Norms, La Cienaga on Fire 1964

Editor: Here we have Edward Ruscha's "Norms, La Cienaga on Fire" from 1964. It's a painting rendered, if I'm not mistaken, using stencils and acrylic. There's something unsettling about how graphic and cool it is, considering the subject matter—a building on fire! What exactly is going on here? Curator: Well, isn’t that the question? This piece to me screams "Los Angeles." Not the postcard version, but the sun-baked, slightly surreal city that only reveals its oddness if you really look. It’s less about documenting a literal fire and more about capturing a feeling. Editor: A feeling of what? Detachment? Curator: Perhaps! Or maybe, a love affair with the mundane turned apocalyptic. Ruscha took everyday things, like gas stations or, in this case, Norms, this iconic Googie-style diner, and turned them into almost mythic landscapes. The fire is dramatic, yes, but it’s also so...stylized. Do you see how the flames are almost like advertising? Editor: Yeah, they do have a certain Pop Art sensibility to them. Was Ruscha making a commentary about consumerism or something like that? Curator: That’s the million-dollar question! He definitely forces us to question our relationship with the symbols and structures that we navigate every day. But he lets us come to our own conclusions. There's a cool, detached feeling, like the diner is just another sign on the landscape, burning or not. Editor: I see what you mean. So it’s not really about the fire at all. It's about the feeling. Curator: Exactly. He’s taken something quite frightening, an urban conflagration, and framed it with almost unsettling calmness. Editor: I guess there's an artistic, self-referential distance between an actual fire, and painting about that fire. Thanks, that clarified the artist's mood in this work.