Ed Ruscha, Parking Lots (6), 1967/99



Richard Linklater, still from the filmWaking Life, 2001


In 1960, American conceptual/pop artist Ed Ruscha finished art school in LA. That same year, Texan filmmaker Richard Linklater was born. In 1967, the year that I was born, Ruscha made the unpreposessing art book, Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles. In 198-something, I first encountered Ruscha's art books while attending art school at NSCAD. My initial reaction to "Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles" was a rush of relief. I recently had a similar experience watching Richard Linklater's film "Waking Life."


Try this: Ed Ruscha is to Joseph Kosuth what Richard Linklater is to Larry Clark.


The thing that really struck me while watching "Waking Life" was how we are still turning over the bleak homogeny of modernist urban planning with a sort of questing bewilderment. Ruscha's photographs of parking lots and swimming pools had a bemused humour to them, like, "guess what folks, there's actuallly content in this!" Linklater's film struck a similar chord. Both go beyond the abject alienation angle to a real humanist commitment to ideas. In Linklater's case it's almost embarrassing (Douglas Coupland, for example, plays it more cool...except for his little book Life After God which I just read ...and loved). Ruscha was more suave as well, but he was also closer to the source, to a genuine formal modernist appreciation for the patterns made by empty parking lots.

Hal Foster: "...Ruscha has dampened his art in a way that nonetheless allows it to be distinctive: a deadpan-ness - funny, desolate, sometimes both - is conveyed in his homely shots of solitary gas stations or aerial images of empty parking lots..."



Richard Linkater: "One thing we’ve all learned is that the corporate father has no interest in you as an individual. So if people could be aware of that, and stay on their toes, adapt … that’s a good thing."



Metropolitain Museum of Art's Timeline of Art History: "Ruscha's books paid tribute to and slyly parodied the romantic vision of the road epitomized by writers and artists such as Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank, while also subverting the rapidly expanding market for what the artist described as "limited edition, individual, hand processed photos."

1. Aerial photography still fascinates me, probably because it is linked to war and/or the military, and fear.

   There’s Sally’s video. The black crow is the bird of danger. death. There’s that map of the city that goes in and out of focus, and yet it shouldn’t, given the sophisticated technology we now have to move in and out of the grid with satelite imagery. There is the tension.

   The Toronto Parking Authority has an extensive website: http://www.greenp.com/tpa

   It details the idea of offering low fare parking in the city, with Mayor Nathan Phillips declaring over fifty years ago, “business goes today where there is convenient, thrifty parking and stays clear of locations that can’t or won’t provide it”. The websites allows you to locate the green P sites within the city. The map is designed as a grid of green capilaries but there isn’t a seamless drill down to the actual sites, almost as if the software has failed it.

   A University of Toronto study has found 59% of commuters in the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton drive to work. This was reported in metro news today (sept. 19).

   Posted by  on  09/19  at  12:21 PM

2. Dear Sally,

   Thanks very much for your startling piece and for bringing Ruscha together with Linklater. I love it that you use the word “relief.” For me, your post/movie offer me some possiblities for dealing with Corporate Father’s Metro. First, I will let bewilderment arrive as a good thing. Next, I will wonder about whether the Romantic road begins or ends in the slots and hashmarks of the downtown lot. Finally, I will re-read Life after God. All the human-ness (blood-warm water?) in the seemingly abject alien (lines awaiting mechanical company)? Maybe that’s the “tension” Paola’s noting, too. Anyway, these are wonderful. Thank you very much.
   Jake
   Posted by  on  09/20  at  12:02 PM

3. Such nice comments Jake and Paola. Sorry it took me so long to respond, been embroiled this week and not much online. I am really enjoying all the parking lot posts – very poignant. I always think about teenagers sitting on curbs outside of 711 stores, with melting bubble gum on the ashphalt and litter blowing around, waiting for rides, smoking cigarettes, watching cars go by, doing nothing, nothing nothing. Parking lots are really truly empty spaces and we have inflicted them on ourselves.

   Posted by sally  on  09/24  at  01:27 PM

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