ed ruscha's one way street

Ed Ruscha’s One-Way Street*

JALEH MANSOOR

OCTOBER 111, Winter 2005, pp. 127–42. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Edward Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956, delivered by the car trip he andhigh school friend Mason Williams took in Ruscha’s black 1950 Ford from Oklahomato the suburban-like stretch of a rapidly developing L.A. Over the next seven years,Ruscha drove the distance between L.A. and Oklahoma City several times, oftendocumenting it by taking snapshots of gas stations along U.S. Route 66 that recordthe experience of the drive. Although many of the photographs were shot fromacross the road, several of the images are framed by the visual parameters set by a carwindow. They appear to be taken from the spatial perspective of the dashboard.1

A collection of flatly laconic snapshots then got strung together and reroutedonto the pages of a book. Titled with the threadbare economy of fact, TwentysixGasoline Stations (1962) is a booklet that presents, or rather fails to present, theroad’s physical extension through the connect-the-dots-like points of flat gas stationsignboards. Although Ruscha already assumed a peripatetic approach characteristicof his later books, driving without adhering to any linear west-to-east route, theterrain between stations, implicit from stop to stop, is never presented to view.While the drive itself was usually linear, starting from the west and heading east,the route in the book drifts free of any such destination-driven order. Succinctlyinvoking the canned canon of the history of painting, Ruscha said of his organiza-tion of the banality of the interstate, “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet. I justhave U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.”2 He nonetheless perversely

* A version of this paper was first given at the Réclame Conference Series in November 1999, at theThread Waxing Space in New York, on a panel organized by Judith Rodenbeck. I am indebted toRodenbeck, Rachel Haidu, and T’ai Smith for their many criticisms. I would also like to express gratitudeto Benjamin Buchloh, Lisa Pasquariello, Sara Nainzadeh, and Hal Foster for their contributions to thisincarnation of the essay. 1. Eleanor Antin, “Reading Ruscha,” Art in America 61, no. 6 (November–December 1973), pp.64–71. Antin points out that many of the photographs were shot from outside the car, and across theroad. The mode of visuality internalized by occupying the car nonetheless conditions, if not outrightstructures, these photographs. 2. See Edward Ruscha, “A Conversation Between Walter Hopps and Ed Ruscha, September 1992,”in Romance with Liquids: Paintings 1966–1969, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery and Rizzoli, 1993),p. 100; reprinted in Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed.Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 312–328.

withholds U.S. 66 from our visual access by physically occupying it. The means oftranslat ing the experience of the road to view—photographs of materialencountered on the trip—effectively obscures the road itself. The car functionsas a frame for everything we see, mediating our perceptual field. The Seine, bycontrast, was occasionally the object, the iconography, presented and fetishizedin Monet’s painting. It appears in rather than as the field of vision.

The renegotiated subjective and experiential dimension of vision introducedin works such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966),Royal Road Test (1967), and Real Estate Opportunities (1970) responds to a singularthread in the historical matrix of postwar urban America. To flesh out the viabilityof locating the car as the mediating structure of Ruscha’s work, I will elaborate onthe bankruptcy of established mediums, both painterly and photographic, availableto him under the new perceptual and structural conditions of fifties America. Thecar provided a specific communicative solution at a particular juncture, the mostsalient feature of which was the irrelevance of previously pertinent artistic mediumssuch as “art” photography or documentary photography. These changed aestheticconditions ran parallel to, if not outright internalized, a set of changed socio-economic conditions in an era of explosive consumerist exuberance. Ruscha’s useof the car emerges as the vehicle for an apparently unlikely staging of subjectivitythat exceeds both obsolete models of integrated consciousness on the one hand andthe increasingly expropriative demands of the culture industry on the other.

Of course, Ruscha had a set of predecessors, the figures of fifties literary andbeat culture, who thematized the road as one way of protesting postwar consumeristvalues. In 1951, Jack Kerouac set his sights on the road with a story of two guysheaded west, just as Ruscha and Williams would in 1956. In his fictional account,entitled On the Road and published in 1957, Kerouac had wanted to express “thesoul that journeys along the open highway of America, in search of permanence, ofvalues that will endure and not collapse.”3 Ironically, the very object of advancedconsumerism in fifties America—the car—is called upon as the medium of trans-port away from the flux of commodity culture, which Kerouac characterized asephemeral, vulnerable to exchange and substitution.4 The journey out westpromises, tacitly, to provide distance and furnish a perspective, as it leads towardpermanence and enduring values elsewhere. The car not only delivers the protago-nists from being situated or implicated anywhere along their travels, but chartsthem in relation to the grand transcendental terms, indeed the sky, that Ruschavehemently eschews. Leaving Louisiana to head further west, one of the charactersof On the Road asks: “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people andthey recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It’s the too huge worldvaulting us as we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” In

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3. Regina Weinreich, The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern IllinoisUniversity Press, 1987), pp. 40–41. See this volume for an analysis of On the Road, including Kerouac’sown appraisal of his aims in that particular work of fiction.4. Ibid.

5. Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1995), p. 34.

Kerouac’s quest narrative, the road extends like a vertical line between the nose ofthe protagonists’ car and a future understood spatially.

The field that projects Sal and Dean onward functions like a perspectivalline along which they move toward an apex point. Kerouac evokes a traditionalorganization of depth perspective as essential to the road, which plays a pivotalrole in structuring the narrative. His framework, moreover, hinges on a prospec-tive model of perception and cognition.5 Louis Marin develops the idea of aprospective model of vision, in which the formal construction of representation ofthe world to the self involves three terms: the eye, the object, and the “visual ray”connecting the distance between eye and object. This line, or ray, organizes per-ception and, concomitantly, investment in the outside field, placing emphasis ona single point at the far end of the ray and diminishing the rest of the perceptualfield, which becomes increasingly relegated to the status of undifferentiatedground. Kerouac’s framework depends upon a prospectively bounded subject.That is to say that consciousness and perception remain fully integrated, unified,and mapped along the spatio-temporal coordinates of conventional single-pointperspective. The narrative is bound by the faith that this model remains a viablemeans of engagement with an exterior at that particular historical juncture, asthough an “outside,” a space above and beyond systems of equivalence andexchange, existed elsewhere, especially given the protagonists’ embodied situated-ness in the car, on the road. Ruscha, by contrast, begins to enact a model ofsubjectivity in covert resistance to, and in dialogue with, both the proliferation ofsystems of exchange and Kerouac’s naive denial of those conditions.

The manuscript of On the Road embodies Kerouac’s belief in the function ofnarrative to relay him to a self-determined destination, from a beginning to anend, and beyond that, an ends. According to Kerouac biographer Anne Charters,

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Jack Kerouac. On the Roadmanuscript. 1957.

“Much has been made of the manuscript. Its mode of composition has become amodern myth. It was first written on a 16-foot roll of paper. Kerouac sketched theflow that existed intact in his mind.”6 Here, the mind transposes itself withoutmediation; nothing complicates the transmittal of thought to hand. Appearing as ifmagical and “intact,” the narrative proceeds perspectivally from a present to afuture. Like the vertical stretch of road up ahead on the highway, it implies the possi-bility of an internally bounded relationship to the external flow of objects, acontrolled distance between inside and outside. By contrast, Ruscha’s books high-light the many layers of mediation through which they are constituted; editing andcropping appear at once arbitrary and yet all the more purposive for pointing to theconditions of the frame as the very matrix of vision. Ruscha’s production respondswith implosive violence to both Kerouac’s mid-century version of an individualizedManifest Destiny and the Romantic American dream, and to the object of Kerouac’sown critique, an increasingly ubiquitous consumer culture. This response demon-strates the changing terrain of American culture between 1951 and 1963 throughthe procedures of occupying and newly configuring the celebrated fifties tropes ofcar and road to ultimately enact another form of hybrid resistance.

Royal Road Test takes the celebrated Kerouac typewriter and tosses it fromthe car into the desert, where it breaks against the gravel and becomes so muchwreckage, finally part and parcel with the ground. Ruscha and collaboratorsWilliams and Patrick Blackwell then go to great lengths to document the physicaltraces of the event in its aftermath, which results in a book of photographs oftypewriter parts embedded in dirt and sand that occupy the entirety of the frame.The plane of vision is literally smashed into the desert ground. The viewer arrivesafter the test has happened, to confront wreckage, and the aftermath of violentimpact is nonetheless neatly contained in the pages of a discrete book.

Two years earlier, in 1965, Ruscha had begun to develop his own use of thecar as a medium. He shifted its role from that of a trope reflective of an integratedsubject, as it had been in Kerouac’s work, to that of an internally hybridized assem-blage of camera, car, and road, which could investigate a new set of communicativepotentialities. Ruscha suggested first an elision between the car and the snapshot,and then one between the process of collecting photographs in small books andthe process of driving as an act of passage. The car figures in the bookwork as thevehicle enabling the act of photography, as if the car were itself part of the cameraapparatus, generative of another means of framing experience.

