Angeles and oklahoma City. The architecture and the urban landscape of LA are dealt with explicitly in Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) (Figures 14.1, 14.3 and 14.5) and Thirty-four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) (Figures 14.2 and 14.4). Real Estate Opportunities (1970) contains pictures of empty lots for sale in less glamorous and more marginal neighbourhoods,16 illustrating the increasing urbanization of the landscape.17 The empty lots made a distinctive mark on the decentralized cityscape. By photographing these residual spaces from the other side of the road, Ruscha stresses their emptiness and the gauntness of their advertising signs.

Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) is a series of colour photographs of swimming pools – turned into a Californian icon by Hockney. Ruscha, however, presents his pools trimmed by concrete and pressed up by surrounding buildings. In A Few Palm Trees (1971), Ruscha focuses on these symbols of local popular horticulture. The book contains a selection of neglected palms, planted in little stretches of earth, surrounded by asphalt and concrete and located at crossroads, intersections and traffic islands. All the trees are photographed from the same direction – ‘camera facing west on all photos,’ Ruscha mentions. They are isolated from their context but accompanied by a text describing their exact location. A similar subject and approach is used in Colored People (1972), containing a series of colour photographs of cacti, aloe and agaves, which can be found abundantly in Los Angeles domestic neighbourhoods built on former desert land. Finally, Royal Road Test (1967), which drily documents the throwing of a Royal typewriter from a moving car, is conceptually linked with Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations and its fascination for the culture of the road. In short, Ruscha’s photographic booklets show us all the obligatory ingredients of

14.2 Ed Ruscha, ‘Pershing Square underground lot, 5th & Hill’, from THIRTYFoUR PARKING LoTS, 1967. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever



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the urban iconography of California and Los Angeles: bright sunlight, palm trees, freeways, streets with motorized traffic, an abundance of commercial signs and the enormous territorial expansion with suburban, low-density modes of dwellings – the kind of buildings which are called dingbats and which, according to Banham, are ‘the true symptom of Los Angeles’ urban Id trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living.’18

LeArning from Los AngeLes

Real Estate Opportunities, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations in particular show a Pop sensibility for signs and billboards. Ruscha even compared Los Angeles with ‘a series of storefront planes that are vertical from the street, and there’s almost like nothing behind the façades. It’s all façades here – that’s what interests me about the whole city of Los Angeles – the façade-ness of the whole thing.’19 To Ruscha, Los Angeles is ‘the ultimate cardboard cut-out town’, which seems to be a positive quality: ‘Superficiality can be profound and funny and worth living for. I mean, everything’s ephemeral when you look at it in its proper focus. It just happens more quickly in LA.’20

Los Angeles, in short, is presented as an urban emblem of Pop Art, which in itself has been labelled ‘the ideal instrument for coming to grips with the American urban environment’.21 This notion of Los Angeles as a Pop city of signs and billboards tallies with contemporaneous architectural theories. Banham, for instance, draws a lot of attention to the playful components of the consumer architecture of hamburger bars and Disneyland. Architect Robert Venturi, too, pleaded for a more positive look at the new landscape and welcomed Pop Art as a refreshing view on urban reality. ‘Some of the vivid lessons of Pop Art, involving contradictions of scale and context, should have awakened architects from prim dreams of pure order’,22 Venturi wrote. Together with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Venturi explained these lessons in his famous text Learning from Las Vegas, the first version of which was published in 1968.23 In this analysis of the new American landscape of big spaces, high speed and complex programmes, Venturi particularly investigates the symbolism of architectural form, which plays an important part in the commercial persuasiveness of roadside eclecticism. In addition, he points to the concomitant new visual experiences and analyses scrupulously the organizing elements – the sign and the strip – that lie hidden behind the chaotic urban landscape, which Peter Blake had disapprovingly called God’s Own Junkyard.24 Strikingly, Venturi refers to Ruscha. His inventory of Vegas gas stations, for instance, is clearly indebted to Ruscha’s first photographical booklet, and his photo-montage of the Vegas strip refers unmistakably to Ruscha’s Sunset Strip – Ruscha is even explicitly mentioned in the caption of this image.

