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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > March > 12
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Artist Ed Ruscha in Austin April 2
Don’t forget: Famed Pop artist Ed Ruscha comes to Austin in just three weeks as part of the Harry Ransom Lectures. And the lecture is free and open to the public.
When: 7 p.m. April 2
Where: AT&T Conference Center, 1900 University Ave.
Doors open 30 minutes before the program begins. No reservations required, but seating is limited to 300.
Ruscha’s lecture will be webcast.
In 2001, I spoke with Ruscha when he was here for an exhibit of his work at the Austin Museum of Art.
On the road with Edward Ruscha
Edward Ruscha’s fascination with gas stations started right here in Texas — in Amarillo, along Route 66.
The artist’s now-iconic painting and related prints of a Standard gas station, as well as his iconic art book “Twentysix Gasoline Stations,” were born out of the many road trips he made between California, where in 1956 he enrolled in art school, and Oklahoma City, where he grew up. “I knew at some point I had to get out of there,” the 63-year-old artist said in a recent phone interview. “There’s hardly much room for poets and artists in Oklahoma.”
And so Ruscha hit the road and drove west. Along the way he passed a gas station in Amarillo.
“I found it inspiring,” he said. Just like he found the American West inspiring. “There’s something scary and beautiful at the same time in the wide open West.”
Ruscha took a picture of the Standard station. And then he drove until he saw another gas station that intrigued him. He stopped and took a picture of it, too.
“I just kept shooting pictures of gas stations,” he said. Eventually, those pictures became “Twentysix Gasoline Stations,” his deadpan black-and-white chronicle of service stations along Route 66. And that Amarillo Standard station? Ruscha transformed it into “Standard Station,” now a Pop art symbol.
Along the road, signs and billboards also caught Ruscha’s eye.
“Signs had a new reality for me,” he said. “Some were really kind of primitive, like the little sign marking the town of Jackrabbit, Ariz. It was really just a board held up by some sticks.
“Really, that’s true of all signs — they’re just things propped on sticks with nothing behind them. Even the Hollywood sign is just a false front. And so there was something about driving along, heading west, and experiencing all these false fronts which culminated in the big Hollywood sign. It all became a resource for my artwork.”
One of the more influential voices in postwar American art, Ruscha has always straddled the line between conceptual and Pop art. His work celebrates the quotidian American landscape — the flat horizon of the West, vernacular architecture, the highway — by cleaning up its edges, reducing the detail to heighten the drama.
Ruscha’s passion for driving and cars runs so deep that even in a foray into filmmaking, he still couldn’t get off the road. In 1975, he made “Miracle,” a 28-minute color film starring artist Jim Ganzer and singer Michelle Phillips.
“It’s about a car, really,” Ruscha said. “I’m not sure how essential the story is to the movie. I just kind of dreamt it up. It’s basically a shaggy dog story, about a man’s dedication to his car and his dedication to his destiny.”
Essentially a quirky story that follows a day in the life of an auto mechanic, the film, Ruscha says, is a study in alteration. “It has a lot to do with things blending, with transitions — from the dirty to the clean, from the primitive to the scientific. In an odd way, there’s a remote connection to my painting because my work involves the horizontal blending of paint.”
As much as he loves to be in the driver’s seat, though, Ruscha says, “Making art is an involuntary reflex for me. I’m not in control of it. I guess in a way, that makes me a captive.”
Image: “Standard Station,” Edward Ruscha, 1966
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‘Cool’ brings in the crowds at the Blanton
The ‘Birth of the Cool’ exhibit is drawing in the crowds at the Blanton Museum of Art.
The survey of all things California cool is bringing in more than 4,000 visitors a week, almost double the museum’s average attendance of the previous few months, museum officials say.
Take your time with this exhibit. Re-visit several times — it’s worth it. There’s much to see and all of it is wonderfully groovy. Leave time to watch the brilliant film and animation shorts, especially the artsy experiments of husband-and-wife creative team Charles and Ray Eames whose singular style of furniture and household objects epitomizes mid-century modernism.
