60 years ago this week, the American artist Ed Ruscha took a memorable ride down Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip

LA is an elusive place: all flesh and no soul, all buildings and no architecture, all property and no land, all electricity and no light, all billboards and nothing to say, all ideas and no principles.^[1]
—Peter Plagens, Los Angeles: The Ecology of Evil

A Meeting of the Minds

In all fairness, it would have been easy for anyone to miss. When Ed Ruscha first drove his pickup truck down LA’s West Sunset Boulevard on Saturday, June 11, 1966, to begin shooting Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a 27′ long photographic inventory that became one of the most renowned works of his career, he inadvertently caught a glimpse of another important artistic performance that would, in time, come to match—some might say exceed—his own in the breadth of its cultural impact.

Only a few miles away from the Strip inside the Getty Museum, now home to Ruscha’s photographic archive, is stored an image labelled “Sunset Boulevard, 1966 : Divider 1-A : 9171 headed east : Image 0080.” On this single photograph—one of 750,000 in the collection—stands the marquee of the Whisky a Go Go advertising the legendary, 3 month-long musical residency that would soon propel Jim Morrison and The Doors from mere opening acts for forgettable, or just plain forgotten bands like Them and The Turtles to the pantheon of rock and roll immortality.^[2]

Can we say for sure if Ruscha noticed the marquee of the then 2-year-old club located at 8901 West Sunset Boulevard? Even if he did catch the show that night or later that month, Ruscha made no specific note of it when Every Building on the Sunset Strip appeared in print a few months later, only months before The Doors’ Light My Fire single would top the US charts. To be sure, omitting the surreptitious encounter would certainly have been in keeping with his artistic approach: during this period, Ruscha aspired to develop a deadpan, field documentary style exploring the American landscape in which no one building, no one parking lot, no one apartment complex, no one gas station, and perhaps even no one band or club—even ones as celebrated as The Doors or the Whisky—would be given privileged status over another.^[3] The venerable architectural critic Reyner Banham characterized Ruscha’s goal as being able to “visit the same building in 900 different locations.”^[4] Still, the possibility of an impromptu run-in between some of the most creative, yet initially misunderstood minds to emerge out of the 1960s Los Angeles art scene is nothing if not tantalizing.

In the Field

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art…^[5]
—Sol Lewitt

Ruscha’s initial attempts to document the Strip on foot in 1965 did not pan out as he had expected: standing on the opposite side of the street they were photographing, he and his assistant, the visual artist Jerry McMillan, soon discovered that their prospective view of the streetfront buildings was dramatically obstructed by up to 6 lanes of cars in the foreground.^[6] For Ruscha, it was essential that the “ground line” connecting buildings and empty lots alike run “all the way through the book.”^[7]

By later revising his approach and securing a 35mm camera to a tripod mounted to the bed of his pickup truck, Ruscha accomplished several objectives: by leaving the sidewalk and enjoining the lighter, weekend vehicular traffic on West Sunset, the artist managed to get considerably closer to the buildings themselves and evaluate them from an elevated vantage, high above that of fellow motorists. And as if using one engine weren’t enough, the artist took care to automate the movement and trigger of his camera with its own, self-winding motor. With the engines of the truck and the camera humming along in sync, as it were, it took Ruscha and his team no more time to photograph the 1.7-mile stretch in West Hollywood than it required them to drive from one end to the other and back.

While the process offered significant economies of time, the artist completely relinquished the ability to snap precise photos that conveyed specific intent. Anyone who has been stuck in LA traffic knows that congestion can ease and tighten unpredictably: with the camera fully automated to shoot at regular time intervals, there could be no accounting for the location of the device at any moment or the relative success of individual images. A few years later, the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour and their Yale University students pushed Ruscha’s innovative fieldwork methods to a new extreme when they strapped a movie camera to the hood of their car to document the casinos along the Las Vegas Strip. As such, they were able to witness firsthand the effectiveness of the ever-expanding signage towering high above the buildings they represented. When driving at high speeds, motorists would have but a few seconds’ notice to identify legendary casinos like the Frontier or the Stardust—then still 1/8 or 1/4 mile away—and make for their giant parking lots.

