| Artist: | Ed Ruscha |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Hollywood | |
| Date: | 1968 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Signscape | |
| Movement: | Pop Art | |
| Materials: | oil on canvas | |
| Subject: signage; nature turned into culture; the landscape turned into the signscape; the dreams that only Hollywood can conjure up; the degraded Sublime (manufactured cinematic fantasies and a spectacular smog-induced sunset rendered with airbrush slickness); the sign as a detached signifier cut off from any real referent; Rothko gone Hollywood; a hyperreal vision that is anything but spiritual. Style: slick, airbrushed sky that appears to have no oxygen, no breathable atmosphere; uses a crane shot from the movies to give the sign that bigger than life monumentality; scale and format mimic the technicolor movie screen; vacant and mute, no true sense of a depth charge or a transcendent beyond; the false aura or hype of a beyond; what lies behind the word? Nothing. Context: Hollywood dreams; L.A. as the land of dreams;painting influenced by the movies that manufacture mass fantasies and play into desire; the signscape with its detached signifiers and distancing from nature. | ||
