In a past life, he was an arsonist. A bold accusation, I realize, but nobody makes that many paintings, drawings, and photographs of fire without some buried lust for the real deal. By the time I left "Ed Ruscha/Now Then," an XXL retrospective at MOMA comprising some two hundred works produced between the Eisenhower years and the present, I had lost count of the burning things, which are as lowbrow as a diner and as ladi-da as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title of Ruscha's 1964 photo series, "Various Small Fires and Milk," could have been, minus the milk, a reasonable title for the exhibition itself, if he hadn't painted various large ones, too.
The strangest thing about these fires, other than their quantity, is their calm. There are no people running out of LACMA, and if there were you get the feeling they'd be fine. Tranquillity, often simple but rarely simpleminded, may be Ruscha's essential quality as an artist. His work-preoccupied with mass media, the mother tongue of the twentieth century-is universal yet cozily regional, a trick he pulls off because the region in question is Los Angeles, where much of the world's mass media is born. Other postwar artists spoke a similar dialect, but Ruscha's best work has a coiled concision that makes Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg seem heavyhanded. "Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights" (1962), a half painting, half drawing of the Twentieth Century Fox logo, is as flashy as the film industry but as devil-may-care as a shrug; everything flows from (and back to) the half-assed pencil scrawls in the lower right corner. You're charmed by something you see straight through.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 09, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 09, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Thataway Thomas McGuane
The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca.
THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN
“Megalopolis.”
THE THEATRE - PHOTO REALISM
Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries.”
AGE OF ANXIETY
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
FAMILY PORTRAIT
In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.
EYES UP HERE
The perils and pleasures of a nice rack.
A CRITIC AT LARGE SAY THE WORD
Why liberals struggle to defend liberalism.
A REPORTER AT LARGE YOU MAKE ME SICK
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
THE WORLD OF TELEVISION CASTOFFS
REALITY-TV CONTESTANTS ARE BARELY PAID, AND THE EXPERIENCE CAN FEEL LIKE ABUSE. SHOULD THEY UNIONIZE?
SHOUTS & MURMURS IDENTIFIED
A panel of scientific experts commissioned by NASA to study unidentified anomalous phenomena,” more widely known as UFOs, said Thursday that it found no evidence that any of the reported objects were extraterrestrial in origin.
