Online-Vortrag // Eva Ehninger: Imagining the Status Quo. Ed Rusha’s Streets of Los Angeles
On June 11, 1966 the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha had a camera installed on the bed of his pickup truck. As he drove along Sunset Boulevard, the camera, fed by a film role, released automatically every second, producing roughly 5.600 individual images of both sides of the famous LA street. During the mid-60s and early 70s, Ruscha’s photographic method of documentation was an inspiration for contemporary urban theorists and architects such as Reyner Banham, Robert Venturi or Denise Scott-Brown, who set out to re-imagine the urban environment by acknowledging and interpreting the contemporary city’s actual make-up, its visual status quo. Today, more than fifty years later, art historians and urban theorists are confronted with the fact that Ruscha has repeated his original shoot of Sunset Boulevard twelve times over the past decades, and has added a number of other LA avenues to his photographic portfolio over time. What is called his Streets of Los Angeles-archive amounts to around 700.000 single images of the city. Again, architects and urbanists are keen to tap into this visual resource to learn more about the lived experience of the contemporary city. The application and processing of Ruscha’s archive as a straightforward documentation of urban reality runs counter to the fact, however, that it is a deeply idiosyncratic visual encounter with Los Angeles, motivated by irony as well as melancholy, and reflecting both dystopian and utopian imaginations of LA. 
Eva Ehninger is Professor for Modern Art at the Institute of Art and Visual History, Humboldt-University, Berlin. She is a member of the Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Angeles Research Initiative of the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. Her current research focuses on photographic norms of representation.
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Der Vortrag ist Teil der Veranstaltungsreihe “California Dreaming: Utopia, Dystopia” des Lehrstuhls Theorie und Geschichte für Architektur, Kunst und Design der Technischen Universität München und des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte.
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Abbildungsnachweis: Ed Ruscha, Sunset Boulevard (shoot: June 11, 1966; filmstrip 270, image 0007), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2019