Authors@google - Alexandra schwartz

>>Chris: Welcome, everybody, to an Authors@Google talk here in the Google Santa Monica office. Today's speaker is a writer of the book, Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles, the author of this, this book; editor of a collection of Ruscha's writings, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, published by MIT Press in 2002; the coordinator of the Museum of Modern Art's Modern Women's Project -- a curatorial initiative to increase scholarship on women artists. She's also the co-editor of Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, 2010, and co-curator of "Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940 to Now," currently on view at MoMA. A contributor to various journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogs, she received her PhD from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Harvard University, and we look forward to hearing Alexandra Schwartz talk about her book, Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles. Please welcome Alexandra Schwartz. [applause] >>Alexandra: Thanks, Chris. It's really a pleasure to be here, and thank all of you for coming. Is anyone already familiar with Ed Ruscha's work? Any fans? Well, I'll tell you a little bit about him. He's an LA-based artist. He actually works right down the road in Venice. He has a studio there. And he's been around since the early 1960s. He came up with the pop artists -- people like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, who some of you may be familiar with. But he really was one of the first LA-based artists to make it big during that time in the 60s, and he showed with a gallery called the Ferus Gallery, which was on La Cienega Boulevard, along with other artists like Joe Goode, Billy Al Bengston, and they formed an avant-garde community in LA, really for the first time. There hadn't been sort of a set group in LA before then, and Ruscha was really the most successful of this group. He's shown internationally, beginning in the 60s up to now. And now he really has a reputation as being one of the key artists of his generation. So, there's a lot of his work at the LA County Museum and the LA MOCA, The Museum of Modern Art, where I work -- he really is all over the place. He was the representative to the Venice Biennale a couple of years ago. So, it's particularly timely to talk about him now, I thought, and what I'm gonna focus on today is the relationship he had with Dennis Hopper, who I'm sure a lot of you know he just died a few weeks ago, and there's a show of his work opening at MOCA on Sunday. So, I hope you all go check it out, and this presentation that I'm gonna give today, I adapted for the catalog essay for the Dennis Hopper show at MOCA. So, you can also check that out. But something that was really interesting about Ruscha is that he was one of the first artists to forge a relationship with his contemporaries in Hollywood. Of course, so much art goes on in LA, especially now in terms of visual arts, but at the time there wasn't that much. Really, the creative output coming out of LA was mostly through film. And Ruscha was in a really unique position in that he had one foot in the visual art world and one foot in Hollywood. So, what you're seeing here is a 1962 painting called Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights. It's a really large work; it's about 11 feet long. It's in the collection of the Whitney Museum in New York, and this was one of Ruscha's first big examinations of Hollywood, so, of course, you recognize what this is. It's the 20th Century Fox logo that you still see at the beginning of any 20th Century Fox film. And it was part of a series of works that he was doing at the time dealing with words -- especially logos, things that you find in everyday objects. So, this work is called Actual Size. It's about SPAM, which, of course, we all know. You see a little SPAM can floating through space down at the bottom and then the big logo, SPAM, at the top. And then Annie, from right around the same time, 1962-63, recognizable from the logo for Little Orphan Annie, the comic strip that would've been especially well-known at the time. So, Ruscha was doing a series of works in which he was looking at just things that we see every day. If he were doing these now, he'd probably do a Google sign as well. But this was particularly pointed because he was interested in Hollywood, interested in kind of how Hollywood operated, and what it meant in American culture at the time. He was taking it straight from the logo, so we're used to seeing the logo with this sort of drum and trumpet fanfare, and that's just a screen shot from what the logo looked like in the early 60s. But he's changing it. He's making it a lot simpler -- he's turning it into something static instead of something moving. So, the time when he was doing this was a really interesting time in Hollywood. It was the period in the 60s into the early 70s when Hollywood was changing a lot. It was going from the kind of big studio productions, like Doctor Dolittle, kind of these very elaborate, very sort of unnaturalistic works to this period that came to be known as "The New Hollywood." So, I brought a bunch of posters up here from some of the most important new Hollywood films, which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with. So, The Graduate was