>>Chris: Welcome, everybody, to an Authors@Google
talk here in the Google Santa Monica office.
Today's speaker is a writer of the book, Ed
Ruscha's Los Angeles, the author of this,
this book; editor of a collection of Ruscha's
writings, Leave Any Information at the Signal:
Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, published
by MIT Press in 2002; the coordinator of the
Museum of Modern Art's Modern Women's Project
 -- a curatorial initiative to increase scholarship
on women artists.
She's also the co-editor of Modern Women:
Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art,
2010, and co-curator of "Mind and Matter:
Alternative Abstractions, 1940 to Now," currently
on view at MoMA. A contributor to various
journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogs,
she received her PhD from the University of
Michigan and a B.A. from Harvard University,
and we look forward to hearing Alexandra Schwartz
talk about her book, Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles.
Please welcome Alexandra Schwartz.
[applause]
>>Alexandra: Thanks, Chris. It's really a
pleasure to be here, and thank all of you
for coming. Is anyone already familiar with
Ed Ruscha's work? Any fans? Well, I'll tell
you a little bit about him. He's an LA-based
artist. He actually works right down the road
in Venice. He has a studio there. And he's
been around since the early 1960s. He came
up with the pop artists -- people like Andy
Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, who some of you may
be familiar with.
But he really was one of the first LA-based
artists to make it big during that time in
the 60s, and he showed with a gallery called
the Ferus Gallery, which was on La Cienega
Boulevard, along with other artists like Joe
Goode, Billy Al Bengston, and they formed
an avant-garde community in LA, really for
the first time. There hadn't been sort of
a set group in LA before then, and Ruscha
was really the most successful of this group.
He's shown internationally, beginning in the
60s up to now. And now he really has a reputation
as being one of the key artists of his generation.
So, there's a lot of his work at the LA County
Museum and the LA MOCA, The Museum of Modern
Art, where I work -- he really is all over
the place. He was the representative to the
Venice Biennale a couple of years ago.
So, it's particularly timely to talk about
him now, I thought, and what I'm gonna focus
on today is the relationship he had with Dennis
Hopper, who I'm sure a lot of you know he
just died a few weeks ago, and there's a show
of his work opening at MOCA on Sunday. So,
I hope you all go check it out, and this presentation
that I'm gonna give today, I adapted for the
catalog essay for the Dennis Hopper show at
MOCA. So, you can also check that out.
But something that was really interesting
about Ruscha is that he was one of the first
artists to forge a relationship with his contemporaries
in Hollywood. Of course, so much art goes
on in LA, especially now in terms of visual
arts, but at the time there wasn't that much.
Really, the creative output coming out of
LA was mostly through film. And Ruscha was
in a really unique position in that he had
one foot in the visual art world and one foot
in Hollywood. So, what you're seeing here
is a 1962 painting called Large Trademark
with Eight Spotlights. It's a really large
work; it's about 11 feet long. It's in the
collection of the Whitney Museum in New York,
and this was one of Ruscha's first big examinations
of Hollywood, so, of course, you recognize
what this is.
It's the 20th Century Fox logo that you still
see at the beginning of any 20th Century Fox
film. And it was part of a series of works
that he was doing at the time dealing with
words -- especially logos, things that you
find in everyday objects. So, this work is
called Actual Size. It's about SPAM, which,
of course, we all know. You see a little SPAM
can floating through space down at the bottom
and then the big logo, SPAM, at the top. And
then Annie, from right around the same time,
1962-63, recognizable from the logo for Little
Orphan Annie, the comic strip that would've
been especially well-known at the time. So,
Ruscha was doing a series of works in which
he was looking at just things that we see
every day. If he were doing these now, he'd
probably do a Google sign as well.
But this was particularly pointed because
he was interested in Hollywood, interested
in kind of how Hollywood operated, and what
it meant in American culture at the time.
He was taking it straight from the logo, so
we're used to seeing the logo with this sort
of drum and trumpet fanfare, and that's just
a screen shot from what the logo looked like
in the early 60s. But he's changing it. He's
making it a lot simpler -- he's turning it
into something static instead of something
moving. So, the time when he was doing this
was a really interesting time in Hollywood.
