Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

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Edward Ruscha. Four Books. 1962-1966.
Andy Warhol. From Thirteen Most Wanted Men.
1964.
even in the most superficial and trivial forms of architectural decor.16 It was not
until the emergence of Pop Art in the early 1960s, in particular in the work of
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Claes Oldenburg, and Edward Ruscha, that the references
to monumental sculpture (even in its negation as the Anti-Monument) and to
vernacular architecture reintroduced (even if only by implication) a reflection on
public (architectural and domestic) space, thereby foregrounding the absence of
a developed artistic reflection on the problematic of the contemporary publics.
In January 1963 (the year of Duchamp's first American retrospective, held
at the Pasadena Art Museum), Ruscha, a relatively unknown Los Angeles artist,
decided to publish a book entitled Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations. The book, modest
16. It would be worthwhile to explore the fact that artists like Arshile Gorky under the impact of
the WPA program would still have been concerned with the aesthetics of mural painting when he was
commissioned to decorate the Newark Airport building, and that even Pollock tinkered with the idea
of an architectural dimension for his paintings, wondering whether they could be transformed into
architectural panels. As is well known, Mark Rothko's involvement with the Seagram Corporation to
produce a set of decorative panels for their corporate headquarters ended in disaster, and Barnett
Newman's synagogue project was abandoned as well. All of these exceptions would confirm the rule
that the postwar aesthetic had undergone the most rigorous privatization and a reversal of the
reflection on the inextricable link between artistic production and public social experience as they
had marked the 1920s.