one of the first, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, which of course, Dennis Hopper directed and starred in -- I'll be talking about that more in a second -- The Godfather, etc. So, during this time, Hollywood was realizing, you know it's the late 60s, there's a big counter-culture movement and hippie movement and it was, they were starting to realize that they had to incorporate some of that youth culture into the studio movies that they were producing. So a lot of young directors came up -- people like Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, etc. So, this was happening at the same time that Ruscha was working as a visual artist, as a painter in LA. And, in fact, there had for a while been a sort of group of people, artists and young Hollywood types, who were all meeting together and discussing ideas. They particularly met around an artist named Wallace Berman, who lived in LA from the 50s through the 60s, and he had a kind of group at his house, a salon, where artists and also Hollywood figures would come and hang out. One of his biggest fans and closest friends was James Dean, so this was right around the time that James Dean was working. And then Dennis Hopper came to this group as well, and eventually, Ruscha. Berman was an artist in his own right, so what you're seeing on the left are a bunch of works that he did in the late 50s into the 60s. He had a journal called Semina, which was almost a precursor to a zine. It was very cheaply done. He'd do a lot of collage -- cutting up bits of magazines, movie magazines, that kind of thing -- and then distributing it. And he was also a filmmaker. And what you're seeing on the right is a still from a film called Aleph, which he did in the late 50s, that incorporated the same kind of found imagery with some texts, specifically Hebrew text, that he was very interested in. So, Berman was doing his own work, but also bringing together musicians, poets, painters, people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, would come through, Jay DeFeo, a painter from San Francisco. And so, what people said is that everyone just came and hung out at Wallace Berman's house, and you never knew what was gonna go on, but it was it this very creative, very interesting kind of atmosphere. So, one of the most prominent Hollywood figures to come through Wallace's Bermans, Wallace Berman's house was Dennis Hopper. I know there's been a lot of discussion about him in the paper recently because, of course, he sadly just died. But at this time he had already starred in Rebel Without a Cause in the mid-50s. He had started on a film career, but he got blackballed from Hollywood. He kind of misbehaved on the set of one of his films, and the director, Henry Hathaway, said, "You'll never work in this town again." And he basically didn't for about eight years, but at the same time he was really interested in visual art. He had been making photography since he was a teenager. He was painting; he was making sculptures. This is an example of a sculpture he did with the artist, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp had a show at the Pasadena Art Museum, which is now the Norton Simon, and during the opening dinner they stole the sign from the hotel, and they kind of decided it was a work of art -- a ready-made work of art. And they both signed it -- so this is signed by Duchamp and by Dennis Hopper. So, Hopper, because he couldn't work in film, he wanted to be working creatively. He was very passionate about the visual art scene in LA, so he focused on that. And he got to know people like Ruscha, other artists at the time. This is a really great photograph from this period. This was at the sculptor, Claes Oldenburg's wedding, I'm sorry, these were done by Claes Oldenburg. It was at a curator named Jim Elliot's wedding down by the Santa Monica Pier. And what these are are plaster sculptures of slices of wedding cake. This is a photograph that Hopper took. So, as kind of a present to this couple, Oldenburg made all these plaster wedding cake sculptures, and Hopper told me that at the end, he and his wife went and gathered up a bunch of these slices that people had left, and they made themselves a wedding cake sculpture that became part of their collection. So, it really gives you a sense that it was this incredibly creative time during this period. People were having these sort of crazy events all over the city, like at the Santa Monica Pier. At the same time, Hopper was also making his own work. This is a work called After the Fall from 1961 to 64. And what it is is a photograph. Hopper was very active as a photographer and it's of posters on a wall, so they had been kind of stripped away so you're seeing different layers of posters that have been plastered down. And it's of this girl whose eyes have been sort of obscured. You can tell maybe it was a movie poster, but it's been all ripped up and then he added found elements to it. So, what you're seeing here, those are Kleenex boxes. So, the kind of covers you put on a Kleenex box, which he's attached to the edge of it. So, it does it, it's got this kind of surreal juxtaposition of elements that shouldn't be together, but he was putting them together and this was very new for what was happening in art at the time. That shows a view of the original photograph, and then the photograph with the sculptural found objects