Next, in 1966, Ruscha started reeling down L.A.’s Sunset Strip and takingsnapshots with a now motorized camera attached to his car. The recorded visualtrace of this drive, a bandlike stretch structurally homologous with the extensionof the Strip itself, positions our point of view as from the car’s passenger side. Thelocation of the camera, coextensive as it appears to be with Ruscha’s Ford, rotatesfrom the car’s frontal orientation to its lateral window. The accordion format of

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6. Charters in Weinreich, The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac, pp. 40–41.

the book, which suggests a temporal unfurling, mimics the sense of passage implicitin a drive. As the car rolls down the length of the street, it produces a series ofimages of contiguous spaces horizontally aligned. Entitled Every Building on theSunset Strip, the resulting piece is organized as two parallel ribbons, one for eitherside of the Strip. The decision to present each side of the road in this format(separated into two thin bands divided by a wide band of white) further voids anysense of perspective, of buildings that exist in three-dimensional space.

Having fixed the exterior space as parallel to the car, in contrast to a conceptof the car penetrating the space through which it moves, Every Building on theSunset Strip suggests a nontraversable block between the viewer and the external


Ed Ruscha. From Royal Road Test.1967. All images courtesy the artistand Gagosian Gallery unless otherwise indicated.

flow of urban landscape. Outside objects are inaccessible; the car’s movement onlyever skims over their surface, never accessing spatial depth to reach them. Thebuildings and cars on the Strip take up very little space; the book’s layout preventsany conventional signifier of distance on a two-dimensional plane. At the sametime, the suffocating flatness of the exterior world pushes it squarely up againstthe car window. The tiny ruptures between photographic units also insist onabsolute flatness. Any coherent perspectival rendering of space—as when a sidestreet draws away in a diagonal line to signify recession—buckles in on itselfthrough a fault line, where two snapshots are grafted side by side to continue thehorizontal extension. The stitches between snapshots read like visual pleats thatcreate inevitable imperfections on a clean seamless surface, alternations betweencontinuity and discontinuity that the work simultaneously ignores and empha-sizes. The lines between snapshots refuse to conjoin properly in many instances,leaving the trace of Ruscha’s own process of connecting photos together.Sometimes a sign, a billboard, or a car will simply break off (between 8282 SunsetBoulevard and Sweetzer Street, for example), as though it were erased. Through aperceptual crease, the almost seamless piece folds in on itself in minute breaks.And of course this barely noticeable erasure takes place as the photographic appa-ratus, the camera, snaps to “capture” the presence and plenitude of its materialsubject. As “the strip” serially unwinds, moments in its temporal and spatial unrav-

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Ruscha. From Every Building on theSunset Strip. 1966.

eling sink into a nonspace despite, or rather because of, the absolute surface ofthe photograph squarely reproduced on the printed page.

The empirical flatness of the support—that flatness of modernist doctrinemeant to preserve the autonomy of the work and differentiate it from the real spaceof the viewer—begins here to signal flatness as an experiential condition of dailyreality, recorded with the bland facticity implicit in Ruscha’s singular approach tophotography. Ruscha’s use of the car as a device through which to mediate anyunderstanding of the exterior field of view proposes an internal contradiction, asthough the trope of the car had been chosen to drive along a dialectic particular tothe mid-1950s: the tension between exuberant affirmation of and resistance to a newmass commodity culture. Benjamin Buchloh discusses the affirmative dimension ofRuscha’s work under the rubric of an aesthetics of indifference, as evidenced by theformal logic of the work, in which “the commitment to antihierarchical organizationof universally valid facticity operates as total affirmation.”7 The horizontality of EveryBuilding on the Sunset Strip does function as a repository for the unmediated recordingof every bit of data on the Sunset Strip. The structural properties of the work aretransparent to Ruscha’s failure to manifest not only any conscious authorial intentionin how the work is organized, but even to engage in any kind of selection. The subjec-tive agency of the artist, and by reciprocal exchange that of the viewer, becomesentirely voided, spoken for in advance by a set of external forces.

