תחנות דלק – מחשבות על מסעות באמנות|Gas stations – Thoughts on travels in art

Gas stations – Thoughts on travels in art

Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) has intrigued me ever since I first saw the project. During this current pandemic, I personally experienced the limitation on my travel for the first time. If I were to be stopped at a roadblock, I would have to come up with a good reason why I am driving in the public space – the metaphorical expansion of my home space in which I have obvious right to move in freely. These sensations, experienced daily since1967 by the millions of people in the Occupied Territories, led me to study the visual representations of various travels, and return to  Ruscha’s resonant little work.

The small artist’s book (18×14”) is comprised of black and white photos of gas stations on the route between Ruscha’s home in Los Angeles and his parents’ house in Oklahoma which he traveled many times as a student. The geographical order was not strictly preserved, so the booklet has a feeling of the illusion of memory. The images embody the essence of the encounter between American modernist functionality and an abstracting of mood and the sensation of a seemingly banal journey which hides a quest.
When Ruscha published his book in 1963, Pop was flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic, with its critical examination of issues of consumerism. Ruscha’s snapshots emphasized the ruggedness of the distilled reflection of the American car culture.

The first edition of 400 numbered copies was produced on simple office copiers, manifesting the territory between the documentary and the artistic as a physical object.
Our body size, larger than the images in the books, seems to overshadow and even contain them, making the gas stations look so familiar despite the ensuing 60 or so years since they were shot. Whether the photographs are displayed singly in frames or perused in a book (reprinted several times), the images bear the rhythm of innumerable road movies and individual memories mingling with the trip. The simple gas stations become gateways, possibilities, and starting points at which the imaginary traveler can encounter others and touch the reality outside of oneself. They are like oases (although they are polluting deserts and other environments), acting as rest stops to refuel the vehicle with gas and food, water, and rest for the travelers. They are designed as promises under a glistening overhang with star-like lights.

That same year (1963), Ruscha painted Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, which is more than 3m. wide; it became one of the iconic works of American Pop Art. The gas stations were expropriated from reality into the glamorous world of precise, polished, and shiny graphics through painting. Ruscha turned the viewer’s gaze to the huge corporations, the major forces motivating American society, which, in today’s doubly critical look, is a criticism of capitalism and the destruction of the environment.
In 2014, Shai Shaul, an excellent art photographer who rarely exhibits, exhibited the series Enlightenment (Gas stations),at the gallery of the Architects’ Association in Jaffa (text by this writer). Shaul photographed eight gas stations throughout Israel in a variety of locations, including Afikim, Eilaboun, and Tel Aviv, without people present and with hardly a car in sight. The images express political contents in referring to roads and borders, with their economic, environmental, and cultural aspects. Shaul emphasizes the recurring physical model of pumps, the overhang protecting from the burning sun and rain, and parking places. This is the basic efficient, modernist paradigm of car culture and movement identified in the past with freedom.

Shaul photographed most of the stations at night, with its lights disappearing and being swallowed up in the dark, i.e., an image formed and dying rapidly. The photographs by Ruscha, and by Shaul half a century after the former, freeze the memory of the short moment in which the wanderer/traveler observes the gas station, unless he makes a stop.
The title of the series, Enlightenment, alludes to the hopes of the Age of Enlightenment, of a rational society seeking the good. Shaul’s images, with their perfect finish and printing, pose breathtaking questions, thoughts about promises, illusions, and outer shells.
Journeys are the essence of art, and often also the subject. The change from one position, location, or state of consciousness into another is the change generated by the best kind of art, a change in the observers as a journey into the depths of their inner selves.