on top of it. At the same time that Hopper was making this kind of work, he was also really active as almost a photojournalist. He was fascinated by what was happening at the time politically; of course it was a really tumultuous period, the mid-60s. And he was going to a lot of political events and capturing them. So, what you're seeing here are pictures from the Selma to Montgomery march, led my Martin Luther King. And I interviewed Hopper a few years ago when, before he got sick, and he told me that he was just kind of hanging around and Marlon Brando drove up to him in his car and he's like, "Hey, you wanna go to Selma?" And Hopper was like, "Yeah, sure, let's go." So they went. And he took these really incredible photographs of, of course, this really key time in American history. So, it's something that's not very well known about Hopper that he was, he considered himself a historian in a way. He wanted to capture what was going on at the time. I'm just comparing these two. The bottom here is a photograph by Robert Frank, one of the most prominent photographers of the 1950s. He did a book called The Americans, which some of you may know. But it just kind of shows what Hopper was looking at when he did this top photograph from Selma. He was thinking about Robert Frank and really thinking as a very serious artist. He wasn't just dabbling in this; he was very passionate about it. And all of these will be on view at MOCA, starting on Sunday, so you guys should check them out. He was also, I'm sorry about this slide. I don't know what happened there, but he was also photographing the LA art scene. So, he would photograph his friends and he was very intentional about it. He wanted to photograph people who he thought would have big careers. He kind of wanted to be the documenter of these people's careers; so sadly, this photograph that didn't come out very well in the presentation. It's of the artist, Bruce Conner, and this woman is Teri Garr. I don't know if you guys remember her from a lot of 80s movies, but she was involved with the art scene at the time. And on the left is Toni Basil, "Hey Mickey", from the 80s. So, they were all part of this group and kind of working with each other, collaborating on each other's things, and then on the right is just kind of a funny photograph of Billy Al Bengston with an anonymous woman in the background. He was also photographing people like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, New York-based artists but who were coming through LA. Warhol actually had his first show at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega. And then Ruscha. This is a photograph of Ruscha from 1964 that Hopper took and has been reproduced really often and sort of captures the young Ruscha. As you can see, he really looks like a movie star. He was kind of movie star handsome and like James Dean or Marlon Brando -- he's striking that kind of a pose. And because Ruscha's work was so bound up in the Los Angeles cityscape, Hopper really wanted to show him on an LA street, so this was taken, I think, just further down on La Cienega Boulevard in front of an electronics supply store. So, you've got the sign "TV Radio Service", and then Ruscha kind of to the side with that movie star pose -- so, capturing both the personality and also what his work was like. [pause] So, Hopper concentrated on making art throughout most of the 1960s, but something he told me that I thought was really interesting was that he always knew he wanted to go back to making movies, and he saw doing photography as a way of training himself to be a director. So, he would never crop his images. He always shot in full frame and he really saw it as kind of a way of going to school; a way of teaching himself so that when he was ready to make a film, he would know how to do it, and he'd have a certain amount of skill. So, in 1969, Hopper made Easy Rider. Has anyone seen Easy Rider? Yeah. A fair number of you have. Something that was really interesting for me when I watched it again is just how much a sort of period piece it is. It's just so 1960s. So, what you're seeing here is Dennis Hopper on the left, Peter Fonda on the right and for those of you who haven't seen it, it's kind of a road movie. So, Hopper and Peter Fonda are these two guys, they smoke a lot of pot, they do a lot of other drugs, and they go on this road trip to New Orleans and they, along the way they pick up Jack Nicholson, who was very young at the time, you sort of wouldn't recognize him, but he was the straight-laced lawyer and they sort of get him into the hippie lifestyle. And they take this long trip, they have a lot of different adventures and in the end, I don't think I'll be spoiling it because you can kinda see what's coming, but they get in trouble down in the South who are really threatened by these long haired hippie types and they end up getting shot. So, it's this kind of parable about how there's this new youth culture that the rest of the country just kind of can't deal with. So, it became a really important movie for the New Hollywood that I was mentioning earlier. It was 1969, the New Hollywood sort of took off during the 70s, but it was the first time that the youth culture really appeared in a Hollywood movie, and Hopper became a kind of icon. He had all these groupies, accolades; he sort of had the status similar to someone like John Lennon. But