Another way of interpreting Ruscha’s car-based books is to see his exploitationof the car-to-road-to-book-of-photographs as an assemblage of choices—within anincreasingly limited matrix of possibilities—that frame and mediate an experienceof that expropriative “outside,” comprised of a newly leveled terrain, reorganized byhighway, dotted with the signage of consumerist abundance, and traversable only bythat urpostwar commodity: the car. This assemblage exceeds the logic of total affir-mation; Ruscha’s inaugural use of the car as a vehicle mediating active articulationtransforms the work’s seeming banal facticity and initially apparent neutral indiffer-ence. In other words, the car sets in place, however paradoxically, an apparatus ofengagement. The books, after all, are at once marked by the interpolative exteriorfunctions of the road and car, and characterized by a response that resituates thereader/viewer in an experiential dimension of process, even as they present newmodes of banality under which the subject must learn to “speak.” The car could notmediate the encounter between vision, the subject, and the exterior field were it toreflect a total determining force brought to bear by that outside.8 The car is reorga-nized as a vehicle of articulation, rather than as an inert object that renders the


7. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration tothe Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990). Buchloh’s interest in Ruscha neverthelessappears to exceed the limitation of these categories as well.8. See Rosalind Krauss, “‘And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman,” October 81(Summer 1997), pp. 5–33. “Can one ‘invent a medium’ without believing in the redemptive possibilities ofthe newly adopted support itself ? Can something function as a medium, if it is not a vehicle ofexpressiveness but only a target of attack?” (p. 10). The car could not function as a communicativevehicle were it completely interpolative, rendering the subject passive, as object.

subject equally inert as he passively moves through an environment unresponsive tohis experience.

The questions nevertheless begin to mount: how does the medium of photog-raphy account for the books such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip and TwentysixGasoline Stations? What of their status as books? As objects? Were we to provisionallyaccept the proposition of viewing the car as the means that generates the work,and mediates the procedures by which the work is made, what are the conditions ofthe impossibility of deploying previously established mediums such as painting, oreven photography? Conversely, what conditions of possibility does the car-as-apparatus generate?

The idea of work as mediated through the car that we see in Ruscha’s booksconfronted a paradoxical problem, a historical moment and context that placedthe work of art, in its traditional medium-bound form as painting, sculpture, or“fine art” photography in the tradition of Edward Steichen, under duress. Theother context within which to consider Ruscha’s books is the legacy of Americandocumentary photography as practiced under the WPA, which had also lost itsrelevance in the absence of any immediate motivating factor or contemporaryconsequence by the 1940s. The mediums that had provided a coherent formthrough which to speak no longer held the same relevance to the conditions inwhich Ruscha sought a vehicle for visual articulation.

*

At first, when Ruscha investigated the relationship between the car and thephotograph, the two seemed interchangeable, as if one might substitute for theother, and the car could symbolize the photograph. The ’38 Chevy, for example,presented 1938; it exhibited a photograph-like index of that year. Ruschaexplains that “there was something about the curves of it.”9 A year old then, hecould not have had any actual memories of 1938, but the car neverthelessemerged, a snapshot out of time, a fragment drawn from temporal continuity.10

Cars were like snapshots, mnemonic in the same way a photograph could be, ful-gurating with a sense of recognition yet distant, removed from the subject’s ownexperience.

By the time of the many car trips between Oklahoma and L.A. that arerecorded in Twentysix Gasoline Stations, however, Ruscha departed from the logic ofsubstitution between the car and the photograph, which was a relationship orga-nized around metaphor. He replaced it with an elision between the car and thepractice of photography. Rather than occupying the position as the object at the endof the process of representation, the car becomes the apparatus through which

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9. “I was born in ’37, so I have no personal recollections of it, but the ’38 [Chevy] just somehowstayed with me. I’m not sure what it is—it’s a snapshot out of time” (Ruscha in “A Conversation withWalter Hopps,” p. 99).10. Ibid.

visual presentation is enacted, performed.11 The car’s presence as the structuremediating the possibility of visual production is ubiquitous in Ruscha’s printedwork. And when asked in an interview with Dave Hickey in 1982 why he failed tocomplete a particular work, Ruscha replied, “It’s probably too late, I think I missedthe exit, the off ramp. I just can’t get it finished from where I am now. Maybe I’lldrive back around.”12 Reprinted on the flatbed of the page, the printed surfacecollapses with the road; the two fold into one another.

