Hollywood

Edward Ruscha, The Back of Hollywood, 1977

Hollywood is a district within the city of Los Angeles, California, U.S., whose name is synonymous with the American film industry. Lying northwest of downtown Los Angeles, it is bounded by Hyperion Avenue and Riverside Drive (east), Beverly Boulevard (south), the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains (north), and Beverly Hills (west). Since the early 1900s, when moviemaking pioneers found in southern California an ideal blend of mild climate, much sunshine, varied terrain, and a large labour market, the image of Hollywood as the fabricator of tinseled cinematic dreams has been etched worldwide. The first house in Hollywood was an adobe building (1853) on a site near Los Angeles, then a small city in the new state of California. Hollywood was laid out as a real-estate subdivision in 1887 by Harvey Wilcox, a prohibitionist from Kansas who envisioned a community based on his sober religious principles. Real-estate magnate H.J. Whitley, known as the “Father of Hollywood,” subsequently transformed Hollywood into a wealthy and popular residential area. At the turn of the 20th century, Whitley was responsible for bringing telephone, electric, and gas lines into the new suburb. In 1910, because of an inadequate water supply, Hollywood residents voted to consolidate with Los Angeles.

In 1908 one of the first storytelling movies, The Count of Monte Cristo, was completed in Hollywood after its filming had begun in Chicago. In 1911 a site on Sunset Boulevard was turned into Hollywood's first studio, and soon about 20 companies were producing films in the area. In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky, Arthur Freed, and Samuel Goldwyn formed Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount Pictures). DeMille produced The Squaw Man in a barn one block from present-day Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, and more box-office successes soon followed. Hollywood had become the centre of the American film industry by 1915 as more independent filmmakers relocated there from the East Coast. For more than three decades, from early silent films through the advent of “talkies,” figures such as D.W. Griffith, Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Harry Cohn served as overlords of the great film studios—Twentieth Century-Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, and others. Among the writers who were fascinated by Hollywood in its “golden age” were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Nathanael West.
After World War II, film studios began to move outside Hollywood, and the practice of filming “on location” emptied many of the famous lots and sound stages or turned them over to television show producers. With the growth of the television industry, Hollywood began to change, and by the early 1960s it had become the home of much of American network television entertainment.
Among the features of Hollywood, aside from its working studios, are the Hollywood Bowl (1919; a natural amphitheatre used since 1922 for summertime concerts under the stars), the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park (also a concert venue), Mann's (formerly Grauman's) Chinese Theatre (with footprints and handprints of many stars in its concrete forecourt), and the Hollywood Wax Museum (with more than 350 wax figures of celebrities). The Hollywood Walk of Fame pays tribute to many celebrities of the entertainment industry. The most visible symbol of the district is the Hollywood sign that overlooks the area. First built in 1923 (a new sign was erected in 1978), the sign originally said “Hollywoodland” (to advertise new homes being developed in the area), but the sign fell into disrepair, and the “land” section was removed in the 1940s when the sign was refurbished.
Many stars, past and present, live in neighbouring communities such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and the Hollywood Forever Cemetery contains the crypts of such performers as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Tyrone Power. Hollywood Boulevard, long a chic thoroughfare, became rather tawdry with the demise of old studio Hollywood, but it underwent regeneration beginning in the late 20th century; the Egyptian Theatre (built in 1922), for example, was fully restored in the 1990s and became the home of the American Cinematheque, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the presentation of the motion picture.

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Interview II

Interview: Ed Ruscha

Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha gained notoriety from the early 1960s as one of the most important West Coast Pop artists. His works about the road, travel and automobile culture are the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Fort Worth Modern. Ed Ruscha: Road Tested remains on view through April 17.

For this issue of …mbg, Charissa Terranova interviews Ruscha about how road trips, the West and contemporary urbanism have influenced his art.

 

Charissa N. Terranova [CT]: Do you think the automobile and the road has a specific effect on a certain kind of art or art in general?

Ed Ruscha [ER]: Well, art has always been into “the machine.” You can go back to the Italian Futurists and how they felt like any kind of machine is more beautiful than a flower, for instance. An outrageous statement when you first think about it, but the point is taken that machinery itself is a glorifying experience. Motion and physics and metals and how they all mesh together…
Artists have always been attached to the “Hollywood glamour” of automobiles, even artists that profess to have no interest in Pop art, like the Abstract Expressionists. I think that people erroneously thought they didn’t have any interest in popular culture, but they really did—I mean, Marilyn Monroe and Cadillacs and stuff like that.

