On 19 November 2024, Christie’s New York is honoured to offer Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) as part of the 20th Century Evening Sale.
‘Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half is the great synthesis and climax of his masterpieces of the early 1960s,’ explains Christie’s Vice Chairman, Max Carter. ‘Monumental and rich in paradox, it is an icon of the post-war era, of the west, of American art.’
Mark Rozzo, the author of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward and 1960s Los Angeles, traces the origins of this 20th century tour-de-force in the accompanying catalogue essay, High Octane. Below, we share an exclusive excerpt from the text.
Excerpts from ‘High Octane’ by Mark Rozzo
In August of 1956, the 18-year-old Ed Ruscha set out for Los Angeles from his hometown of Oklahoma City in a 1950 Ford. His copilot was his high-school best friend, a precocious teenage musician named Mason Williams.
Their 1,300-mile odyssey is a standard component of the Ruscha origin story, not to mention the cosmology of postwar American art: You could argue that what Warhol was to Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes, Ruscha has been to highways — the all-American, high-speed built landscape of yammering signage and cheapo architecture. Roads, streets, freeways, the blown-tire detritus on their shoulders, the endless sequence of gas stations that line them: Ruscha has been a visual bard of the world as seen through a windshield.
As Adam D. Weinberg, the former director of the Whitney Museum, once put it, ‘No American artist has a more singular vision of the American landscape, especially the impassive iconography of the road, than Ruscha.’ Or, as Ruscha himself said, ‘Everything you see on the street I’m influenced by.’
