Oct. 09, 2007 - Issue #625: We’ve got an election!
Anthony Easton takes up the challenge of Ed Ruscha at the AGA
At least those are dominant threads in Edmonton-based artist/curator Anthony Easton’s attempt to fulfill a request made by pop master Ed Ruscha in his 1977 conceptual drawing, “WILL 100 ARTISTS PLEASE DRAW A 1950 FORD FROM MEMORY?.” A descendent of the word paintings Ruscha did primarily in the mid to late 1960s, which built on pop’s appropriation of advertising techniques to include text itself as an object, “WILL 100 ARTISTS ... ” asked viewers to imagine the implications of reproduction at its most perilously faulty—an iconic cultural object from an iconic era, which many people encountered experientially, conjured up from layered tangles of recollections and committed to paper.
Ruscha did say ”‘please.” In a demonstration of ultimate Canadian politesse, Easton took on the task of finding 100 artists working in a variety of mediums and genres to answer the plea after seeing Ruscha’s piece in an advertisement in the pages of Artforum, a delicious irony on so many levels it should come with meta-escalators and a food court. Not the least among these is that Ruscha once worked as a layout artist for the same magazine, under the moniker “Eddie Russia” (a poke at people who mispronounced his name, which rhymes with touché). The curator savours another ironic touch: although Easton secured permission from Ruscha to realize his conceptual assignment, he couldn’t get the original piece for the show. Instead, behind plexiglass and on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery space, there’s a copy of Artforum open to an image of the drawing.
“I like it being a mechanical reproduction,” Easton laughs.
Hung in an almost-perfect grid—most participants complied with Easton’s only request, that they respond on letter-sized paper—the drawings range from diaristic to enigmatic by artists and illustrators from all over North America and as far away as Europe and Japan, working in pastel, ink, pixels, pencil, collage, woodcut print, tempura, gold foil and other techniques.
“I asked some specific people I had in mind, but there are also clusters of geography I stumbled on,” Easton relates. “Word spread. Sometimes I’d send out a request and it would end up on blogs or websites, and artists would contact me, and their friends or people they shared a studio with would submit too. One artist had a party and sent me the drawings from that night. I was fascinated by the cannibalization of another reproductive medium.”
Whatever nostalgic impulse for the ‘50s Ruscha tried to evoke in 1977 has been heightened by further chronological distance for some responding artists in The 1950 Ford Show, while for others it’s so far away or entirely removed from experience that memory has jumped tracks and careened down another path.
“Memory is an amorphous, broken thing,” Easton explains. “A lot of people added narrative to their drawings, and people tried to include their own aesthetic into the process.”
Several centre on family stories; Craig Talbot circles a Ford part that went to the grave with his grandfather, opining, “Drawing the interior of a car from memory is like trying to draw ears.” Illustrator Seth delivers a dazzling reproduction of a big, dark Ford, buffed by his trademark retro-fetishization. Tammy Salzl shrinks the Ford to toy size, and sets it in a tableau of childhood neglect. As promised, there is also sex—scantily clad beauties and stories of backseat seduction counter narratives situated deeper in childhood.
Many works are conventionally representational, but others are impressionistic—a glow of headlights, scrawled gestural skeleton, or fraction of Ford logo. There are breakdowns of memory—fossilized attempts at a car that turns into something else, the way memories can flit maddeningly just out of reach of consciousness.
Some drawings latch onto the cerebral moorings of Ruscha’s question, investigating the fallibility of representation and recollection. One illustrator repeats a car front over and over, each time different yet perfect in its own way. A graphic designer insinuates Ruscha’s gunpowder drawings and use of text with silvery Ford lettering in liquid graphite, while another artist depicts “an abstract representation of his neural nets.”
“In Japan, ‘Ford’ is a bicycle brand,” Easton notes, indicating a charming delineation of a bike surrounded by mutant chick-beings. Another artist remembered Ford as a kind of tractor.
“There are even critiques of car culture in a few works,” Easton says. The most pointed of these is a lurid vintage gas pump, robotic looking and surrealistically menacing.
The show is a feast and delight, deserving of continued life in a catalogue or other archival form. What it does best, in answering a specific question of parlour trick banality, is show the rich legacy of the questioner and his contemporaries. Pop freed its successors to fracture and reassemble the everyday world kaleidoscopically, to mix the grand with the base, and to remember selectively in pursuit of an unruly truth. V
Through Jan 6
The 1950 Ford Show
Guest Curated by Anthony Easton
AGA
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