CT: I think it’s the way history’s been written. It’s the importance of Clement Greenberg that has dominated the field, but there are other ways of understanding, for example, Abstract Expressionism.

My next question has to do with a quote from Michael Auping’s essay in the catalogue. He writes: “Ruscha acknowledges that many of his ideas for paintings come while he’s driving, and to the extent that he has taken photographs from his moving car and made cryptic drawings and notes while driving, his car is a kind of second studio.” What are your thoughts on the idea of the car as an extension of the human body?

ER: I’m right there when I’m behind the wheel. I’m kind of serving my mental state. At the risk of my own safety I’ve got to concentrate on the road, but I think about all kinds of things while I’m driving, especially on long trips. I’ve never liked the sound of my voice so I don’t use a tape recorder. Instead I write these things down—

CT: As you’re driving?

ER: As I’m driving, off to the side of the road. I don’t take my eyes off the road, but I’m able to use a pad of paper and a pencil to cryptically annotate what I’m thinking as I’m driving.

CT: I’ve directed students in graduate work and one of them wrote about Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962). In the avant-garde journal October, people wrote about your work, and that piece in particular, as an articulation of the entropic landscape, as if those buildings were some kind of statement on the death of the author and ugliness. But when I look at Twentysix Gasoline Stations, I like them; I think they’re nice buildings. Do you like the parking lots, the gas stations and the buildings? Are they formal? Are they beautiful to you?

ER: A lot of it has to do with the idea of divorcing myself from the idea of a picture of something and getting to the mental state of it. The gas stations in particular… I knew as I was photographing these stations that sometime in the future they would become nostalgic and have another strength or weakness to them. I remember feeling regretful about that, that I couldn’t keep them in the present.

CT: Do you make these works out of some desire, because you like them, or is it arbitrary?

ER: Well I like them, but it’s also sort of a haphazard, lackadaisical, traveling along, I-want-to-photograph-that kind of thing. And then there’s collections of notions: another gas station to add to the pile.

CT: Do you think through them? Because you’re driving to the gas stations.

ER: Each time I did this I would be more or less in my own world. I realized that people seeing me photographing these gas stations were wondering, “What’s this man up to?” Especially people in the gas stations. They would say, “Hey, what are you doing?” And I would say, “Photographing the gas station.” So I had a bit of that. But it’s like…the magic of chemistry.

CT: I’m really empathetic because for my first art history graduate degree, I wrote about WalMart, as an art historian. And really it was because I was interested in the landscape. I used to go interview and take pictures and people said the same things: “What are you doing? What are you doing this for?”

America has a long tradition of car art. Houston has an Art Car Parade every year, and then there are exhibitions like Allure of the Automobile at the High Museum last year, where they brought cars literally into the building. Since MoMA opened, they’ve done seven or eight shows on the car. How does your work relate to that kind of convention of car art?

ER: It’s different than those issues. People who decorate their cars? That’s a side culture that I don’t subscribe to, although at first I liked customized cars. I liked the fact that people would do that, sometimes in subtle ways, and that was a symptom of post-war luxury. But Art Cars, no. Decorating your car with spangles never really interested me, and I see other interests in just pure historical value of cars. I’ll be the first one to line up to see a collection of old automobiles—something that is overwhelming and is such a part of my life and such a part of everyone’s life that it’s hard to escape.

CT: That’s what’s so interesting about your work. I make a distinction in my book between this Art Car mode of production and conceptual car art. I think your work brings something more perceptual to the table. It’s phenomenological, like the body moving through space, and I think it brings a criticality. It is critical to the fact that this has become normative for us. What is your statement about the car, If there is a statement?

ER: That’s an important thing you said: “If there is a statement.” (laughs) I view everything that I do as basically an exploratory venture. It’s so impulsive that I have to go back later and sort of cover my tracks and make a reason for why I’m doing it. I think that’s basically where it comes from—from something so simple and stupid, but powerful at the same time.

CT: There’s the car on the road in your work, then there’s the graphic tradition. When I talk about your work, because you’re so brilliantly talented at rendering things in space, I think of John F. Peto and William Harnett, the 19th-century trompe l’oeil artists. So who were your graphic influences?

