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On The Road, Again
The Hammer Museum Gives The Novel New Life.
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It takes a visionary to write an iconic novel in three weeks. A man that understands that vision is needed to take that novel into another medium. With his new exhibit, Ed Ruscha aims to become such a man. Ed Ruscha: On the Road takes the challenge of bringing Jack Kerouac’s piercing portrait of American dregs, drugs, and jazz to the world of art. Los Angeles art lovers will have the chance to judge the result at The Hammer Museum.
In a single month, Jack Kerouac transformed years of travel notes into the defining novel of the Beat Generation. The scroll containing On The Road’s first draft has warranted exhibits of its own in the past. Ed Ruscha brings portrait of America crafted in On The Road back to the museum circuit with eight canvas paintings and nine drawings inspired by the book. Ruscha’s imagery aims to create a “psychic road trip” through the work. Interplay with the novel’s language is created through a focus on individual excerpts from the text. For instance, one painting proudly displays, “In California you chew the juice out of grapes and spit away the skin, a real luxury” in bold text over a foreboding mountain peak. In other pieces, Kerouac’s words appear in delicate script above an abstract background.
“It is completely fitting that Ed Ruscha would take up the challenge of looking at Kerouac’s On the Road,” Hammer chief curator Douglas Fogle says, expressing his confidence in Ruscha’s abilities. “In many ways Ruscha’s entire career has offered an artistic corollary to Kerouac’s linguistic portrait of the American landscape.” Ed Ruscha is certainly no newcomer to the material: Ruscha’s marriage of modern images and classic words marks the latest chapter in a long fascination with Kerouac’s prose. In 2009, he crafted a limited “artist book” edition of On The Road, supplementing the text with photographs he personally took or collected. Copies of this version will supplement the exhibit, forging another link between the visual and literary worlds.
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