It was the period in the 60s into the early
70s when Hollywood was changing a lot. It
was going from the kind of big studio productions,
like Doctor Dolittle, kind of these very elaborate,
very sort of unnaturalistic works to this
period that came to be known as "The New Hollywood."
So, I brought a bunch of posters up here from
some of the most important new Hollywood films,
which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with.
So, The Graduate was one of the first, Bonnie
and Clyde, Easy Rider, which of course, Dennis
Hopper directed and starred in -- I'll be
talking about that more in a second -- The
Godfather, etc. So, during this time, Hollywood
was realizing, you know it's the late 60s,
there's a big counter-culture movement and
hippie movement and it was, they were starting
to realize that they had to incorporate some
of that youth culture into the studio movies
that they were producing. So a lot of young
directors came up -- people like Mike Nichols,
Martin Scorsese, etc. So, this was happening
at the same time that Ruscha was working as
a visual artist, as a painter in LA. And,
in fact, there had for a while been a sort
of group of people, artists and young Hollywood
types, who were all meeting together and discussing
ideas. They particularly met around an artist
named Wallace Berman, who lived in LA from
the 50s through the 60s, and he had a kind
of group at his house, a salon, where artists
and also Hollywood figures would come and
hang out. One of his biggest fans and closest
friends was James Dean, so this was right
around the time that James Dean was working.
And then Dennis Hopper came to this group
as well, and eventually, Ruscha. Berman was
an artist in his own right, so what you're
seeing on the left are a bunch of works that
he did in the late 50s into the 60s. He had
a journal called Semina, which was almost
a precursor to a zine.
It was very cheaply done. He'd do a lot of
collage -- cutting up bits of magazines, movie
magazines, that kind of thing -- and then
distributing it. And he was also a filmmaker.
And what you're seeing on the right is a still
from a film called Aleph, which he did in
the late 50s, that incorporated the same kind
of found imagery with some texts, specifically
Hebrew text, that he was very interested in.
So, Berman was doing his own work, but also
bringing together musicians, poets, painters,
people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet,
would come through, Jay DeFeo, a painter from
San Francisco. And so, what people said is
that everyone just came and hung out at Wallace
Berman's house, and you never knew what was
gonna go on, but it was it this very creative,
very interesting kind of atmosphere.
So, one of the most prominent Hollywood figures
to come through Wallace's Bermans, Wallace
Berman's house was Dennis Hopper. I know there's
been a lot of discussion about him in the
paper recently because, of course, he sadly
just died. But at this time he had already
starred in Rebel Without a Cause in the mid-50s.
He had started on a film career, but he got
blackballed from Hollywood. He kind of misbehaved
on the set of one of his films, and the director,
Henry Hathaway, said, "You'll never work in
this town again." And he basically didn't
for about eight years, but at the same time
he was really interested in visual art.
He had been making photography since he was
a teenager. He was painting; he was making
sculptures. This is an example of a sculpture
he did with the artist, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp
had a show at the Pasadena Art Museum, which
is now the Norton Simon, and during the opening
dinner they stole the sign from the hotel,
and they kind of decided it was a work of
art -- a ready-made work of art. And they
both signed it -- so this is signed by Duchamp
and by Dennis Hopper. So, Hopper, because
he couldn't work in film, he wanted to be
working creatively. He was very passionate
about the visual art scene in LA, so he focused
on that. And he got to know people like Ruscha,
other artists at the time. This is a really
great photograph from this period. This was
at the sculptor, Claes Oldenburg's wedding,
I'm sorry, these were done by Claes Oldenburg.
It was at a curator named Jim Elliot's wedding
down by the Santa Monica Pier. And what these
are are plaster sculptures of slices of wedding
cake.