CAr And CinemA

A Pop city marked by signs and billboards is inherently connected to the car. In Ruscha’s work, too, the pedestrian, who was so celebrated both in the street photography of the New York School and in the influential writings of Jane Jacobs,25 seems completely pushed aside by the car driver – although cars themselves, being the motif connecting practically all of his photographic series, are actually absent, like people, from the images. ‘Cars are too much like people’,26 Ruscha



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once said. The sidewalk, the locus classicus of street photography, has been exchanged for the freeway. The gaze of the flâneur, according to Walter Benjamin the embodiment of the ultimate metropolitan,27 made room for the view from the road – the crucial topic in the eponymous book by Donald Appleyard and Kevin Lynch28 as well as in Learning from Las Vegas. In Los Angeles, of course, freeways were already an obligatory component of tourist imagery and were depicted on postcards. To Banham, driving a car was even a precondition for grasping the city. ‘Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original’,29 Banham wrote.

Car infrastructure is central to Ruscha’s series of gasoline stations, parking lots, the Sunset Strip and Royal Road Test. His entire oeuvre is determined by a visual perspective defined by the windscreen, driver’s window and curbside. Every Building on the Sunset Strip was produced with a motorized Nikon mounted on the back of a pickup truck. In his earlier Pop paintings as well, Ruscha evoked road culture: the painted words are like signposts along the highway, a landscape seen through the windscreen. Ruscha demonstrates that the replacement of the pedestrian by the car driver coincided with new visual modes of perception. The car not only contributed to the spatial dispersal and architectural dilution of the city but to its optical evaporation as well. By privileging moving view points, the environment loses its tactility and is continuously subjected to optical distortions. By reducing the urban experience to a visual spectacle, car driving can be interpreted as an intensification of flânerie, which has been defined as an optical and scopophilic operation from the very first. The flâneur became a chauffeur.30 The flâneur, however, relates to the chauffeur as does Benjamin to Baudrillard: whereas the flâneur attempts to keep a distance from the phantasmagoria of the metropolis, the contemporary city transforms itself into a series of simulacra, which are closely connected with modes of perception typical of postmodern consumer society. Whereas the Benjaminian flâneur, by means of a self-conscious artistic activity, succeeded in transforming the banal urban environment into a surreal landscape, his post-urban equivalent becomes absorbed by a hyper-reality. Driving, of course, borrows its hyper-real dimension to a large extent from its isomorphic relationship to watching a film, an activity in itself associated with flânerie.31 The perception of a shifting landscape through the windscreen bears a striking resemblance with a cinematic experience – an aspect Paul Virilio touches upon frequently. Baudrillard as well, in his book on America – not coincidentally in a passage on the Los Angeles freeways – pointed at the interconnection of kinetics and kinematics.32 In the 1960s and 70s, when the genre of the road movie blossomed on both sides of the Atlantic, the interconnection of driving and film was also an important motif in cinema itself.

This filmic dimension characterizes Ruscha’s work as well. Cinematic effects are incorporated in his paintings and silk-screens, often with extreme horizontal cinemascope proportions. The cinematic experience of the road is also clearly revealed in Every Building on the Sunset Strip, consisting of two long, uninterrupted strips of photographs. By means of this approximately 7.6 metre long accordion-fold book (see Figure 14.3), Ruscha succeeded in evoking perfectly the horizontal expanse of Los Angeles. In so doing, he also refers to nineteenth-century pre-cinematic devices such as graphical panoramas of streets. on a long strip, a landscape was recreated as it would appear to a traveller in a stagecoach, train or steamboat. The rise of these ‘extended’ or ‘longitudinal panoramas’ was, of course, closely connected with the increasing speed of travel and the development of a new way of seeing, which was tellingly called ‘panoramistic’.33 The great urban streets and avenues in particular, such as Unter den Linden in Berlin or the Paris boulevards, were popular subjects. Representing the street fronts on either