what was really interesting about this movie from the perspective of someone who's interested in the art of the period, is that the style of the film was very related to the style of people like Ruscha, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, etc. It was kinda what was happening in visual art in LA in the 60s. And Hopper was taking all those influences and putting them into a Hollywood film so that they became much more widespread and influential then they otherwise would have been. So, these are stills from se-, from a Bruce Conner movie about the JFK assassination, so both very famous images that, obviously, we all recognize. But it was a very experimental film. It had a lot of very quick cuts, it kind of would repeat, and Hopper said that a lot of his influences for Easy Rider came straight from Bruce Conner, so what looked very, very new in a Hollywood film actually had been happening for awhile in the LA art community. He also had a lot of imagery from contemporary art. What you're seeing here is by Jasper Johns, the painting Flag, from 1955 in The Museum of Modern Art's collection. And then down at the bottom, the Peter Fonda character's name was Captain America in the movie, so he had his motorcycle helmet with the American flag, his whole outfit, and Hopper said that he was getting the idea from that straight from someone like Jasper Johns; kind of thinking about the symbolism of the American flag turning it on its head a little bit. So, it was really interesting for me to understand that in Ruscha's work, what Hopper was doing was so important and then vice versa. There really was this very close collaboration between the two artists, and they remained friends the rest of their lives. The rest of Hopper's life -- Ruscha of course is still working. So, it really was kind of a quid pro quo. They were talking to each other and a lot of the same themes, the idea of the road trip, kind of the big expanse of America, traveling around the country; it was very much a part of Ruscha's work as well. So, what you're seeing here is a painting by Ruscha called Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, from 1963, one of his most famous early works -- showing a gas station, so kind of referring to the highways to being out on the road to taking road trips and this, actually, was bought by Dennis Hopper. This was one of the first works that Hopper bought and one of the first works that Ruscha sold, so there really was this very close collaboration there. And Hopper was dealing with similar things in his own photography. This is a work called "Double Standard," and the MoCA show is actually called Double Standard: Dennis Hopper's Art. This was one of Dennis Hopper's most famous photographs, so this is quite nearby here. I think it's the corner of, I don't know if any of you guys would recognize it, but it was right by Ferus on La Cienega. So, it's the same Standard station that you're kind of seeing going down the street, you see the view from the, the view in the rear view mirror. So the same interest in car culture, in the road, popular culture, signs are things that Ruscha deals with a lot, as does Hopper, sort of our everyday lives in looking at it in a new way. And there's a direct comparison. The Standard station in the Hopper photograph and then down there, with Ruscha. Ruscha also did a book of gas stations. It's called, literally, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, where he took photographs of gas stations on Route 66 going from LA to Oklahoma City, where he was from. So, it's a little, tiny book. They're literally photos of 26 gasoline stations, it's called Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and this is one of them. So you see the connections between what these two artists were thinking about -- thinking about the cityscape, thinking about being out on the highways. Ruscha also did several other books at the time, and I'm just giving you little images of them that I'm not sure what's going on with the quality there, but at the top is a book called Every Building on the Sunset Strip, where he photographed every single building on the Sunset Strip; spliced them together into an accordion fold book. So if you stretched it out, it would be about 20 feet long. And then this is called Some Los Angeles Apartment Buildings, so continuing to look at the urban landscape, think about it in any way. So, whereas the previous, we'll just go back to that, this book, the way he did it was he sat in the back of a pickup truck, and he had a camera that would shoot automatically, so it would shoot picture after picture after picture. And then he'd splice them together by hand so that you got this kind of view of the street as if you were driving along it. And he said that it, for him it was very much related to film because if you think about film being a series of images moving very quickly, it was something kinda similar that he was trying to do in this book. But Ruscha also made his own films during this period, and the first one he made was called Crackers. And you're seeing two shots from it here, actually from the book. Something that was interesting about Ruscha is that he was making paintings, he was making drawings and prints, he was making books at the same time he was making film. So his movie that he did here came out of a book called Crackers, in which he had this kind of very