Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties Hardcover - 2015

Excerpt

By the time he was eighteen, Ed Ruscha was sure of two things: he wanted to be an artist, and he needed to get out of Oklahoma. Art school was the answer, and Ruscha knew that the most highly touted ones were in New York, maybe Chicago. But “the East,” he figured—“that’s just too old-world for me.” California was more like it; he had visited with his family as a kid and was taken with what he thought of as “that California style.” Los Angeles was “the only place” to be, as far as Ruscha was concerned. So in the summer of 1956, he packed up his six-year-old Ford with Smitty mufflers and set out on Route 66, heading west.
   In the mid-fifties, painters in Los Angeles, like their counterparts in New York, were searching for a way forward in the wake of abstract expressionism. Initially, few artists in either city doubted that the future of painting lay in abstraction of some kind, a presumption that would be seriously challenged only as the decade drew toward its close. Jasper Johns’s paintings of targets and flags were shocking in their use of familiar symbols as “ready-made” images that both were and were not representational. (What, after all, is the difference between a flag and its image?) Ruscha himself would experience the shock firsthand in 1957, when he spied a reproduction of Johns’s Target with Four Faces in a magazine, a work that he said “hit me right between the eyes.”
   But the present state of American painting was far from Ruscha’s thoughts as he and his friend and fellow traveler Mason Williams burned through countless quarts of oil, rumbling past the Indian reservations and trading posts, abandoned mining towns, and cheap motels that punctuated their crossing of the scorched desert regions that lay between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.

Media reviews

Citations

• Library Journal, 02/15/2015, Page 96
• Publishers Weekly, 02/02/2015, Page 0