ER: Well it comes from so many sources. But I could say Peto and Harnett, and artists like that from that era, like Louis Eilshemius. You could call him a tragic figure, but he’s a painter and had a great influence on Marcel Duchamp. I think Duchamp considered him one of the greatest painters of the age. He painted around the turn of the century. And there are a lot of very obscure people who have influenced me; it’s not just people that are well known, but unknown people and even naïve artists, like Sam Doyle, a painter from South Carolina who is considered a folk artist. He had a strong effect on me. And then I can bring in the subject of music.

CT: You did an interview with someone about the blues, didn’t you?

ER: Oh yeah.

CT: How does L.A. figure? Is it a muse for you?

ER: I love it and hate it, and now I’m back to loving it again. I have mood swings about that city.

CT: Why do you hate it sometimes?

ER: It’s my life in the place that is disturbing or unsettling. I feel like I want to get out of there but now I’m settled back into it. But I also have a place out in the desert, so it’s a place to get away to.

CT: Do you read L.A. writers? Are you into Raymond Chandler or any of those people?

ER: Yeah, James Elroy, and there’s another writer named Mark Z. Danielewski who I’ve read. There’s some good writers.

CT: I remember that in your catalogue from the 2006 show at the Whitney that you were thinking about moving to New York or L.A., but you went L.A. because it’s more modern, or rather more contemporary. Do you still feel that way?

ER: Yeah. But at the same time, all of our ideas of metropolitan America that develop part of the sophisticated art of America come from Gotham.

CT: It’s a myth though, because everybody lives like L.A.

ER: Yes, but I think it’s sold to us through the movies—the movies out in L.A. have told us what the world was like. Before, we had a notion of what New York was like. I didn’t visit New York until I was 21 or 22 years old, and when I got there I thought, “This place is just like I thought it was.” Movies had always shown me this grandiose, George Gershwin sort of tempo with the tall buildings and all. How else would I know what New York was about except through movies and descriptions? So maybe that’s the Hollywood forward motion.

CT: What are your thoughts on European urbanism and the traditions of the walking city?

ER: Here we have real estate galore, and there they farm everything up until the back door to the farm houses. Their cities are sort of organized in the same way. It’s ancient in many ways, and eye opening at the same time just to see European culture. I didn’t go there until I was in my early twenties and I was impressed by the exotic aspect of the cities and the countries. And yet there’s something that made me say, “I’ve got to get back to the Western US.”

CT: Can I ask you a question about Jack Kerouac? In your version of On the Road, you’re really paying a great homage to him. What are your feelings about that book and the history of American literature? Is it important, and why? Clearly you must think it’s important because you’ve created a work of art about it.

ER: He got on the track of stream of consciousness, just blurting things out as they came and attacking the world in an unstructured way. I began to see value and hope in that. His use of language coupled with his ideas of just his friends and the fun that they were all having during this period was maybe a metaphor for something I found myself doing at the same time.

CT: Do you have any specific thoughts about conceptual art, or does it just not interest you as a category? It seems like you work between the text and the machine, the automobile and at certain points the typewriter. Do you care about the designation of being called a conceptual artist?

ER: No, it doesn’t bother me at all—

CT: Are you a conceptual artist?

ER: I probably am, probably not. When I think of conceptual art, I immediately want to define that kind of art as mental art, art without a physical presence. And that was an inevitable thing to happen during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. All these artists came along that were exploring something that didn’t involve a concrete item like a painting on canvas. Now it’s possibly run its course, but it’s influenced millions of artists, even if they won’t admit it.

CT: I feel like it’s almost become grammatical, this term of conceptual art. It’s so foundational that it’s what most engaged artists do often. I call it “the conceptual turn.” It’s an idea I’m working on that I’d like to write more on it. I think it starts in the ‘50s but it comes to the present, because I see this in so many artists’ work.

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Oklahoma City Earthquake

Oklahoma Earthquake Biggest Ever; 320 Million Years in the Making

Things were shaky in Oklahoma on Saturday, but the 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Lincoln County was not all that abnormal.

The quake, which hit 45 miles northeast of Oklahoma City at 10:53 p.m. Central Time, was the largest in the state's history and occurred less than 24 hours after a 4.7 magnitude quake hit in almost the exact same spot.
It was felt in Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas, and there have been at least ten after-shocks of magnitude 3.0 or higher.