strange story that unfolded throughout its pages. So the story that was this guy picks up this woman for a date -- kind of wines and dines her. And then takes her home to this hotel room that he's rented and so you kind of like can guess where the story's gonna go. But, in fact, what he wants her to do is to lie on a bed of salad and then cover her in dressing. So, it's this kind of, it's kind of a shaggy dog story. You don't really understand the point of it, but it's got a very distinct narrative and it goes in this direction that you never would have guessed that it would. So he did this book in 1969, and then he decided to do a movie of the same story. So, to kind of flesh out the story that he had told picture by picture into an actual film. And these are shots from a film which was called Premium. And the reason it's called that is because after he made the salad, the protagonist wanted crackers and so he leaves the, he leaves the girl in the bed with the salad, goes out and buys Saltines and then goes to his own apartment and eats his Saltines in bed, alone. So, you've got Crackers, the book, and then Premium, the movie. And these are shots from the movie that kind of show how it was set up, show how he adapted the book into the film version, and the artist, the protagonist, is actually the artist Larry Bell, a sculptor who was working in LA at the time. So it's kind of pushing it in, in another interesting direction. A visual artist who had done this book and then decided to do film, so it was really fascinating to me to see this back and forth. And this is a still from the movie where it's the same people that were in the book that got slightly different styles -- they're acting it out, but the same basic scenario. Ruscha then went on to do another film in 1975, which is another kind of shaggy dog story, sort of surreal. It stars someone who's playing an auto mechanic and he's kind of futzing around with the car, but over the course of the story, he becomes more and more sort of like a scientist. His coveralls gradually become less and less soiled, so that's the miracle of the title that this kind of divine intervention has happened as this guy is fixing a car. Again, it's surreal; it's not supposed to make a lot of sense. But I think what's really interesting about it is the same set of themes that he keeps dealing with, cars, sort of looking at everyday life in a new way, never quite knowing what's gonna come of it. So these are the only two films that Ruscha did, but I think it was really interesting that at the same time that, that there was all this interest in more experimental films in Hollywood. You have this artist that was working in LA, his studio was actually in Hollywood at the time, who's also making films. There's just all sorts of very cool crossovers happening there. [pause] At the same time, as I mentioned, Ruscha was also dealing directly with Hollywood in his more traditional art. So this is the image that we saw at the beginning and in fact, it was a series of many pictures at the time that he was doing dealing with Hollywood. This is a sketch that he made where he was trying to work out the idea for the Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights. I really love this. It's done just on a piece of stationary from a hotel, but you see him thinking through what these very recognizable things, like the 20th Century Fox logo -- kind of taking them apart, pulling them apart and putting them back together. [pause] He did a series of these Standard Station images, and I think it's really interesting to notice just how similar they are to the 20th Century Fox image. It's the same, basic compositional format, so the, the very strong diagonal. This is called Standard Station with Cheap Western Torn in Half, so up in the corner, that's a very precise, illusionistic rendition of a comic book torn in half. So he's got this very literal way of titling his pictures, kind of surreal, but having a lot of fun with it, of great sense of humor about it. These are two drawings that show how he sort of got to this format of the Standard Station, preparing it, again thinking about these every day things that you see every day and looking at them in a new way. Down here is obviously the same compositional format, but he's pretended that it's a stack of his Twentysix Gasoline book, Station books that I told you about. So in the front is, you see the title and then he was imagining that there was a whole stack of book behind it. And this is something that you see a lot in his work. This is a painting from the early 60s, obviously same subject matter, Paramount Pictures. He ended up not being happy with it and destroying it, but this is an early photograph that we have it, just to show that he was doing it. So Hollywood was something that he was thinking about a lot, kind of thinking about how he could integrate it into his art. He also is very well known for his series of images of the Hollywood sign. These are things that he's gone back to, again and again, throughout his career. He did his first Hollywood images in the late 60s; the first painting was 1968. But this is an early example of how he was starting to think about the Hollywood sign and for him, it represents this kind of almost Boulevard of Broken Dreams type of idea, that it's so iconic that you can see it from so many different places in the city, but