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side of the road, these panoramic strips were sometimes folded into a booklet, as is the case with Sunset Strip.34 Ruscha later enhanced the cinematic character of his Sunset Strip by applying vertical scratches on the negatives of some of the individual photographs. As a result, their prints evoke frame enlargements of a worn-out celluloid copy.

seriALism And immAnent minimALism

The cinematic quality is also the result of the serial juxtaposition of the photographs, which evokes a certain duration. Determined by the rhythmical logic of the book format, Ruscha’s photographs display a sequential and almost proto-cinematic non-narrative order. Ruscha emphasizes the serial character of photography itself by numerical indications in the titles: twenty-six gasoline stations, thirty-four parking lots, every building on the Sunset Strip. This serial attitude contrasts sharply with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the ‘decisive moment’, so celebrated in the street photography of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. In this tradition, the spontaneous encounter was even presented as the urban experience par excellence. It was conceived as a motif that could only be captured by the master eye of the photographer. Ruscha, by contrast, is more devoted to structures than the unique moment. Instead of the formal decisions of the photographer, the primacy of the photographical apparatus is emphasized. Instead of representing a singular moment containing an entire action, the photographic series fragments and dilutes the action so that nothing looks ‘unique.’

14.3 Ed Ruscha, EVERY BUILDING oN THE SUNSET STRIP, 1966, view of entire book. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever



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14.4 Ed Ruscha, ‘(Top) Van Nuys Police lot, (Bottom) Public Parking, Van Nuys county Bldg. Multi-level’, from THIRTYFoUR PARKING LoTS, 1967. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever



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In spite of obvious similarities with the works of Walker Evans, Pop Art and Venturi, Ruscha’s works display little attention to the specific design of vernacular buildings. Ruscha was even hesitant about selecting picturesque gas stations: ‘I’m not even interested in Americana’, he stated. ‘The eccentric stations were the first ones I threw out. I didn’t want to have the look of variety to it, necessarily. I wanted the book to be severe.’35 In contrast with some of his paintings, Ruscha’s photos barely emphasize the playful and spectacular elements which Venturi notices in these buildings. Instead of evoking the loud and spectacular landscape of consumer capitalism, Ruscha’s cityscape appears to be bland, monotonous, dull and boring. Minimalist forms and structures are discovered in the urban landscape, and also determine the formal language of the photographs and the way in which they are presented. Ruscha often makes use of a frontal view, as a result of which Some Los Angeles Apartments, for instance, are rendered as geometrical compositions.

The Thirty-four Parking Lots are photographed from the air in order to do full justice to their grid pattern, which is, as Rosalind Krauss demonstrated in a famous essay, the epitome of Modernist self-referentiality.36 Ruscha emphasizes the serial coherence by including the photographs in a book whose design enhances the repetitive qualities of the pictures. In Sunset Strip, the photographs are mounted beside each other. Apart from reflecting the linear urban stretch, it also evokes the serial or modular succession of simple units favoured by minimal artists such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre or Sol LeWitt. Rather than the individual photograph, the layout emphasizes the repetitiveness and low density of the Los Angeles cityscape.

Such forms are perfectly adapted to their subjects. The minimalist principle of non-relational composition characterizes the spatial organization of Los Angeles. According to Banham, rather than a traditional, differentiated and clustered layout, this city displays a non-hierarchical spatial continuum.37 This vision of homogeneous spaces devoid of contrasts and hierarchies is perfectly expressed in Ruscha’s detached style and in the undifferentiated way the subject is dealt with. Ruscha represents the urbanized landscape as empty, unstructured and formless. In Ruscha’s work, as in that of other photoconceptualists such as Graham, Smithson and Baldessari, the vernacular and the authentic seem to be suppressed by an industrial serial order. Their images could just as much illustrate Kenneth Frampton’s critique on Venturi. Frampton not only noted that the attitude of Venturi toward the popular differed clearly from the ironic and detached approach of Pop,38 he also expressed his doubts about the possibility of a true vernacular architecture based on building forms created by big corporations for mass consumption.39 Whereas Venturi believed in the possibility of a vital popular culture within the dynamics of consumer capitalism, to Frampton the concept of a popular culture in a post-industrial America no longer seemed evident. Ruscha’s ironic neutrality seems to take his work outside this debate. But in retrospect, this ironic neutrality, of course, became problematic. As Mike Davis states, the innocence of the 1960s is no longer

