In Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, and Spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles, Ken D. Allan argues thatRuscha's paintings tackle the activity "between the pictorial space, the mental space, and theactual space that structures our encounters with works of art as objects. In Ruscha's Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights we see a representation of a city not through a building but an iconic symbol that very much represents Los Angeles. According to Allan one of the most important aspects to Ruscha's paintings is their ability to require from the viewer a bodily participation. Even Ruscha himself refers to the paintings as friendly characters that he picked up and moved around his studio. To Ruscha the paintings were three-dimensional and he helped create that through painting on the sides where the canvas wraps around the stretch bars and then putting text down the side. The bodily participation was also evoked through things like small details some times at the bottom of the paintingand large text across the top half.
In Flash, L.A. Times, Ruscha employed this technique by painting a very detailed rolled up newspaper that would require the viewer to walk up closely to the painting and maybe even tilt their head. The positioning of the paper gives the impression that the paper is lying on top of the surface, like it is on a table. The text FLASH creates the opposite affect creating a vertical space. It is this horizontal and vertical space in one painting that creates issues of spectatorship. The text in Ruscha's paintings are also strong representations of the billboard
and advertising that had become an integral part of the Los Angeles landscape by the 1960s.
In Standard Station with Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half the viewer is still being torn between the vertical and horizontal views. The other quality to this painting is it's comment on the city of Los Angeles's dependency on the automobile and how one was constantly viewing the city landscape from the car. Although the painting still works as an object because of the small comic book in the upper corner creating the horizontal space, making the whole painting seem like a table. It becomes even more clear of Ruscha's concern with ones experience with his work to be a bodily experience with his small books photographs of the vernacular. To look at a book especially as small as Ruscha's books are it becomes a very bodily hand held experience. Ruscha was obviously fascinated with the way one viewed the city of Los Angeles from a car, as in one of his most famous pieces Every Building on Sunset Strip photographs of all the
buildings on sunset strip, are not only taken from Ruscha's car but by the car's motor drive.
In Pop LA Cecile Whiting begins by writing about the highly sexualized qualities of the automobile. Artists Judy Chicago and Billy Al Bengston, and Kenneth Anger all used the shine, the chrome, and physicality of the car to evoke at times erotic imagery, as well as male and female sexual symbols. Edward Kienholz’s approach to using the automobile and sex was not reliant on the shine an chrome of the car, it was reliant on the idea that the car though thought very often to be this place that is private is still can become a very public space. When Whiting writes about Vija Celmins and Ruscha, she acknowledges that they wanted to show the view from the car. Although just as Ken Allan had acknowledged that Ruscha's Standard Station paintings were painted to low to be at the view of the driver, they view was lower to the ground more from the angle of the license plate. According to Whiting, "Ruscha's painting accentuated the features of commercial facades that claim the momentary glance of the driver in transit through the streets of Los Angeles. To me Ruscha's Standard Station paintings shows a much detailed look at the landscape that had become Rushca's home and constant subject matter for his art. Such precise rendering and detail to represent these places and spaces as common place as they were seemed of great concern to Ruscha.
Whiting goes on to compare Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations to Robert Franks's photograph of a gas station in Santa Fa, New Mexico that appears in his book The Americans. Whiting claims that Franks's gas station photograph is one that shows a pessimistic view of the road, and is a sort of metaphor for diminishing hopes and the entire scene gives off a great sense of loneliness. While Ruscha's photographs are void of any human emotion, with their deadpan style and bleached out skies, the comment on the commercial vernacular within our landscape, not human condition. I am not sure I agree with Whiting here as Ruscha is showing us a human condition of sorts, this was now the American landscape in many places, as common place and repetitive as it was, it was what man had created, and its redundancy alone was depressing.