especially during this period, it was in terrible shape. It was crumbling, there had been some suicides from people jumping off some letters, so it was really this sort of dark side of the Hollywood dream that he was interested in. And this is a drawing that he did on a menu. So this is like a paper menu from a Schraff's coffee shop. This is one of his first fully rendered images of the Hollywood sign; it's a drawing, pastel with ink and pencil on paper. And he usually shows the Hollywood sign against the sunset, sort of at an iconic, LA, smoggy, orange-red sunset. And he always did that so you think of walking off into the sunset, riding off into the sunset, these sort of clichés of Hollywood movies, but he's showing it looking kind of ominous, a little scary. He did another series called The Back of Hollywood, a theme that he just went back to again and again. He was always fascinated by it. Another version from the 1970s. And then as I mentioned, he was always interested in language. He plays around with language, you saw it in the SPAM and the an-, in the images, so beginning in the mid 70s, he started doing literally drawings with words in them, talking about Hollywood. So, this is a pastel called Properties in Hollywood, and he kind of makes you stop and think, "What do you mean by 'properties in hollywood'?" Is he calling on the language of real estate brochures? Is he talking about a property, like a kind of film script, something like that? So he's taking these language, these bits of language that are sort of familiar, but making them strange, making you think, "What does that actually mean? Why is he putting this is in a drawing? What's the point of it?" So, again, making you stop and think about every day things that just pass through your life and you don't usually consider. This is a drawing called "Hollywood". It's from a series called Paper Drawings that he did in the 70s, and so it looks like ribbons of paper. It's all completely illusionistic. He's incredibly skilled as a draftsman, but he was able to do it so that it looks as if he kind of set up this paper and then did the drawing of it, but it's all out of his imagination. Hollywood, California from around the same period. Another Hollywood Dream Bubble Popped, this is one of my favorites. It's just, it's so resonant. It calls up so many different ideas, but then you think, "Well, what does it mean? What does it come from? Where did he get this idea?" But it really gets at that sort of dream versus nightmare idea -- the kind of myth of Hollywood. Hollywood is a Verb, another one of my favorites. Doesn't really make sense at all, but you sort of understand what he's saying. He has a quotation that I really like where he talks about how things can be Hollywoodized. You can take the most ordinary, mundane object and Hollywoodize it and it gets this aura about it, it gets this kind of stardust. So that's something he's really interested in, how you can take something very ordinary and humble and make it into something extraordinary that makes you think about it. So, that's about it. I understand that books are coming to you on Monday. They didn't get here in time, but there's a larger version of this talk in the book. Other things that I talk about are the LA art scene of the 60s -- how it came together. I have a chapter on how a lot of architects during the 70s were really interested in Ruscha's books, thinking about the post-modern city, thinking about Los Angeles as kind of a new type of city. And architects -- especially Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who were very prominent during the 70s and 80s, were directly influenced by Ruscha. And then I have a chapter on how Ruscha, and you get the sense of this I think from the Dennis Hopper picture of him, he really was a genius at marketing himself as a movie star type character, and he would place advertisements for himself in magazines, he was very good looking, obviously, but he was very clever at using the media to promote himself as an artist. And he was really one of the first to do that. So, I hope you enjoy the books when you get them. I'm sorry I can't sign them for you and I also really hope you'll go check out the Dennis Hopper exhibition at MoCA. I think it should be really interesting and opens soon. So I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. >>Chris: Any questions? Ok. >>Alexandra: Thank you. Thanks so much everyone. [applause] >>Chris: We have a question right there. He's, he's formulating one. >>Alexandra: Oh, sure. >>Chris: So. >>male audience member1: I thought it was kind of interesting that, that it's kind of the same time, these artists are kind of pointing out the artifice of Hollywood while, while Hollywood is kind of going to verite, trying to be-- >>Alexandra: Yeah. >>make audience member1: more genuine. >>Alexandra: Yeah. >>male audience member1: Is there a relationship there or is it, do you thing that commentary kind of pushed it in that direction? >>Alexandra: I think there's definitely a relationship there, yeah. I don't know. It's funny because Easy Rider, I, I could've thought about this in relationships to Easy Rider because reading the commentary on it in the 60s, in places like Life Magazine and Time, they just saw it as so outrageous and so new, but it was really a watered down version of what people like Bruce Conner, these avant-garde artists were doing. So, I guess I think ultimately Hollywood kind of won because they had the money, and so they were really using the ideas that these artists had been coming up with. But I think that it was symbiotic because the sort of critical aspect and Easy Rider is a pretty critical movie. I think was coming from the art community. So it was this interesting dynamic, it was an interesting take, give and take, and maybe it's cynical to think that, that Hollywood exploited these artists, but I guess I think ultimately that that's what it is. They really benefitted from them. I mean -- it saved their skins. They were in terrible trouble. 