Director
"L.A. Restaurants" opens with a panned shot recorded while driving past Cole's P.E. Buffet in downtown Los Angeles, which was founded in 1908 and claims to be the oldest restaurant and bar in the city. In a manner reminiscent of the typological catalogues of gas stations and buildings on the Sunset Strip first explored in his seminal artist's books of the 1960s, Ruscha documents sixty-four restaurants emblematic of "Old Hollywood" across the LA region. This visual perambulation moves in a spiral formation, from the outer limits of the San Fernando Valley along Ventura Boulevard to the centrally located restaurants near Culver City.
Narrator
Commissioned by The Getty Museum on the occasion of their 2019 Getty Medal to the painter, draftsman, photographer, and bookmaker, Ed Ruscha. Utilizing The Getty Research Institute's preservation and digitization of over a million images from Ed's Streets of Los Angeles photo series, and excerpts from Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," this film puts together two of Ed's major inspirations: Kerouac's text and the city of Los Angeles.
himself
A short film which debuted in a secret location in London to coincide with the release of the NikeCraft x Tom Sachs Mars Yard Overshoe
Self
Ed Ruscha made his very first art in his native Oklahoma, but soon became attracted to Los Angeles . Curator Margit Rowell has examined his extensive body of work and created a brilliant exhibition of his seldom seen drawings. Rowell visits Ruscha in his studio, looking at new paintings with the artist, discussing his progress over the decades and asking him to comment on the many milestones in his large retrospective exhibition at MoCA in Los Angeles.
Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Bunuel, Freud, pop media and art, they place the symbology of Western psychosexual analytical theory into a cross-cultural context, juxtaposing the Oedipal and Kappa myths in a delirious collusion of form and content. The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a vamp from a Hollywood exploitation film. Steeped in perversions and violent longings, both the Kappa and Oedipus legends are presented in highly stylized, purposefully "degraded" forms, reflecting their media-exploitative cultural contexts. In this ironic yet oddly poignant essay of psychosexual compulsion and catharsis, the Yonemotos demonstrate that even in debased forms, cultural archetypes hold the power to move and manipulate.