A Moving Stream of Images

The language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of mobility […] The city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life.^[8]
—Reyner Banham

Like a movie director cross-cutting between different camera shots to narrate a critical scene, Ruscha, working with a body of over 1,000 photographs resulting from several drive-bys along the Strip, patiently curated and spliced the photographs together in an effort to best preserve the continuity of the street facades; in the process, he ended up reconstructing West Sunset not into a traditional urban Boulevard but rather, quite literally, a cinematic strip, which the Ruscha scholar Alexandra Schwartz has characterized as a “moving stream of images.”^[9] The resulting work functions not only to highlight the Boulevard’s lack of architectural character: even adding every building end-to-end won’t produce a more cohesive urban whole. At times privileging fluidity of movement while also asking us to pay close attention to the most minute details, Ruscha’s strip of The Strip celebrates the experience of driving while also calling into question our ever-diminishing attention spans. For Venturi, Izenour and Scott Brown, the message was similarly clear: Want to see it? No need to slow down, just make it bigger.

Every Building on the Sunset Strip has often been compared with another similar transect from the same period by the Japanese photographer Yoshikazu Suzuki and the essayist Shohachi Kimura, titled Ginza Kaiwai, Ginza Haccho (1954). Though it is impossible to determine whether Ruscha knew about the work published 13 years before his own, it is easy to see why the seminal study of Tokyo’s upscale shopping district has been cited as an important reference: both are photographed in black and white and are composed and annotated in very similar ways; both crop taller buildings in a way that accentuates the horizontality of the overall scene; both adopt the form of a long, single sheet of paper ingeniously folded into a compact accordion, known as a leporello.

The principal difference is that Ginza constitutes a highly-edited montage of static elements that lacks Ruscha’s highly cinematic sense of dynamism. Upon close inspection, we see for example that the street and sidewalk are rendered as flat tonal planes onto which individual cars and people have been carefully placed to animate the scene. Further, Suzuki and Kimura were careful to conceal any photographic seams in the folds of the leporello, resulting in a cohesive and vibrant, though highly contrived urban transect.

Ruscha made no such effort at improving or freezing the aesthetic character of the LA Strip: among the many other landmarks on view are billboards advertising the likes of Johnny Walker Scotch Whisky, Popov Vodka, performances by the R&B and gospel artist Percy Sledge and the burlesque female performer Joni (not to be mistaken with Johnny) Carson, or the film Arabesque, directed by Stanley Donen and starring Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen, the leading visualization and cartography studio that helped digitize and georeference the entire 50-year field archive that Ruscha created in and around Los Angeles now held at the Getty, noticed unique moments of serendipity when the artist unexpectedly captured himself inside his own work. He points the inquisitive observer towards large, reflective glass surfaces at or near the center of any one of Ruscha’s photographs: these constitute our best bet to spot the artist and his moving cinematic rig.^[10] The most compelling example of this type of reflection is a snapshot so ironic that it seems to capture all at once the spirit of Hollywood wealth and artifice: here is Ruscha in the storefront of the Jaguar dealership at 9170 West Sunset, hovering right above a brand new 1965 E-Type. And because the properties of this particular glass pane are slightly more reflective than they are transparent, Ruscha’s truck, the word DAIMLER virtually stamped across the side, stands in far greater relief than the beautiful Jag adorning the shop window.^[11]

While it might be tempting to suggest that the urban elevations in Ginza Kaiwai, Ginza Haccho reflected a more cohesive sense of composition, intentionality and craft, I would argue quite the opposite. Dennis Hopper, the iconic Hollywood anti-hero of such films as Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986), confided to his friend Ruscha that “I have a hard time with L.A. in that I don’t find it particularly attractive.”^[12] Similarly, for Ruscha, the dissonant, fragmented character of the Strip represents an integral feature, not a bug, in the book. As such, the artist welcomed with similar ease the chopped up or reconstituted vehicles that appear haphazardly amid the motley assortment of spliced-up buildings, empty lots and billboards as he does his own, accidental reflection or a glimpse of the Whisky’s marquee. If not for these vehicles shuttling people from one club, one bank, one motel or one store to the next, the Strip, unlike Ginza, would be virtually deserted of passers-by.