14.5 Ed Ruscha, detail of EVERY BUILDING oN THE SUNSET STRIP, 1966. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photography by Robert McKeever



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‘innocent’.40 Banham’s utopia made room for a class-divided fortified city and an ecological disaster.

Nevertheless, Ruscha, by looking at this neglected space in a new way, highlighted the changing urban condition. Precisely as a non-political engaged artist, Ruscha demonstrated that the language of minimalism, which had been presented as the nexus of Modernist formalism and avant-garde self-reflection, was also evident in the urban environment. His art represents an urban environment dominated by corporate structures and bureaucratic institutions, favouring serial and modular forms. The minimalist art work, in other words, bears certain qualities which also can be ascribed to the spatial morphology of the new urban landscape: a uniform space without a clear-cut distinction between centre and periphery, or city and countryside. Instead of the colourful and dazzling accumulation of fragments and contrasts of the traditional modern urban paradigm, which was perfectly expressed in cubist fragmentation and Modernist montage, the new urban configuration is characterized by the contrastless monotony of minimalist ‘specific objects’.41 The post-urban realm is presented as a landscape of repetition, boredom, dullness, vapidity, inertia and formlessness.

This formlessness reoccurs in Ruscha’s photographs themselves. Made with a cheap amateur camera, these de-skilled images are in no way presented as precious artworks. Ruscha stated that his books could be made with pictures taken by someone else. Sometimes, this was indeed the case: the parking lot photographs, for instance, were taken by a professional aerial photographer. With this inartistic interest for the medium of photography, Ruscha made an important contribution to the development of conceptual art and its preoccupation with the so-called ‘dematerialization of the art object’. Ruscha is not interested in making fine art objects in the form of unique and highly-crafted photographic prints. Moreover, his books lack any aura of luxury. The graphic design is as cool and deadpan as the pictures. Instead of the traditional crafted livre d’artiste, Ruscha just made a commercially-produced book. Whereas Pop Art used the mass media as a motif, Ruscha appropriated its methods.

By presenting these pictures in series, Ruscha also answers to the self-reflexivity of conceptual art. His photographs seem to refer to each other rather than to urban reality. The photographs emphasize their mechanical origins. They are both metaphor and metonymy of industrial consumer society. Ruscha called his books ‘collections of ready-mades’. His Real Estate Opportunities are indistinguishable from ‘real’ real estate pictures. Although his books are undoubtedly indebted to Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), Ruscha clearly depersonalizes and neutralizes the photographical process in its entirety. Reminiscent of Benjamin’s famous interpretation of the work of Eugène Atget, Ruscha compared his pictures with ‘what a police photographer would produce in a report on how somebody was killed’.42 In Learning from Levittown (1970), Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour precisely praise Ruscha because of his use of a photographical non-style that is capable of representing the new and still-to-be-defined landscape: ‘What new techniques are required to document new forms? We should aim to dead-pan the material so it speaks for itself. Ruscha has pioneered this treatment in his monographs.’43

Willingly or otherwise, with these publications Ruscha joins in with the great tradition of urban photographic books. These books do not contain only individual urban photographs but also evoke a complex urban totality by means of sequences, juxtapositions and a general graphical layout. Like such illustrious predecessors as Berenice Abbott, Brassaï, Moi Ver or Weegee, Ruscha constructs an entire urban image by means of a book.



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notes

1 See Steven Jacobs, ‘Street Photography’, in Lynn Warren (ed.), Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography (New York: Routledge, 2005) vol. 3, pp1503–8.