This is a photograph that Hopper took. So,
as kind of a present to this couple, Oldenburg
made all these plaster wedding cake sculptures,
and Hopper told me that at the end, he and
his wife went and gathered up a bunch of these
slices that people had left, and they made
themselves a wedding cake sculpture that became
part of their collection. So, it really gives
you a sense that it was this incredibly creative
time during this period. People were having
these sort of crazy events all over the city,
like at the Santa Monica Pier.
At the same time, Hopper was also making his
own work. This is a work called After the
Fall from 1961 to 64. And what it is is a
photograph. Hopper was very active as a photographer
and it's of posters on a wall, so they had
been kind of stripped away so you're seeing
different layers of posters that have been
plastered down. And it's of this girl whose
eyes have been sort of obscured. You can tell
maybe it was a movie poster, but it's been
all ripped up and then he added found elements
to it. So, what you're seeing here, those
are Kleenex boxes. So, the kind of covers
you put on a Kleenex box, which he's attached
to the edge of it. So, it does it, it's got
this kind of surreal juxtaposition of elements
that shouldn't be together, but he was putting
them together and this was very new for what
was happening in art at the time.
That shows a view of the original photograph,
and then the photograph with the sculptural
found objects on top of it. At the same time
that Hopper was making this kind of work,
he was also really active as almost a photojournalist.
He was fascinated by what was happening at
the time politically; of course it was a really
tumultuous period, the mid-60s. And he was
going to a lot of political events and capturing
them. So, what you're seeing here are pictures
from the Selma to Montgomery march, led my
Martin Luther King. And I interviewed Hopper
a few years ago when, before he got sick,
and he told me that he was just kind of hanging
around and Marlon Brando drove up to him in
his car and he's like, "Hey, you wanna go
to Selma?" And Hopper was like, "Yeah, sure,
let's go." So they went. And he took these
really incredible photographs of, of course,
this really key time in American history.
So, it's something that's not very well known
about Hopper that he was, he considered himself
a historian in a way. He wanted to capture
what was going on at the time. I'm just comparing
these two. The bottom here is a photograph
by Robert Frank, one of the most prominent
photographers of the 1950s. He did a book
called The Americans, which some of you may
know.
But it just kind of shows what Hopper was
looking at when he did this top photograph
from Selma. He was thinking about Robert Frank
and really thinking as a very serious artist.
He wasn't just dabbling in this; he was very
passionate about it. And all of these will
be on view at MOCA, starting on Sunday, so
you guys should check them out. He was also,
I'm sorry about this slide. I don't know what
happened there, but he was also photographing
the LA art scene. So, he would photograph
his friends and he was very intentional about
it. He wanted to photograph people who he
thought would have big careers.
He kind of wanted to be the documenter of
these people's careers; so sadly, this photograph
that didn't come out very well in the presentation.
It's of the artist, Bruce Conner, and this
woman is Teri Garr. I don't know if you guys
remember her from a lot of 80s movies, but
she was involved with the art scene at the
time. And on the left is Toni Basil, "Hey
Mickey", from the 80s.
So, they were all part of this group and kind
of working with each other, collaborating
on each other's things, and then on the right
is just kind of a funny photograph of Billy
Al Bengston with an anonymous woman in the
background. He was also photographing people
like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, New York-based
artists but who were coming through LA. Warhol
actually had his first show at the Ferus Gallery
on La Cienega. And then Ruscha.
This is a photograph of Ruscha from 1964 that
Hopper took and has been reproduced really
often and sort of captures the young Ruscha.
As you can see, he really looks like a movie
star. He was kind of movie star handsome and
like James Dean or Marlon Brando -- he's striking
that kind of a pose. And because Ruscha's
work was so bound up in the Los Angeles cityscape,
Hopper really wanted to show him on an LA
street, so this was taken, I think, just further
down on La Cienega Boulevard in front of an
electronics supply store. So, you've got the
sign "TV Radio Service", and then Ruscha kind
of to the side with that movie star pose -- so,
capturing both the personality and also what
his work was like.
[pause]
So, Hopper concentrated on making art throughout
most of the 1960s, but something he told me
that I thought was really interesting was
that he always knew he wanted to go back to
making movies, and he saw doing photography
as a way of training himself to be a director.
