Designing Ed Ruscha: The invention of the Los Angeles artist, 1960--1980.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Ed Ruscha's distinctive model of artistic subjectivity guided his career and shaped his production. Soon after his arrival on the art scene in the early 1960s, Ruscha became known as the quintessential Los Angeles artist. Working in an unusually broad range of media, he focused on Southern California culture as the primary subject of his work. In so doing, he introduced a new, Hollywood-based sensibility into the landscape of contemporary art---and helped to establish a new image of the artist as a Hollywood-style celebrity. Ruscha utilized the popular and art media to construct and market his artistic persona. As art director of <italic>Artforum</italic> from 1965 to 1970, he was closely connected to the art press, and some of his most significant works from this era employed forms borrowed from mass culture. He adeptly promoted his work, publishing skillfully engineered advertisements, interviews, and statements in various art magazines to promulgate his identity as an L.A. artist. The image Ruscha projected through these outlets was complex. At times, he presented himself as a cool, intellectual maverick---a typically avant-garde stance. But in other instances, he appeared as a kind of good old boy---an image akin to that of his Los Angeles neighbor, the Hollywood actor. Ruscha's frequent oscillation between these postures reflected his ambiguous position within the art world; while his Hollywood persona acquiesced to the middlebrow yet ostentatious culture of the L.A. insiders who collected his work, his avant-garde alter-ego held that world in contempt. To a degree, this double-bind plagues all vanguard artists who, while longing to <italic>epater la bourgeoisie</italic>, also rely on it to support their work. But Ruscha's personal and professional involvement with Hollywood---the great manufacturer of middle-American myth---complicated his situation, for even as his work deconstructed or satirized L.A. culture (his books notably commented on L.A. architecture and urbanism, attracting the interest of theorist Reyner Banham, and architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi), it depended on the city for inspiration and its elite for patronage. As such, Ruscha embodied a unique model of artistic subjectivity at mid-century.