2 Sharing some of the aspirations of Pop Art, Land Art, Minimal Art and conceptual art, these so-called ‘photoconceptualists’, as labelled by Douglas Fogle in The Last Picture Show (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), tried to reconcile the Modernist notion of art as a self-reflexive activity with an interest in the changing urban landscape. In such amorphous locations, which lacked established patterns of aesthetic harmonization, these artists found the kind of subjects that answered to their conceptual interests: the signs of consumer culture (celebrated in Pop Art), new dimensions of scale (investigated in Land Art) and a realm dominated by the monotonous repetition of simple geometrical units (marking Minimal Art).

3 Jon Teaford, The Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p152.

4 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); and Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).

5 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990).

6 Michael Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001).

7 Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

8 William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

9 Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles 1850–1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967).

10 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin Books, 1971).

11 See Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

12 See Charles Desmarais, Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph 1960–1980 (Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, 1992); William R. Hackman, ‘Interview with Henry Hopkins’, in Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960–1997 (Humlebaek: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 1997), pp145–51; and Lynn Zelevansky, ‘A Place in the Sun: The Los Angeles Art World and the New Global Context’, in Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein & Ilene Susan Fort (eds), Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp293–311. See also Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp442–3.

13 Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl 1978–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p239.

14 Not coincidentally, Banham included in his seminal book on Los Angeles five of Ruscha’s aerial photographs of parking lots. Strikingly however, these photographs are not presented as works by Ruscha the artist, merely as pictures illustrating Banham’s text, whereas a black and white reproduction of Ruscha’s silkscreen of the Hollywood sign (1968) is attributed to Ruscha as an artwork.

15 See Clive Phillpot, ‘Sixteen Books and Then Some’, in Siri Engberg (ed.), Edward Ruscha Editions 1959–1999 (Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center, 1999), vol. 2, pp58–78; Philip Rosenzweig, ‘Sixteen (and Counting): Ed Ruscha’s Books,’ in Neal Benezra and Kerry Brougher (eds), Ed Ruscha (Zürich: Scalo/Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 2000), pp178–88; and Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Göttingen: Steidl, 2004).

16 Such as Montebello, Pico Rivera, Canoga Park and Sylmar.



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17 See Richard Marshall, Ed Ruscha (London: Phaidon Press, 2003), p61.

18 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, op. cit., p175.

19 Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, edited by Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp223–4.

20 Ibid. pp244–5.

21 Edward Lucie Smith, ‘Pop Art’, in Nikos Stangos (ed.), Concepts of Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), p226.

22 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p104.

23 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).

24 Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).

25 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).

26 Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, op. cit., p213.

27 See Rob Shields, ‘Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on Flânerie’, in Keith Tester (ed.), The Flâneur (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp6–80.

28 Donald Appleyard and Kevin Lynch, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).

29 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, op. cit., p23.

30 See Steven Jacobs, ‘From Flaneur to Chauffeur: Driving Through Cinematic Cities’, in Christian Emden, Catherine Keen and David Midgley (eds), Imagining the City (oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), pp213–28.

31 See Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp138–43.

32 Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), p55.

33 Stephan oettermann, ‘Moving Panorama: Der bewegte Horizont’, in Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1993), pp230–51.

34 on other occasions, they were wrapped around two cylinders, by which they could be unrolled gradually into a so-called ‘moving panorama,’ which can be considered an early precursor of cinema.


36 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p9.

37 See Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham, op.cit., pp236–41.

38 Kenneth Frampton, ‘America 1960–1970: Notes on Urban Images and Theory’, in Casabella, vol. 35, pp359–60 (December 1971), pp24–38.

39 See Deborah Fausch, ‘Ugly and ordinary: The Representation of the Everyday’, in Steven Harris & Deborah Berke (eds), Architecture of the Everyday (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), pp88–9.

40 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, op. cit., p95.

41 See Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990).




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43 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Levittown, or Remedial Housing for Architects, Studio Handouts (New Haven: Yale University, Department of Architecture, Studio RHA, Spring 1970), II, p11; quoted in Deborah Fausch, ‘Ugly and ordinary: The Representation of the Everyday’, op. cit. p97.

Documents

Leafing Through Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha’s Photographic Books Steven Jacobs