So, he would never crop his images. He always
shot in full frame and he really saw it as
kind of a way of going to school; a way of
teaching himself so that when he was ready
to make a film, he would know how to do it,
and he'd have a certain amount of skill. So,
in 1969, Hopper made Easy Rider. Has anyone
seen Easy Rider? Yeah. A fair number of you
have.
Something that was really interesting for
me when I watched it again is just how much
a sort of period piece it is. It's just so
1960s. So, what you're seeing here is Dennis
Hopper on the left, Peter Fonda on the right
and for those of you who haven't seen it,
it's kind of a road movie. So, Hopper and
Peter Fonda are these two guys, they smoke
a lot of pot, they do a lot of other drugs,
and they go on this road trip to New Orleans
and they, along the way they pick up Jack
Nicholson, who was very young at the time,
you sort of wouldn't recognize him, but he
was the straight-laced lawyer and they sort
of get him into the hippie lifestyle. And
they take this long trip, they have a lot
of different adventures and in the end, I
don't think I'll be spoiling it because you
can kinda see what's coming, but they get
in trouble down in the South who are really
threatened by these long haired hippie types
and they end up getting shot. So, it's this
kind of parable about how there's this new
youth culture that the rest of the country
just kind of can't deal with.
So, it became a really important movie for
the New Hollywood that I was mentioning earlier.
It was 1969, the New Hollywood sort of took
off during the 70s, but it was the first time
that the youth culture really appeared in
a Hollywood movie, and Hopper became a kind
of icon. He had all these groupies, accolades;
he sort of had the status similar to someone
like John Lennon. But what was really interesting
about this movie from the perspective of someone
who's interested in the art of the period,
is that the style of the film was very related
to the style of people like Ruscha, Wallace
Berman, Bruce Conner, etc. It was kinda what
was happening in visual art in LA in the 60s.
And Hopper was taking all those influences
and putting them into a Hollywood film so
that they became much more widespread and
influential then they otherwise would have
been.
So, these are stills from se-, from a Bruce
Conner movie about the JFK assassination,
so both very famous images that, obviously,
we all recognize. But it was a very experimental
film. It had a lot of very quick cuts, it
kind of would repeat, and Hopper said that
a lot of his influences for Easy Rider came
straight from Bruce Conner, so what looked
very, very new in a Hollywood film actually
had been happening for awhile in the LA art
community. He also had a lot of imagery from
contemporary art. What you're seeing here
is by Jasper Johns, the painting Flag, from
1955 in The Museum of Modern Art's collection.
And then down at the bottom, the Peter Fonda
character's name was Captain America in the
movie, so he had his motorcycle helmet with
the American flag, his whole outfit, and Hopper
said that he was getting the idea from that
straight from someone like Jasper Johns; kind
of thinking about the symbolism of the American
flag turning it on its head a little bit.
So, it was really interesting for me to understand
that in Ruscha's work, what Hopper was doing
was so important and then vice versa.
There really was this very close collaboration
between the two artists, and they remained
friends the rest of their lives. The rest
of Hopper's life -- Ruscha of course is still
working. So, it really was kind of a quid
pro quo. They were talking to each other and
a lot of the same themes, the idea of the
road trip, kind of the big expanse of America,
traveling around the country; it was very
much a part of Ruscha's work as well. So,
what you're seeing here is a painting by Ruscha
called Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas,
from 1963, one of his most famous early works
 -- showing a gas station, so kind of referring
to the highways to being out on the road to
taking road trips and this, actually, was
bought by Dennis Hopper. This was one of the
first works that Hopper bought and one of
the first works that Ruscha sold, so there
really was this very close collaboration there.
And Hopper was dealing with similar things
in his own photography.