20th Century Fox actually shut down for a while in the 60s and these new artists revitalized it. So, I think it's a, it's a really interesting question and a really fascinating dynamic, but I think ultimately they sort of leeched on what the artists were doing for profit. >>Chris: Any other questions? [pause] Ok, I've got a question, >>Alexandra: Ok. >>Chris: So, Ruscha seemed to, especially in his early career, it's like he's got the 20th Century Fox, he's like looking at corporate iconography, and I'm wondering did he, and, and yet he also seemed to like keep his distance from it too, maybe later in life. Did he, did he ever work directly with a corporate patron and, and like do something, some of the things that some other artists have done? Actually don't know about that. >>Alexandra: Not directly. He's very interesting. I've tried to get him to talk a lot about that and he doesn't love to talk about it. But he never worked for a Hollywood studio. Some artists did in the 60s, but since, he's really become kind of a favorite of Hollywood collectors, so David Geffen owns a lot of his work, well Hopper, obviously. I was just watching a preview online for Sophia Copola's new movie, and there's a Ruscha in the movie. It's kind of up against a wall, and I met the other day with the main person at Ruscha's gallery, he shows at the Gagosian Gallery, and I was meeting with his main contact there and that, that print was on the wall, and I said, "Oh my God, did you know that this is in this preview for the Sophia Coppola movie?" And he's like, "Oh, yeah. We lent it to them." So, Ruscha definitely, he's kind of popular I think with Hollywood collectors now. A lot of actors collect his work. He's good friends with Jack Nicholson, so I think that there's definitely a relationship there. It's not kind of set in stone, but because he's here, because he's such a kind of cool guy, like you see him in magazines a lot, he's dated a lot of Hollywood actresses over the years. I think that it's there but he kind of doesn't like to talk about it that much. >>male audience member2: I just have a comment and then a question. One is if anybody hasn't seen Easy Rider, it's playing tonight-- >>Alexandra: Wow. >>male audience member2: at The Silent Movie Theater, and they're actually doing a big Dennis Hopper retrospective all month and then after tonight, I think, the second movie tonight is a documentary about when he was making the last movie-- >>Alexandra: Yeah. >>male audience member2: which is supposed to be like, rarely seen, and he kinda really went off his head while he was making that. >>Alexandra: Are these at MoCA or somewhere else? >>male audience member2: No, at The Silent Movie Theater, it's on Fairfax. >>Alexandra: Ok, cool. >>male audience member2: Yeah, it's a cute little theater, art theater. And then my question was just is he still, is Ruscha still working today and, and what is he working on? [Alexandra coughs] >>Alexandra: Excuse me. Yeah, I'm seeing him tomorrow, actually. He's very much still working. His studio is right in Venice. I don't know what his very latest things are. I haven't seen him in a little while, but I'll find out tomorrow. He did recently a series of paintings of mountains with words above them, kind of superimposed upon them, and he told me that the mountains came from a magazine that had a story on the Himalayas. So, it's one of the Himalayan Mountains, and then he has language on top of it. He's really dealing with a lot of the same issues that he has throughout his career -- a lot on language, word play. He's painting a lot; he's still making books. He's actually done a series of books documenting other Los Angeles streets. I told you about Every Building on the Sunset Strip, but he also photographs the Pacific Coast Highway, Hollywood Boulevard, every few years, so he did a book that was Hollywood Boulevard: Then and Now. So, one set from the 60s and one from the early 2000s, kind of right next to each other. But yeah, he's still very active, he's in his early 70s and still working a lot. >>Chris: One, one more question. So, is he, I know that he did a lot of LA, Hollywood, Southern California based kind of imagery early on in his career, does he come back to that as well? >>Alexandra: Yeah, he still comes back to the Hollywood sign a lot. The logos, like the 20th Century Fox, he hasn't done that in awhile, but he's always recycling images, so I wouldn't be surprised if he does come back to it at some point. He has the same sort of preoccupations that he keeps coming back to, as a lot of artists do. It's really interesting to watch that over the course of artists' careers. >>Chris: All right. Thank you very much. >>Alexandra: Thanks so much. It's been a real pleasure. [applause]