"I don't have any Seine River like Monet. I just have U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles." Ed Ruscha
Composed in a noir palette of stark black and cool white, Ed Ruscha’s Porch, 1996, immediately conjures the barren prairie landscape of 1930s America during the era known as The Dust Bowl. Rendered in Ruscha’s uniquely graphic brand of sfumato, the imagery in Porch delicately emerges from a gray haze as a bold silhouette, casting the familiar setting as a highly nostalgic, cinematic stage that is reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s heartbreaking photographs of the catastrophic drought in the Southern Plains region of United States. These images would have been especially evocative for Ruscha as an Oklahoma native, and likely a key source of inspiration for Porch.
Belonging to a 1996 series that depicts four paradigmatic porticos (the others being Doric, Ionic, and Palapa), and originally exhibited together that same year at Gallery Seomi in Seoul, Porch portrays the only uniquely American architecture of the group. Pared down to its basic geometric elements, yet nearly photographic in its implied detail, Ruscha’s scene is of a post extending vertically from a rectangular foundation, with a sharply triangular mass perched above and supported at an angle by a brace. In its most simplified form, the image of the porch is purely two-dimensional, yet the blurred edges of the bold edifice also allow the viewer to see the structure in an exaggerated, three-dimensional form.
Ruscha’s inclusion of the uniquely American porch within this architectural series positions the structure alongside, and likens it to, the signifiers of classicism (Ionic and Doric) and the primitive (Palapa), equating them all in both function and form. This reference to civilization, past and present, is of central significance to Ruscha and is discernible in his most important works. Architecturally, Ruscha’s Standard Station compositions cast the Standard Oil gas station scene, rendered in exaggerated perspective, in a role similar to Porch, as the covered gas pumps are themselves another genre of the classic portico. Many of the artist’s most significant paintings, such as Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-68, similarly employ the classic architectural elements in a deeply foreboding narrative, and often with a particular focus on the portico.
Speaking specifically of the present lot, Hal Foster eloquently describes the American porch as a symbol of the Western frontier and the American dream: “The vaunted exceptionalism of the United States - its democratic dream, its eternal future - was long staked on its western frontier, but in a cycle of paintings that stretch into the mid-1990s, Ruscha displays such tokens as silhouetted teepees, buffalos, and wagon trains headed for the night… This slow fade is perhaps most poignant in a 1996 painting of a lone post of a twilit porch: a staple shot in westerns (it could come from The Searchers, say), this picture appears in the midst of similar paintings of solitary Ionic and Doric columns as if to suggest that even as this post appears almost as classic as these columns, it seems almost as distant too- less a defiant marker, then, than a fragile relic” (Hal Foster, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha, Princeton, 2014, p. 240).