I have to admit that Ed Ruscha's back story--he once dated Diane Keaton!--delivered me to THEN NOW more than any particular interest in his first retrospective at MoMA. Seeing his work here and there over the years hadn't made much of an impression and I never could figure out how to pronounce his name, a problem now solved by his explicit instruction in a display case. It's ROO SHAY although I can't remember if the accent is on the first syllable or the second.
"Actual Size" by Ed Ruscha (1962)
But I quickly warmed up to his early, graphic work filled with blue California sky.
"Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half" (1964)
It certainly offered an enticing (and meta) selfie back-drop. Those were the days.
"Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights" (partial, 1962)
I hadn't known Ruscha was a photographer (we both took the same shot in Rothenberg, six decades apart), but his obsessive documentation of Los Angeles suggested that we had something in common as young men who had left dusty towns--Oklahoma City, in his case--for life on opposite coasts. New York's much older, down and dirty architecture in the 70s had bewitched me, too.
Normandie (1965)
Every Building on the Sunset Strip(1966)demonstrates yet again how much artistic creation requires the courage of your convictions. Ruscha's belief that he was making art made it so. Overtime, he shot 750,000 images on the streets of Los Angeles, many from a flat bed truck customized for that purpose. The Getty has digitized his negatives creating an exhaustive visual archive of a city as it aged from the 20th century to the 21st.
Psychologists say that people love nothing more than the sound of their own name spoken by someone else. Maybe that's why I mistook this for mine.
"Self" (1967)
I must admit I was intrigued by the "Chocolate Room," which Ruscha debuted in 1970. Please don't eat the art.
Every career has its ups and downs. His painting becomes less interesting as the concept loses its freshness, perhaps even to himself. Another artist painted this background; he added the text from High-Rise, a dystopian novel by J.G. Ballard.
"The Music from the Balconies" (1984)
Ruscha appears to be shooting for something different in this atypical work. It eschews words for numbers and hearkens back to his midwestern lineage: the inevitability of harvests.
"Clock" (1994)
One gallery exhibited mostly black and white works.
This sophomoric, politically incorrect palindrome has become even more of a flash point since its creation two decades ago.
"Tulsa Slut" (2002)
Ruscha, now 85, continues to work, occasionally without his usual subtlety.
"Our Flag" (2017)
THEN NOW didn't draw crowds as large as those in other galleries on the free night sponsored by Uniqlo.
Twilight turned out to be the perfect time for my first exploration of the sculpture garden since the museum's redesign.
I got up early to complete my circumnavigation of Rothenberg atop the city's fortress walls. Only two other cities in Germany have medieval walls as intact. That cutesy horse and carriage sign in the lower right-hand corner tells you everything you need to know.
Like the previous evening, I walked in the direction that had the best light for photos. A wooden canopy protects visitors from the elements.
I descended to check out St. Wolfgang's, a late Gothic church which hadn't opened yet.
Empty streets yielded quiet treasures. Tour buses don't begin rolling in (and then filling up the streets with horse-drawn carriages) until after 9 a.m.
You may be wondering why the Allies mostly spared Rothenburg from bombing given its proximity to Munich, Frankfurt and Nuremberg, my next stop. An assistant U.S. Secretary of War took pity, and local American troops gave the Germans a three-hour window to surrender prior to launching an artillery assault. The Germans complied, defying Hitter's orders to fight to the end. It's now on UNESCO's list of world heritage sites. I heard something similar about Heidelberg which, IMHO, is more worthy of a visit due in part to the presence of a world-class university which promotes knowledge, not folklore.
I climbed to the top of the bell tower on the tall white building (no easy feat; it felt like going back in time the higher I got) for a bird's eye view. Note the fountain in both photos.
As part of his MoMA retrospective, I subsequently discovered that artist Ed Ruscha had taken a similar shot more than six decades earlier. The patterns of people moving on the street interested him more than the architecture.
"Rothenberg" by Ed Ruscha (1961)
I couldn't very well depart from the city without checking out Germany's national headquarters of Christmas porn.
Käthe Wohlfahrt sells some pricey cuckoo clocks, too. Each of these will set you back at least $1,000. I should have kept the one my parents gave me as a kid.
Other stores were just beginning to open as I made my way back to my hotel, just outside the city walls.
This cafe awaited the afternoon rush with a branded scooter, appropriately orange.
I had one final item on my check list: getting a close-up of a Jewish star I had seen from atop the city walls the evening before.