This is a work called "Double Standard," and
the MoCA show is actually called Double Standard:
Dennis Hopper's Art. This was one of Dennis
Hopper's most famous photographs, so this
is quite nearby here. I think it's the corner
of, I don't know if any of you guys would
recognize it, but it was right by Ferus on
La Cienega. So, it's the same Standard station
that you're kind of seeing going down the
street, you see the view from the, the view
in the rear view mirror. So the same interest
in car culture, in the road, popular culture,
signs are things that Ruscha deals with a
lot, as does Hopper, sort of our everyday
lives in looking at it in a new way. And there's
a direct comparison.
The Standard station in the Hopper photograph
and then down there, with Ruscha. Ruscha also
did a book of gas stations. It's called, literally,
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, where he took
photographs of gas stations on Route 66 going
from LA to Oklahoma City, where he was from.
So, it's a little, tiny book. They're literally
photos of 26 gasoline stations, it's called
Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and this is one
of them. So you see the connections between
what these two artists were thinking about
 -- thinking about the cityscape, thinking
about being out on the highways.
Ruscha also did several other books at the
time, and I'm just giving you little images
of them that I'm not sure what's going on
with the quality there, but at the top is
a book called Every Building on the Sunset
Strip, where he photographed every single
building on the Sunset Strip; spliced them
together into an accordion fold book. So if
you stretched it out, it would be about 20
feet long. And then this is called Some Los
Angeles Apartment Buildings, so continuing
to look at the urban landscape, think about
it in any way. So, whereas the previous, we'll
just go back to that, this book, the way he
did it was he sat in the back of a pickup
truck, and he had a camera that would shoot
automatically, so it would shoot picture after
picture after picture. And then he'd splice
them together by hand so that you got this
kind of view of the street as if you were
driving along it.
And he said that it, for him it was very much
related to film because if you think about
film being a series of images moving very
quickly, it was something kinda similar that
he was trying to do in this book. But Ruscha
also made his own films during this period,
and the first one he made was called Crackers.
And you're seeing two shots from it here,
actually from the book. Something that was
interesting about Ruscha is that he was making
paintings, he was making drawings and prints,
he was making books at the same time he was
making film. So his movie that he did here
came out of a book called Crackers, in which
he had this kind of very strange story that
unfolded throughout its pages. So the story
that was this guy picks up this woman for
a date -- kind of wines and dines her. And
then takes her home to this hotel room that
he's rented and so you kind of like can guess
where the story's gonna go. But, in fact,
what he wants her to do is to lie on a bed
of salad and then cover her in dressing. So,
it's this kind of, it's kind of a shaggy dog
story. You don't really understand the point
of it, but it's got a very distinct narrative
and it goes in this direction that you never
would have guessed that it would. So he did
this book in 1969, and then he decided to
do a movie of the same story. So, to kind
of flesh out the story that he had told picture
by picture into an actual film. And these
are shots from a film which was called Premium.
And the reason it's called that is because
after he made the salad, the protagonist wanted
crackers and so he leaves the, he leaves the
girl in the bed with the salad, goes out and
buys Saltines and then goes to his own apartment
and eats his Saltines in bed, alone. So, you've
got Crackers, the book, and then Premium,
the movie. And these are shots from the movie
that kind of show how it was set up, show
how he adapted the book into the film version,
and the artist, the protagonist, is actually
the artist Larry Bell, a sculptor who was
working in LA at the time.
So it's kind of pushing it in, in another
interesting direction. A visual artist who
had done this book and then decided to do
film, so it was really fascinating to me to
see this back and forth. And this is a still
from the movie where it's the same people
that were in the book that got slightly different
styles -- they're acting it out, but the same
basic scenario. Ruscha then went on to do
another film in 1975, which is another kind
of shaggy dog story, sort of surreal. It stars
someone who's playing an auto mechanic and
he's kind of futzing around with the car,
but over the course of the story, he becomes
more and more sort of like a scientist.
His coveralls gradually become less and less
soiled, so that's the miracle of the title
that this kind of divine intervention has
happened as this guy is fixing a car. Again,
it's surreal; it's not supposed to make a
lot of sense. But I think what's really interesting
about it is the same set of themes that he
keeps dealing with, cars, sort of looking
at everyday life in a new way, never quite
knowing what's gonna come of it. So these
are the only two films that Ruscha did, but
I think it was really interesting that at
the same time that, that there was all this
interest in more experimental films in Hollywood.
