Jennifer Quick

In this dissertation, I argue that Ed Ruscha’s practice constitutes an incisive and historically rich engagement with deskilling in twentieth-century art. Focusing on the years 1956–70, I map Ruscha’s development of a design-based, conceptual model of labor based on the aesthetic of the commercial artist’s light board and working table, tools that defined his education at the Chouinard Art Institute. Ruscha’s 1960s Standard Station prints, which feature a larger-than-life Chevron gas station, typify this model of labor. The artist based the Standard series on an image that he included in his first photography book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). Translating the photograph into the clean lines of screen printing and dramatically tilting the diagonal of the roof, he transformed the conventional gasoline station into curiously sterile monument. The same image reappears throughout Ruscha’s oeuvre, in works such as the painting Burning Gas Station (1966) and the screen print Cheese Mold Standard With Olive (1969). The repeated reworking of a photographic imagery, filtered through the language of commercial design and transferred into multiple media, exemplifies Ruscha’s working methods in the 1960s.

Each chapter of the dissertation focuses closely on a key work of art to elucidate the specifics of Ruscha’s process and his engagement with the materiality of various media. In his drawings of commercial food products, in particular the 1960 study Box Smashed Flat, food packaging becomes a means to work through pictorial problems and to cultivate a schematic method of drawing (Chapter 1). The food drawings, in turn, presented a compositional basis for the Standard Station prints (Chapter 2), in which Ruscha develops do-it-yourself strategies of design and printing. For his painting The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68), Ruscha borrowed techniques from the Standard prints to represent a public (and controversial) architectural institution, a place that signified the value of artistic labor more broadly (Chapter 3). The dissertation culminates in an examination of Ruscha’s photography books, considering the process of producing these objects and the archives from which they emerged (Chapter 4). While tightly focused on Ruscha’s work, my project also contributes to broader histories of deskilling—as a theoretical concept and a matter of process—in postwar art. Ruscha’s practice offers a means for understanding the complex renegotiations of skill definitive of the historical transition from productive to conceptual labor.