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