You have this artist that was working in LA,
his studio was actually in Hollywood at the
time, who's also making films. There's just
all sorts of very cool crossovers happening
there.
[pause]
At the same time, as I mentioned, Ruscha was
also dealing directly with Hollywood in his
more traditional art. So this is the image
that we saw at the beginning and in fact,
it was a series of many pictures at the time
that he was doing dealing with Hollywood.
This is a sketch that he made where he was
trying to work out the idea for the Large
Trademark with Eight Spotlights. I really
love this. It's done just on a piece of stationary
from a hotel, but you see him thinking through
what these very recognizable things, like
the 20th Century Fox logo -- kind of taking
them apart, pulling them apart and putting
them back together.
[pause]
He did a series of these Standard Station
images, and I think it's really interesting
to notice just how similar they are to the
20th Century Fox image. It's the same, basic
compositional format, so the, the very strong
diagonal. This is called Standard Station
with Cheap Western Torn in Half, so up in
the corner, that's a very precise, illusionistic
rendition of a comic book torn in half. So
he's got this very literal way of titling
his pictures, kind of surreal, but having
a lot of fun with it, of great sense of humor
about it.
These are two drawings that show how he sort
of got to this format of the Standard Station,
preparing it, again thinking about these every
day things that you see every day and looking
at them in a new way. Down here is obviously
the same compositional format, but he's pretended
that it's a stack of his Twentysix Gasoline
book, Station books that I told you about.
So in the front is, you see the title and
then he was imagining that there was a whole
stack of book behind it. And this is something
that you see a lot in his work.
This is a painting from the early 60s, obviously
same subject matter, Paramount Pictures. He
ended up not being happy with it and destroying
it, but this is an early photograph that we
have it, just to show that he was doing it.
So Hollywood was something that he was thinking
about a lot, kind of thinking about how he
could integrate it into his art. He also is
very well known for his series of images of
the Hollywood sign. These are things that
he's gone back to, again and again, throughout
his career. He did his first Hollywood images
in the late 60s; the first painting was 1968.
But this is an early example of how he was
starting to think about the Hollywood sign
and for him, it represents this kind of almost
Boulevard of Broken Dreams type of idea, that
it's so iconic that you can see it from so
many different places in the city, but especially
during this period, it was in terrible shape.
It was crumbling, there had been some suicides
from people jumping off some letters, so it
was really this sort of dark side of the Hollywood
dream that he was interested in. And this
is a drawing that he did on a menu. So this
is like a paper menu from a Schraff's coffee
shop.
This is one of his first fully rendered images
of the Hollywood sign; it's a drawing, pastel
with ink and pencil on paper. And he usually
shows the Hollywood sign against the sunset,
sort of at an iconic, LA, smoggy, orange-red
sunset. And he always did that so you think
of walking off into the sunset, riding off
into the sunset, these sort of clichés of
Hollywood movies, but he's showing it looking
kind of ominous, a little scary. He did another
series called The Back of Hollywood, a theme
that he just went back to again and again.
He was always fascinated by it. Another version
from the 1970s.
And then as I mentioned, he was always interested
in language. He plays around with language,
you saw it in the SPAM and the an-, in the
images, so beginning in the mid 70s, he started
doing literally drawings with words in them,
talking about Hollywood. So, this is a pastel
called Properties in Hollywood, and he kind
of makes you stop and think, "What do you
mean by 'properties in hollywood'?" Is he
calling on the language of real estate brochures?
Is he talking about a property, like a kind
of film script, something like that? So he's
taking these language, these bits of language
that are sort of familiar, but making them
strange, making you think, "What does that
actually mean? Why is he putting this is in
a drawing? What's the point of it?"
So, again, making you stop and think about
every day things that just pass through your
life and you don't usually consider. This
is a drawing called "Hollywood". It's from
a series called Paper Drawings that he did
in the 70s, and so it looks like ribbons of
paper. It's all completely illusionistic.