In the codex-like procession of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, both the bookform and the medium of photography appear to provide a language that would offerthe work a discursive context, or a “discursive space.”13 But it is the reassurance of anysuch identity, of any such discursive parameter, from which the work departs. Havingstarted with and rejected photography as a system on which his work could draw,Ruscha’s work opens onto other structural limits. Yet it elaborates its language as itunfolds outward, transforming itself in process, in passage. Despite the work’s appar-ent photographic status, Ruscha vehemently eschewed claiming photography as hismedium. As A. D. Coleman pointed out, “the Sunset Strip consists of continuous motor-ized photos printed on an accordion fold . . . to form an impressive and funnycollection of photographic works by an artist that does not consider himself to be aphotographer.” To all of Coleman’s inquiries, Ruscha baldly stated, “I have no interest


11. The topos of the car does not operate iconographically—as the object of representation—as itdoes in John Chamberlain’s or Richard Hamilton’s work. Rather, it mediates an understanding of theexterior world.12. Dave Hickey, “Available Light,” in The Work of Edward Ruscha, exh. cat. (New York and SanFrancisco: Hudson Hills Press and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 19. It would be toosimple to read this response as a glib metaphor for any working process, or as universal condition. Thecar’s presence as structural condition, as the agent for the possibility of visual production, is ubiquitousin Ruscha’s printed works. 13. For a discussion of “discursive space” as a discursive formation, as a system of rules set into opera-tion through assumptions about the spaces in which the object in question was to circulate, seeRosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” in her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and OtherModernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 131–50.

Ruscha. Every Building on the Sunset Strip. 1966.Installed at Gagosian Galley, Los Angeles, 2003.

in photography as a medium. Atget? I love his work just because it’s like going on alittle trip. And that’s what I like about it.”14 Photography, like driving, becomes amobilizing process. Furthermore, Ruscha deployed photography as a means with-out any evident or fixed end, calling it “an excuse to make a book,” which in turnremains open-ended, peripatetic.15

Every Building on the Sunset Strip participates in the temporal entanglementthat photography permits, that of a continually present-past tense. For the piecefreezes the Sunset Strip in the stasis of the continual present, even as the imagesderive from the irretrievable instant in which the camera shutter clicked. TheStrip nevertheless further complicates matters by performing a sense of future as thepages accordion outward. Past, present, and future are drawn out of their rela-tionship of consecutive succession and exposed as simultaneous, as frozen in asingle ribbon.16 This simultaneity must be differentiated from the simultaneity ofthe “pregnant moment” in narrative painting. Where the moment invested withall of the weight of narrative possibility presents the intersection that discloses thepast and suggests the resulting future, Ruscha’s simultaneity operates as a noncli-mactic unfolding devoid of causal sequence. This band form engendered by thecar’s movement does indeed have its own history as Other within the division ofmodernist mediums. The possibility of the coexistence of spatiality and temporal-ity in a single form plays the part of the repressed within Enlightenmentaesthetics, as assimilated to the modernist work of Clement Greenberg and laterMichael Fried. Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon (1766) defines the inherent limits ofpoetry and the visual arts along the axes of spatiality and temporality, a prioriassuming their fundamental mutual opposition. Through its extended, temporallysuccessive unfurling, coupled with the stasis and spatial simultaneity of thestretched-out whole, the horizontal band fails to recognize the spatial and tempo-ral as two discrete and oppositional registers. For Lessing the scroll form (such asthe scrolls that issue from the mouths of figures in old Gothic paintings) carriedthe remnants of pre-Enlightenment imagery.17 Here, the scroll conveys the failureof representational logic through its hybridity and ambivalent state as both spatialand open to temporal passage.

In Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the horizontal band’s procession is notgoverned by a reassuring model or template replete with its own internal pleni-tude (such as the book or the photograph), or its own coherence as structurallyspatial or temporal. Photography and the book are at odds as the work negotiates

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14. Ruscha in A. D. Coleman, “Edward Ruscha: My Books End Up in the Trash,” New York Times,August 27, 1972, p. D12; reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 46–51.15. Ruscha refers to photography as “an excuse to make a book” in numerous journals andsketchbooks.16. This simultaneity would have to be differentiated from the simultaneity of the “pregnant moment”in narrative painting. Where the pregnant moment represents the weighty, almost climactic moment inthe narrative that discloses the past and suggests what will take place in the future as a result, the scroll isnot a chain of causality. It operates in Ruscha as a flat unfolding devoid of causal sequence. 17. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. EdwardAllen McCormick (1766; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 78.

the space between these discourses or determining structures, and thereby ulti-mately exceeds them. It does not occupy or reference a previously opened culturalspace, or advance a signifiable object or form. Rather, it elaborates its languageand form as it works in passage, and transforms itself in process. In other words, asit unravels, it elaborates from within itself an other.

