![]() ![]() You can’t really copy him, in the same way that you can’t really copy Warhol. I don’t know if one can describe his influence because he’s so unique. Everyone knows the Hollywood sign paintings, but I was so interested in the photo books that he was doing with the parking lots. His work has a power and simplicity that is just so present in my mind. Also, to be in the collection of Ed Ruscha was phenomenal. That exchange kept me living in LA for another year. He bought 44 of them! This was 1971, and my part-time teaching contract at Cal State Long Beach had just ended. He came over and I laid out every photograph I had ever made on my ping-pong table. He said he really liked my photographs and he wanted to buy one. He was sort of just around, and he was amazing to know-because he’s Ed Ruscha, and I’m not. Image Credit: ©2023 William Wegman/Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New YorkĮd came over one day when I was living in Venice Beach. Ruscha made space for the everyday, vernacular, and banal. ![]() But his humor has had serious implications for the history of art: before Ruscha and other Pop artists, art was a space set apart for subjects considered important and transcendent. No matter the medium, Ruscha’s trademark is a kind of deadpan humor. Some favored his photo book era, while others noted his sunset paintings and his text-based works, in which he rendered Los Angeles verbiage from the Hollywood sign to that ubiquitous onomatopoeia: honk. To understand Ed Ruscha, an icon who has spent the better part of 60 years mining Los Angeles for iconography devoid of glitz and glamour, we spoke to artists whose work he influenced in advance of “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” a major survey now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the spring. Leaving a mark on others figures well in the history books. Often it’s artists who decide which of their peers will be remembered. ![]()
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