He's incredibly skilled as a draftsman, but
he was able to do it so that it looks as if
he kind of set up this paper and then did
the drawing of it, but it's all out of his
imagination. Hollywood, California from around
the same period. Another Hollywood Dream Bubble
Popped, this is one of my favorites. It's
just, it's so resonant. It calls up so many
different ideas, but then you think, "Well,
what does it mean? What does it come from?
Where did he get this idea?" But it really
gets at that sort of dream versus nightmare
idea -- the kind of myth of Hollywood.
Hollywood is a Verb, another one of my favorites.
Doesn't really make sense at all, but you
sort of understand what he's saying. He has
a quotation that I really like where he talks
about how things can be Hollywoodized. You
can take the most ordinary, mundane object
and Hollywoodize it and it gets this aura
about it, it gets this kind of stardust. So
that's something he's really interested in,
how you can take something very ordinary and
humble and make it into something extraordinary
that makes you think about it. So, that's
about it. I understand that books are coming
to you on Monday. They didn't get here in
time, but there's a larger version of this
talk in the book.
Other things that I talk about are the LA
art scene of
the 60s -- how it came together. I have a
chapter on how a lot of architects during
the 70s were really interested in Ruscha's
books, thinking about the post-modern city,
thinking about Los Angeles as kind of a new
type of city. And architects -- especially
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who
were very prominent during the 70s and 80s,
were directly influenced by Ruscha.
And then I have a chapter on how Ruscha, and
you get the sense of this I think from the
Dennis Hopper picture of him, he really was
a genius at marketing himself as a movie star
type character, and he would place advertisements
for himself in magazines, he was very good
looking, obviously, but he was very clever
at using the media to promote himself as an
artist. And he was really one of the first
to do that. So, I hope you enjoy the books
when you get them. I'm sorry I can't sign
them for you and I also really hope you'll
go check out the Dennis Hopper exhibition
at MoCA. I think it should be really interesting
and opens soon. So I'd be happy to answer
any questions you might have.
>>Chris: Any questions? Ok.
>>Alexandra: Thank you. Thanks so much everyone.
[applause]
>>Chris: We have a question right there. He's,
he's formulating one.
>>Alexandra: Oh, sure.
>>Chris: So.
>>male audience member1: I thought it was
kind of interesting that, that it's kind of
the same time, these artists are kind of pointing
out the artifice of Hollywood while, while
Hollywood is kind of going to verite, trying
to be--
>>Alexandra: Yeah.
>>make audience member1: more genuine.
>>Alexandra: Yeah.
>>male audience member1: Is there a relationship
there or is it, do you thing that commentary
kind of pushed it in that direction?
>>Alexandra: I think there's definitely a
relationship there, yeah. I don't know. It's
funny because Easy Rider, I, I could've thought
about this in relationships to Easy Rider
because reading the commentary on it in the
60s, in places like Life Magazine and Time,
they just saw it as so outrageous and so new,
but it was really a watered down version of
what people like Bruce Conner, these avant-garde
artists were doing. So, I guess I think ultimately
Hollywood kind of won because they had the
money, and so they were really using the ideas
that these artists had been coming up with.
But I think that it was symbiotic because
the sort of critical aspect and Easy Rider
is a pretty critical movie. I think was coming
from the art community. So it was this interesting
dynamic, it was an interesting take, give
and take, and maybe it's cynical to think
that, that Hollywood exploited these artists,
but I guess I think ultimately that that's
what it is. They really benefitted from them.
I mean -- it saved their skins. They were
in terrible trouble. 20th Century Fox actually
shut down for a while in the 60s and these
new artists revitalized it. So, I think it's
a, it's a really interesting question and
a really fascinating dynamic, but I think
ultimately they sort of leeched on what the
artists were doing for profit.
>>Chris: Any other questions?
[pause]
Ok, I've got a question,
>>Alexandra: Ok.