The floating band of Every Building on the Sunset Strip is cut away from a start-ing point, or an origin, that would explain it and lend it a sense of proper cause,and likewise lacks an end that would provide closure. It appears to take place in azone void of any external orientation, any ground. As a fragment of a continuousstretch, the work surfaces as the articulation of passage. As such, it does not occupyor reference a previously opened cultural space; rather it elaborates its form as itstretches outward. As a ride down Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip, the piece alsoexpresses temporal passage experienced as “between times.” Time—duration—issuspended and captured in an instant that is liminal. It opens onto anotherinstance of time and space, the passing instants of an exchange, a process.

The book itself surfaces as a function of the road as the two terms map ontoone another. The book format is defined by motion; turning a page propels thetext as it displaces it. Passage thus determines the logic of the car’s movement,which in turn generates a horizontal band structure suspended in a tensionbetween pictorial spatiality and temporality. Ruscha’s work thus troubles photog-raphy’s static logic, and paradoxically reconstitutes it as “going on a little trip,”necessarily dilated through time and space.

What are the conditions enabling, or requiring, even, this hybrid modality longbanished from modern aesthetics? Ruscha’s printed work inaugurates a communica-tive structure responding to the rhythm and particular exigencies of the historicalmatrix of postwar urban America. Points of intersection emerge with new spatial andperceptual structures of the 1950s American context. Of course it is difficult to distin-guish a cultural history of the 1950s and ’60s from the omnipresent topos of the carand the road. Postwar America saw the sudden introduction of the car into almostevery household as the middle class somehow became (mythically) universal. On aconcrete level, one of the federal government’s first national projects after the warwas to harness contemporary military technology to terrace and level the land inorder to install a nationwide webbing of interstate highways. The highway, and itsrole in the creation of American suburbia, fed into and off of the accelerated postwarproduction and consumption of cars, that emblem of Taylorized ’50s culture.Postwar modernity’s quintessential commodity object, in turn, produced a model ofsubjectivity. On the register of individual experience, the car naturalizes a sense ofperception in movement: a new understanding of motion became integrated intothe driver’s everyday perception, thereby tailoring subjectivity to assimilate newmodes of sensory interaction with everyday objects and everyday spaces. This modelof vision becomes an experiential norm.

Given this perceptual norm, is it possible to resist the interpellative force ofthe car and the road? Can the assimilation—a totalizing imprint into every recess


of daily sensory perception constituted around car-generated experience—success-fully suppress any model of a resistant subject? Aren’t there other perceptualschema that are brought to bear on one’s experience of the car, of the road? Whatwould happen if a “metaphorical vehicle were borrowed in order to take a spin inreality?”18 Could an actual vehicle be borrowed to take a spin in reality, or better,to reroute reality?

The book and the topos of the car already occupied an interlocked rela-tionship within modernism. Tracing the evolution of printed media, WalterBenjamin noted, “Centuries ago it began lying down, passing from the uprightinscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking tobed in the printed book.”19 Benjamin’s investigation of the flat page takes placein an essay entitled “EineBahnStrasse,” or “One-Way Street” (1928). This text iscomprised of aphorisms, observations, and memories assembled between 1924and 1928 and connected in the essay by the single thread of a metaphor of a cardriving through a landscape of perceptions, thoughts, and interpretations ofmodern life. The essay suggests a topographical consciousness where the tempo-ral unfolding of thought is mapped onto an idea of space explored, as well asonto the concrete space of the printed page. At the same time, Benjamin notesthe potential obsolescence of the traditional book medium, and calls for new,more readily accessible forms of literature relevant to a new industrial mass soci-ety. “One-Way Street” begins with a gasoline station. The author is filling up as heprepares to set out on the road, recast in the essay as the stretch of print on thepage over which the author traverses a field of thoughts about modernity. Thecar becomes the vehicle through which the subject opens onto and addresses theexterior world and the reader.

