Word: ruscha
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hard to take all that seriously the marginal artists whose work Alloway has selected. Their work may have this or that to do with signs, but on aesthetic grounds it varies between limpness and indulgent kitsch, typified by the show's California contingent, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha and Mel Ramos...
Goode's constructed fragments of staircases are among the emptiest works of art ever to travel east of the Rockies, and Ruscha's variations on the painted word-as-object, which derive from Jasper Johns, are so cute that Alloway's normal eloquence is reduced to calling them "deceptively obvious." In fact, their obviousness is not deceptive; it is just obvious. And Ramos, whose Batmen and Playboy Bunnies go as far as pop ever went in unctuous, opportunistic triviality, seems to be in the show merely to illustrate an amusing feedback loop between pop and commercial...
...prismatic bloom of Larry Bell's immaculate glass boxes, and in Robert Irwin's pale disks floating into immateriality above their own cast shadows. The "look" is always playing games with media (where but in L.A. would an artist do drawings in caviar and gunpowder, as Ed Ruscha did?) and it stops just this side of fetishism and overrefinement...