>>Chris: So, Ruscha seemed to, especially
in his early career, it's like he's got the
20th Century Fox, he's like looking at corporate
iconography, and I'm wondering did he, and,
and yet he also seemed to like keep his distance
from it too, maybe later in life. Did he,
did he ever work directly with a corporate
patron and, and like do something, some of
the things that some other artists have done?
Actually don't know about that.
>>Alexandra: Not directly. He's very interesting.
I've tried to get him to talk a lot about
that and he doesn't love to talk about it.
But he never worked for a Hollywood studio.
Some artists did in the 60s, but since, he's
really become kind of a favorite of Hollywood
collectors, so David Geffen owns a lot of
his work, well Hopper, obviously. I was just
watching a preview online for Sophia Copola's
new movie, and there's a Ruscha in the movie.
It's kind of up against a wall, and I met
the other day with the main person at Ruscha's
gallery, he shows at the Gagosian Gallery,
and I was meeting with his main contact there
and that, that print was on the wall, and
I said, "Oh my God, did you know that this
is in this preview for the Sophia Coppola
movie?" And he's like, "Oh, yeah. We lent
it to them." So, Ruscha definitely, he's kind
of popular I think with Hollywood collectors
now. A lot of actors collect his work. He's
good friends with Jack Nicholson, so I think
that there's definitely a relationship there.
It's not kind of set in stone, but because
he's here, because he's such a kind of cool
guy, like you see him in magazines a lot,
he's dated a lot of Hollywood actresses over
the years. I think that it's there but he
kind of doesn't like to talk about it that
much.
>>male audience member2: I just have a comment
and then a question. One is if anybody hasn't
seen Easy Rider, it's playing tonight--
>>Alexandra: Wow.
>>male audience member2: at The Silent Movie
Theater, and they're actually doing a big
Dennis Hopper retrospective all month and
then after tonight, I think, the second movie
tonight is a documentary about when he was
making the last movie--
>>Alexandra: Yeah.
>>male audience member2: which is supposed
to be like, rarely seen, and he kinda really
went off his head while he was making that.
>>Alexandra: Are these at MoCA or somewhere
else?
>>male audience member2: No, at The Silent
Movie Theater, it's on Fairfax.
>>Alexandra: Ok, cool.
>>male audience member2: Yeah, it's a cute
little theater, art theater. And then my question
was just is he still, is Ruscha still working
today and, and what is he working on?
[Alexandra coughs]
>>Alexandra: Excuse me. Yeah, I'm seeing him
tomorrow, actually. He's very much still working.
His studio is right in Venice. I don't know
what his very latest things are. I haven't
seen him in a little while, but I'll find
out tomorrow. He did recently a series of
paintings of mountains with words above them,
kind of superimposed upon them, and he told
me that the mountains came from a magazine
that had a story on the Himalayas. So, it's
one of the Himalayan Mountains, and then he
has language on top of it. He's really dealing
with a lot of the same issues that he has
throughout his career -- a lot on language,
word play. He's painting a lot; he's still
making books. He's actually done a series
of books documenting other Los Angeles streets.
I told you about Every Building on the Sunset
Strip, but he also photographs the Pacific
Coast Highway, Hollywood Boulevard, every
few years, so he did a book that was Hollywood
Boulevard: Then and Now. So, one set from
the 60s and one from the early 2000s, kind
of right next to each other. But yeah, he's
still very active, he's in his early 70s and
still working a lot.
>>Chris: One, one more question. So, is he,
I know that he did a lot of LA, Hollywood,
Southern California based kind of imagery
early on in his career, does he come back
to that as well?
>>Alexandra: Yeah, he still comes back to
the Hollywood sign a lot. The logos, like
the 20th Century Fox, he hasn't done that
in awhile, but he's always recycling images,
so I wouldn't be surprised if he does come
back to it at some point. He has the same
sort of preoccupations that he keeps coming
back to, as a lot of artists do. It's really
interesting to watch that over the course
of artists' careers.
>>Chris: All right. Thank you very much.
>>Alexandra: Thanks so much. It's been a real
pleasure.
[applause]
