EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET STRIP
ED RUSCHA, 1966
He photographed every building on the Sunset Strip. Not the good ones. Every one. The clubs, the gas stations, the parking lots, the nothing little storefronts nobody’s ever walked into on purpose. Both sides of the street. Then he printed the whole thing as one continuous accordion-fold book, about twenty-five feet long — north side along the top, south side running upside down along the bottom. Twenty-five feet. For a book. About a street. If you’ve never unfolded one of these — or even a reproduction — you should, because it’s one of the funniest objects in American art. You keep pulling and pulling and more Sunset Strip keeps coming and at some point you just start laughing, because it will not end. It’s like a receipt from God. The photos themselves are terrible. No composition. No lighting. No moment. He mounted a camera on a truck and just rolled. Everything’s flat, washed out, a little grey, and half of it is empty lots. It looks like evidence from the world’s most boring crime. Because Ruscha figured out that you don’t have to make America interesting. It’s already unbelievably weird. You just have to be deadpan enough to let it incriminate itself. A taco stand gets the exact same treatment as the Whisky a Go Go. No hierarchy. No favorites. Just: here’s what’s here. Deal with it. Comedy timing applied to architecture. And like all the best deadpan, the longer you hold the face, the funnier it gets. And then the less funny. Because all this bland, ordinary American stuff laid out end to end stops looking like a street and starts looking like some kind of species report filed by someone who’s never been to Earth. Like: this is how they organized themselves. This is what they built. Look how much of it is parking. Ruscha said he wanted to make books that were “ichiban” — number one, the best. About nothing. And it turns out, when you strip every shred of artistic intention from a photograph of a place, what you’re left with is the place itself. Twenty-five feet of Sunset Boulevard. Not one inch of it is trying to impress you. Has anything ever been more L.A. than that?