For Benjamin, the model of the subject as guaranteed by a contemplativeinteriority has, already by the mid-1920s, been replaced with a subjectivity formedby new modes of perception. Although critical of the expropriation of the subjectby mass culture, Benjamin’s work nevertheless acknowledges the obsolescence of acontemplative critical capacity that operates as a function of “correct distancing”of “perspectives and prospects” and coherent “standpoints.”20

He specifically evokes the car, for him a strictly metaphorical vehicle, to dealwith this loss and retain critical potential in new conditions of modernity.21 In“One-Way Street,” the car’s journey over the road still presents the possibility ofactive, if fragmentary, consciousness. The car metaphor, in other words, presents amode of insinuating the self into the complicated folds of new, ever-flatteningdaily experience. Because of the changing conditions of daily life, the traditional

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18. Denis Hollier raises the idea of a “metaphorical vehicle to take a spin in reality” in The Politics ofProse: An Essay on Sartre, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 3. 19. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Dementz (New York: SchockenBooks, 1986), p. 77. 20. Ibid., pp. 85, 74.21. Benjamin’s point echoes a theme raised in Hollier’s The Politics of Prose, p. 3.

book form—with all of its requisite depth of subjective interiority—fails to com-municate. It reads as a “pretentious, universal gesture” unable to confrontfragmentary modernity.22 “Significant literary work must nurture the inconspicu-ous forms that fit its influence in active communities—in leaflets, brochures,articles. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.”23

Benjamin draws the following analogy: “Opinions are to the vast apparatus ofsocial existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pourmachine oil over it, one pours a little over the little hidden spindles and jointsthat one has to know.”24 In other words, the weighty book, its internally centeredtotality, represses the hidden, subtle contradictions of modernity. Benjamin’s cartraverses and dismantles, through the juxtaposition of fragments, the syntheticideological whole.

Yet, true to dialectical form, this evocation of interstitial text, generated bythat ride down a one-way street headed to modernity in order to come to termswith modernity, anticipates its own disappearance and appropriation. Having castthe book’s emergence in a radically emancipatory light, Benjamin predicts horizon-tally-oriented print’s imminent absorption into the totality of capitalism’s imageculture. He traces the utopian horizontalization of print to point out that now “itis pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to thebrutal heteronomies of economic chaos . . . it begins just as slowly to rise againfrom the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than horizontalplane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely onto thedictatorial perpendicular.”25 In other words, Benjamin’s investment in text-as-roadexposes itself as an insistence upon the critical import of a horizontality sugges-tive of process—as the process-oriented act of reading insists upon—withinimage-driven modernity.

Benjamin’s evocation of text as horizontality, and horizontality as an experi-ence of passage and movement, becomes a way of moving through the biaxialtension between the actively traversed text and the passively received flood ofadvertisements—understood as the authoritarian perpendicular—while simultane-ously reject ing irrelevant and outmoded forms of literature such as “thepretentious . . . book.”26 Cast as a passage from one cultural space to another, thetext doubly plays the role of a car passing by on the road. While Benjamin’s asser-t ion that the experience of modernity, or the evolution of forms of dailyexistence, requires corresponding new forms of cultural articulation and critique,Ruscha’s work operates in tandem with newly evolved postwar modes of percep-tual experience.

Nevertheless, Ruscha’s work threatens to collapse Benjamin’s dialectic bydriving it to the point of working against it; he reconfigures the horizontality-of-


22. Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” p. 61.23. Ibid.24. Ibid.25. Ibid., pp. 77–78.26. Ibid., p. 61.

road-as-reading-and-moving to the point of almost stasis and total flatness. Yet,having arrived at an extreme position, Ruscha’s car proposes another internalcontradiction. The Sunset Strip participates in the logic of general equivalence oflate-twentieth-century image culture, insofar as it posits a serial organization thatrenders all of its terms equal in an external, undifferentiated flow. On the otherhand, that seamlessness is willfully pressured from within and ultimately deferredby the band structure’s failure to internally unite.

Real Estate Opportunities (1970), a work generated by driving peripateticallyfrom place to place, also elaborates this notion of passage. The book is composed oftwenty-five photographs of twenty-five parcels of land that were on the market at thetime. An address functions as a caption to each image. Every single plot is of coursedifferent from every other, and yet appears utterly generic and incidental along thesegment of highway or road that also makes its way into the photograph. Apart fromtheir value as salable items, the spaces themselves do not express much. They are bothurban and rural patches of undifferentiated land. Endless irrelevant detail, such asshrubbery, plots of grass, and gravel on roads read as a kind of visual static. Caught inthe photographic image, these details fail to characterize the plots. Each detail, inturn, reads more as an accident, an exception, than as necessary to the visual field.The plots of land lack features that would define them or assign them an identity.Peripheral, these lots border onto something, some other property.27

