I love Ed Rusha’s work (having first encountered it in a major show of drawings and prints at the Auckland Art Gallery way back in 1978) and have been impressed with his energy and creativity over a really long period of art making – 50 years. The U.K. Telegraph has a great article and interview on his current retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London.
But I laughed at this little gem from the interview. (Ruscha is speaking of LA in the 1950s.):
What it didn’t have was much in the way of indigenous art. ‘The LA art scene was very small in those days. New York was capital of the art world without a doubt in the 1950s and 1960s. Los Angeles at that time was a cultural dry spot, the Australia of the art world – way out there, very small and undeveloped. There were two or three people who actually collected art and we young artists had no idea about how to reach them.’
Ok, we’re not LA, we’re not the USA, but what immediately springs to mind (seeing as we’re talking “indigenous”) is the wonderful recent Tommy Watson show, and the current Early Papunya Paintings at the Grey Gallery . Outside that realm, (in fact, “Outsider”) I think of the huge Cunningham Dax collection in Melbourne (12,000 works), as well as the myriad outsider and mainstream artists making their work from just where they happen to be in Australia.
This proves nothing of course, it’s all about where you’re looking from. Here though, we’re not “way out there”. There’s a danger, when you’re at an assumed epicentre, of missing other points of view.
