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Lot Essay
Ruscha printed and published Hollywood (1968), his seventh print, using a split-fountain technique in which several colors were blended directly on the screen, creating a modulation of color which was difficult to control and subsequently reflects the artist's direct involvement with the screenprinting medium.
Like with Standard Station (1966) and Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) before it, Hollywood (1968) depicts an emblem of the American landscape in a stylized aesthetic reminiscent of advertising. Once an advertisement for the nearby 1923 housing development that read Hollywoodland, the sign was officially declared a "cultural historical monument" by the city of Los Angeles in 1973. The Hollywood sign is a word constructed; it is as much a piece of architecture as it is an emblem of Southern Californian lifestyle.
The Hollywood sign closely parallels Ruscha's visual modus operandi: an abstracted word inserted into a somewhat disparate environment, against which the word takes on additional meaning and implication. As a flat construction of wood and paint, propped up against a hillside in the manner of a billboard, it is an ideal signifier for the lifestyle of glitz and glamour that it evokes, a shoddy façade for a mythologized world. The word Hollywood encapsulates an entire culture, one coveted by people who do not live there, who experience Southern California through film, television, and advertising.
Ruscha's intervention in representing the Hollywood sign is minimal yet telling. The sequence of letters is linear and in Ruscha's preferred perspectival orientation. By manipulating typeface, scale and color--tools of advertising, which he applies to fine art--Ruscha plays upon recognizable associations. The long, horizontal orientation evokes both a landscape and a widescreen cinematic viewpoint, as does the over-the-top, romanticized sunset background. His vision of Hollywood belies a world that is sinister yet coveted, evoking a sense of wonderment and appreciation, mixed with trepidation.
Ruscha once explained that "Hollywood is like a verb to me. It's something that you can do to any subject or any thing." Ruscha's profound understanding of this notion of Hollywoodification--that Hollywood is a readymade idea--makes the present work a seminal expression of first generation Pop art.
Like with Standard Station (1966) and Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) before it, Hollywood (1968) depicts an emblem of the American landscape in a stylized aesthetic reminiscent of advertising. Once an advertisement for the nearby 1923 housing development that read Hollywoodland, the sign was officially declared a "cultural historical monument" by the city of Los Angeles in 1973. The Hollywood sign is a word constructed; it is as much a piece of architecture as it is an emblem of Southern Californian lifestyle.
The Hollywood sign closely parallels Ruscha's visual modus operandi: an abstracted word inserted into a somewhat disparate environment, against which the word takes on additional meaning and implication. As a flat construction of wood and paint, propped up against a hillside in the manner of a billboard, it is an ideal signifier for the lifestyle of glitz and glamour that it evokes, a shoddy façade for a mythologized world. The word Hollywood encapsulates an entire culture, one coveted by people who do not live there, who experience Southern California through film, television, and advertising.
Ruscha's intervention in representing the Hollywood sign is minimal yet telling. The sequence of letters is linear and in Ruscha's preferred perspectival orientation. By manipulating typeface, scale and color--tools of advertising, which he applies to fine art--Ruscha plays upon recognizable associations. The long, horizontal orientation evokes both a landscape and a widescreen cinematic viewpoint, as does the over-the-top, romanticized sunset background. His vision of Hollywood belies a world that is sinister yet coveted, evoking a sense of wonderment and appreciation, mixed with trepidation.
Ruscha once explained that "Hollywood is like a verb to me. It's something that you can do to any subject or any thing." Ruscha's profound understanding of this notion of Hollywoodification--that Hollywood is a readymade idea--makes the present work a seminal expression of first generation Pop art.