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27. For a discussion of Ruscha and entropy, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Zone,” in Bois and Rosalind Krauss,“A User’s Guide to Entropy,” October 78 (Fall 1996), pp. 83–88. While Bois is focusing on the (anti-)structural aspect of Ruscha’s work—part of a greater project on Bataille’s concept of the informe and itsimport in twentieth-century art—under the late global capitalist (alter-)condition of universal entropy,I am formulating a fugitive model of subjectivity that begins to come to terms with both the prolifera-

Ruscha. FromReal Estate

Opportunities.1970.


tion of systems of exchange and a naive denial of those conditions (as in Kerouac). See also Bois,“Thermometers Should Last Forever,” this volume, pp. 60–80. 28. Ibid., pp. 85–88.

This also characterizes the kind of vacancy—on the part of the subject aswell as the historical moment—that forces articulation of the condition of theinterstice through which expression, now divorced from the traditional mediumsthat would have delivered it, comes to be. For there is no ground, no a priorigiven, such as a medium, with a historically constructed language on which todraw. This mode of expression, the peripatetic ride over interstitial urban spaces,is not articulated through a medium or form ready to present it to view. Thismode of expression is not the result of intentionality (bounded in an awareness ofcause and of finality), but emerges now as something contingent and singular.

The interstitial spaces of Real Estate Opportunities evoke a real-estate boom onthe decline, the sleazy, get-rich-quick undercurrent of rapid urban transformationin late-’60s Los Angeles. The car roves from site to site even as this process getscaught by the “snap of a camera” model of temporality and rendered frozen instill images in a book. For Yve-Alain Bois these negative spaces, most likely “reinte-grated into the circuit of production,” speak to a universal late capitalist conditionin which systems of exchange allow nothing to go unassimilated.28

The lots nevertheless surface as sites of flickering momentary resistance.Ruscha photographed these spaces on the very cusp of their reintegration into sys-tems. The “for sale” signs reference a seemingly monolithic system of consumptionthat will absorb each space and eventually spit them out again as entropic waste prod-uct. But those very ephemeral instances themselves suggest a vestigial and contingentspace for the subject. Like the horizontal band of Every Building on the Sunset Strip,generated by the camera/car as it continues on, they fold out of the flat omnipres-ence of an endlessly expropriating social system, and simultaneously pose a splitsecond of dissonance within the obsessive order of the drive to urban form.

The band as road, as passage, participates in a temporal cycle where its predic-tions for the future consume the very conditions of its inception. The road, as asegment of passage, remains suspended in its coming and going. The car only everarrives or departs; it never becomes part of a site, a location.

In an essay for Artforum entitled “American Prayers,” Kim Gordon inter-prets Ruscha’s work as a fugitive passage through a brief stretch in culturalhistory:

Pop art glorified the image of America’s surface while exposing theviolence of consumerism. But the shock value and absurdity of theseimages made the cultural critique entertaining. It was the music of thesixties that really hinted at what lurked within the American dream.

L.A.’s lush landscaping only begins to make sense when you realizethat underneath it is a desert. L.A. is Ed Ruscha’s desert on fire. His workis analogous to that era of apocalyptic music . . . then Manson and the

family were tried and convicted, the Vietnam war ended, everythingreturned to normal, corporate rock began to grow.29

Critical to Gordon’s narrative of the history of the West Coast sixties is her place-ment of Ruscha in the momentary stitch barely connecting the naively utopianbefore and the resigned and affirmative after characterized by the increased corpora-tization of youth culture, of the rise of the culture industry at large: the apparentlyseamless harnessing of culture and the accompanying metamorphosis of the SunsetStrip. In Gordon’s dialectic, Ruscha occupies the connective tissue, the momentarypassing through, between the terms rather than the body proper of any term. His isthe undercurrent that snaps in the blink of the camera’s shutter in the car’s pas-sage over the road, the desert on fire, the ground welling up and then receding again.A structuring characteristic of the car-as-medium is that it does not present a still,fixed form. The simultaneously fragmentary and timeline-like unfolding of EveryBuilding on the Sunset Strip emerges from this construction of temporality: the cardrives through space that yields to time. Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building onthe Sunset Strip, and Real Estate Opportunities articulate the fragment that wells up inthe blink of the camera’s shutter and then recedes as the car passes over the road, asegment in its incompletion.

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29. Kim Gordon, “American Prayers,” Artforum (April 1985), pp. 73–78.

ed ruscha's one way street

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