Discover the innovative architectural installations at the Bruges Triennial 2024, transforming the historic center into a showcase of contemporary art.
The tagline of the magazine in question, Popular Western, was “Complete Quick-Trigger Stories,” which could apply to Ruscha’s photographs but not to his paintings. Even his silliest paintings are stately and brooding, often to a fault. The character of the brooding evolved over time. If the later paintings are often but not always to their detriment more explicit about our world on fire, the ’60s work prioritizes pleasure: the laid-back loops of the gas pump hoses, the blocky, confident reds, the crisp fluorescents, and the light and shadow on the glass façade provide little indication of the crises to come.
Glass instantiates a perpetual newness and eternal currency. Unlike seemingly more solid materials like steel-reinforced concrete, which unmaintained will rust away to ruin in five hundred years, glass is stable, unless it’s shattered. Perhaps because glass shows no patina, no material evidence of its past, it is the closest thing we have to a material from the future.
For the first time in my life I would be an official roadie. I wasn’t merely in charge of the driving: I would also help build and dismantle, lift and position, carry and fetch armed with duct tape and a Swiss Army knife. My writing would be full of self-mockery and rich with funny observations about my wife. Moreover, having experienced the splendor of the gig, my dispatch would be transformed, alchemically, into an essay that contained a series of pointed, even revolutionary, observations about art.