In a final nod that suggests that the work isn’t simply a traditional urban transect but also in part a cinematic effort in its own right, Ruscha plays down the 70′ of grade change across the 1.7-mile extent of the site in order to fully preserve the linear integrity of the traditional film strip.^[13] This is particularly evident in steeper sections of the Boulevard where the flattening of the street causes buildings to appear as if they are lurching leftward.

Analog, Digital

It’s like a western town in a way. A storefront plane of a western town is just paper, and behind it is just nothing.^[14]
—Ed Ruscha

The arrangement of Ruscha’s photographic strips—er., urban facades—follows a series of 18th and 19th century historical examples such as Caspar Jacobsz Philips’ celebrated 1768 architectural study of the buildings along the Keizers and Heeren canals in Amsterdam. Here, one street facade is presented upside down to its counterpart in order to preserve the relationship between buildings facing one another on opposing sides of these important urban arteries. Even the title of the work bears a striking resemblance to Ruscha’s: often simply referred to as the Verzaameling, the full title of Philips’ study is in fact quite a mouthful, roughly translating in English as a “Collection of all the houses and magnificent buildings along the Keizers and Heeren canals of the city of Amsterdam, starting from Binnen Amstel and ending at Brouwersgracht, consisting of over 1400 beautiful and proud buildings originally drawn from house to house and depicted on artistic copper plate.” Although Philips’ constitutive unit is the single building rather than a single photographic snapshot, the results are quite similar to Ruscha’s, at least in some respects: setting aside for a moment the architectural paucity of the Sunset Strip, both boulevard and canals are represented as blank spaces sandwiched between two long elevations inside which are listed the names of cross streets as well as the addresses of individual structures. In such works, the reader inevitably experiences the top facade as being more dominant.^[15]

The 16′ long scroll of the Grands Boulevards de Paris was published in the French weekly newspaper L’Illustration in 1846 and constituted another interesting historical antecedent. Much like Ruscha’s folded leporello, it was designed to be carried along as a field map of sorts. It is easy to imagine, for example, a group of tourists carefully unfurling the delicate drawing to highlight specific sections where they stood at that very moment. Unlike the Verzaameling, which could be characterized as a strictly architectural study devoid of any sign of life, the most interesting elements of the Parisian scroll are the hundreds of colorful pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages ambling along the Grands Boulevards. Curiously, all appear to be frozen in place, waiting with bated breath for the (sadly) uncredited artist to make their way towards them.

For all the attention that Every Building on the Sunset Strip has received over the years, Ruscha himself obsessively returned to this type of practice over these ensuing years, in effect demonstrating a firm commitment to this field method: not only did he shoot Sunset Boulevard 12 times, he also did the same for Hollywood Boulevard (1973, 2004), Santa Monica Boulevard (1974), the Pacific Coast Highway (1974) and Melrose Avenue (1985), among many others.

Much like Charles and Ray Eames’ film Power of Ten (1977) constitutes the most clear antecedent for Google Earth, which was first released in 2005, it would be hard to discount the clear historical link that exists between Ruscha’s field method and the early experiments conducted with Google Street View in the streets of San Francisco beginning in 2006. 40 years of progress separate Ruscha’s 1966 corpus of 1,000 images covering a mere 2 miles in West Hollywood from Google’s 360-degree, panoramic images georeferenced to satellite imagery and covering 10 million miles across the planet, but their similarities are quite striking. In a digital environment in which nothing is properly right side up or upside down but rather simply exists within a dataset of billions of images that can be called up at will, few scenes possess the immediacy of our own homes, streets, places of work or other familiar landmarks like those familiar buildings along Sunset Boulevard. These images represent a fleeting moment in time (a world where the sun literally never sets) in which the eyes of the entire world seemed to be upon us as individuals. This is perhaps why, more than 60 years later, Ruscha’s Sunset Strip hasn’t lost any of its evocative powers.

Note

Very special thanks to the Ed Ruscha Studio (especially Mary Dean and Kylie Hoffman), the Getty Research Institute, the David Rumsey Map Collection, Doors photographer Ronnie Haran, Kailum Graves as well as Jake Geitner, H. James Lucas and David Salomon for their help on this piece.

References