Twelve homes were damaged and three people were injured when a chimney fell on them, according to a local Fox affiliate. Additionally, a major highway buckled in three places.
"We're in tornado country, man," Joey Wakefield, emergency management director for Lincoln County, told Reuters. "These earthquakes, it just scares the hell out of everybody here."

But, Lincoln County is also in earthquake country.

There are three fault lines in the area: the Meers fault, the Wilzetta fault and the "uncertain" Crooked Creek fault on the Kansas-Oklahoma border.

Seismologists now think that the Wilzetta fault, also known as the Seminole uplift, was responsible for the quake on Saturday. It was the result of a right-lateral strike-slip faulting, the same kind of movement that causes earthquakes on the San Andreas fault in California, according to Trembling Earth.

The Wilzetta fault has been active for 320 million years. It has been relatively quite for recent eons, but a nearby seismic belt near Oklahoma City has been rather active recently.

There have been a number of significant earthquakes in the United States this year. Like Oklahoma, the Virginia earthquake in August was an unexpected and unpredictable event. That 5.8 magnitude tremor was felt up and down the East Coast.

Is the earthquake rate anything to worry about? Not really. In the big picture of American earthquakes, these two events were not unusual at all.

In Alaska on Sunday, an earthquake comparable to Oklahoma hit on the outer islands. In the past week, there have been about 300 total earthquakes in the state alone.
Still, aside from Alaska and the West Coast, there were almost no other quakes in the United States in the last seven days. Before Oklahoma, there were only minor earthquakes in Tennessee, Missouri and Virginia, the highest registering a magnitude 2.4, which is 1,000 times less powerful than the 5.6 magnitude quake near Oklahoma City.

Additionally, the rate of earthquakes in Oklahoma has spiked in recent years. Up until 2009, the state had an average of about 50 quakes per year, but in 2010 there were over 1,000, according to the Daily News. Even more shocking is that this dramatic increase could be man-made.

Residents in Oklahoma and Arkansas, which has also had an increase in the numbers of earthquakes recently, blame injection wells. In the process called "fracking," natural gas companies blast through shale and bedrock using a fluid to release natural gas. Some suspect that his could have tectonic repercussions.
There are currently 181 injection wells in Lincoln Country, Okla.

Natural gas companies and some Oklahoma seismologists dismiss the claim that the earthquake was anything but natural. The Oklahoma Geological Survey also added that while the number of quakes has increased in the past two years, it is not inconsistent with historical data, according to CNN.

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Arthur Dove's Goin' Fishin Painting

 
Dove occasionally made collages and assemblages while living on his boat, and twenty-five are known to have been created. In these works he used a variety of materials, such as the bamboo, fabric, and wood in Goin' Fishin'. His clever technique reveals his awareness of the Dadaist collages being produced in Europe and his knowledge of the American folk art revival of the 1920s (folk artists often incorporated objects from their surroundings into their work). Dove's collages and assemblages constitute a charming combination of these divergent influences.
Goin' Fishin' was interpreted by many writers on art, including Duncan Phillips, as a good-natured exposition of a Mark Twain character's fishing exploits, and others have connected it with a drowned African-American fisherman. Dove himself denied these ideas, saying that his starting point was simply an African-American man sitting on the pier.
The sleeves of a denim shirt, representing the fisherman's attire, and a piece of dark wood from the dock form the central motif of the composition. Pieces of bamboo fishing pole frame these materials in a tight semicircle. Parts of the human body are alluded to in an ambiguous but humorous manner by the central radiating configuration of bamboo, which some interpret as a skeletal hand. Small pieces of bamboo outline the denim fabric, creating an arc that is reminiscent of the arch of the fishing pole as the fisherman struggles to land a fish.
Although Phillips saw Goin' Fishin' as early as 1926 at the Intimate Gallery, he did not purchase it at that time. Phillips expressed reservations, telling Dove, "I do wish you would paint more pictures in the conventional way with brush and pigment for I think you owe it to the world to do so. Nevertheless, his opinion had changed by 1935 when he wrote to Stieglitz about the "...glow of aesthetic pleasure" he experienced every time he thought of Goin' Fishin'. In 1937, he managed to buy it, even though it had been in Stieglitz's private collection.

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