Ed Ruscha: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962

Ed Ruscha. Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962

The 26 stations were on the highway from Los Angeles, where Ruscha lived, to Oklahoma City where his mother lived.  In an interview for Artforum, Feb 1965, he said "I have eliminated all text from my books – I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of 'facts'…"   By 1982 he positioned the gas stations metaphorically, akin to the Stations of the Cross, but he was older then.  

Ruscha took 60 stations, edited them down to the 26 most un-eloquent photographs, and published them without any text.  Dave Hickey has written about the kind of numbness that happens when one drives, repetitively, long distances; he mentions John Baldessari's 1963 documentation of the back of every pickup truck he passed between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.  In 1985 I took a photograph out of the side window every 50 miles between Duncan, BC and Halifax, NS, a trip I had done several times.  Fifty was a round number, there were 72 slides, 2 rolls of film exactly – the curious thing was that the 50-mile slices missed every city, so it was a long trail of rocks, trees, horizons, mountains, trees, highway guard rails, trees and one very small town in New Brunswick.  The only narrative was the process, something that was very exciting.  All the deconstruction of motive and meaning came later.

Ruscha photographed the trail of gas stations for all sorts of painterly reasons: serials, ready-mades, a rejection of aesthetics, photography as surface linked to the surface conditions of pop art, the iconography of the everyday.  Plus, there was Kerouac and Cassidy's spooling out of On The Road, and there were cars, cars, cars.  John Chamberlain's crushed car sculpture, Billy Al Bengston's car-enamelled panels: the car was a material with which one could make art.