The Blanton exhibit runs through May 17. See www.blantonmuseum.org for info.
And don’t forget the April 8 screening of ‘Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman’ a documentary by Austin filmmaker Eric Bricker. Bricker trains his lens on the seminal career of the 97-year-old Schulman, the photographer whose seamless images helped define midcentury modernism in America. Bricker will be on hand for a post-screening Q-and-A. The movie screens at the Alamo Ritz, 320 E. Sixth St. at 7 p.m.
IMAGES: Top: ‘Birth of the Cool’ installation. Photo by Rick Hall, courtesy Blanton Museum of art. Bottom: ‘Case Study House #21,’ by Julius Schulman.
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Texas Biennial brims with brio: 1
Sassy, bright, overflowing with verve and up-from-your-own-bootstraps independence, the Texas Biennial brims with brio. Curator Michael Duncan has rounded up a herd of exuberant, spirited Lone Star artists determined to make their presence known.
Is all of it really great art? No, of course not. Only a very few works are truly great, and only a few more are very good. But all of the sprawling Texas Biennial — the two group exhibits, the four solo shows, the seven public projects — makes for rewarding, delightful viewing.
It’s the do-it-yourself spirit that makes the Texas Biennial ebullient fun: Indie, artist-run, never-mind-the-art-world — full speed ahead! We do what we like in the Lone Star State and we don’t need to explain it to anyone.
But that doesn’t mean we have our heads in the Gulf Coast sand. Quite the opposite. As the mostly emerging or mid-career Texas Biennial artists prove, they’re acutely aware of what percolates around the now-global art scene. It’s just that these Texas artists don’t play slave to those trends. They do their own thing.
And because there are lots of things that they do, we’ll be making multiple posts to this blog as we peruse and review the Texas Biennial. And forgive the long, image-heavy posts, but it’s just no fun if you can’t see things.
Buster Greybill’s “Bait Box” is brilliant — and also a heartfelt and honorific memorial to the All-American fish that’s swum decades of folklore and tradition. The Huntsville-based artist crafted an enormous bronze catfish and enshrined it on a high voltage box near a forgotten boat launch in the park along Lady Bird Lake, just east of IH-35.
Greybill elevates the ubiquitous bottom-feeding fish to a new level, literally placing it on a pedestal. Albeit, it’s an ubiquitous pedestal (an ordinary utility box), but that makes Greybill’s homage all the more endearing.
Everybody has a fish story to tell — a tale of the ‘one that got away.’ Greybill’s is sharp and sweet and funny.
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Weekend Arts Pix
‘Beggar’s Bag: Bob Schneider.’
Creative rocker Bob Schneider has an alter ego that isn’t commonly known. The Austin-based musician makes hectic, intricate drawings and prints that focus on the human form, but in distorted and imaginary ways. Just in time for South by Southwest, as thousands of his fellow musicians descend on Austin, Schneider unveils his latest series of black-and-white etchings featuring his mutant and anthropomorphic figures.
Artist’s reception: 6 to 8 Thursday.
Regular gallery hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays.
Exhibit runs through April 18.
Flatbed Galleries, 2380 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Free.
www.flatbedpress.com. 477-9328.
‘Tom Molloy: Lucid.’
Last year, celebrated Irish artist gave us 50 BB gun riddled carnival shooting targets — actually watercolors that read ‘Lone Star’ — arranged on the gallery wall like the stars on the American flag. Now Molloy uses iconic war photographs as the basis for his latest series painstakingly detailed graphite drawings sometimes merging them erotic scenes to offer jarring commentaries on today’s current events.
Reception: 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday with an artist’s talk at 7 p.m.
Regular gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays.
Exhibit continues through April 25.
Lora Reynolds Gallery, 300 Nueces St.
215-4965. www.lorareynolds.com.
IMAGES: Top: Bob Schneider, “Night Way,” courtesy Flatbed Press. Bottom: Tom Molloy, “Graven #3,” courtesy Lora Reynolds Gallery.
