The US artist Ed Ruscha has created a celebrated body of work inspired by the iconic seediness of Los Angeles – its cars, billboards, gas stations and low-slung houses all strung out in a seemingly endless sprawl. This short film combines photos from the Getty Research Institutes’s Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive with audio of Ruscha reading LA-inspired passages from another major influence on his art, Jack Kerouac’s 1957 beat classic On The Road. Commissioned by the Getty Museum to mark Ruscha receiving the 2019 Getty Medal for contributions to the arts, the film by the US director Matthew Miller is a kinetic slice of Americana so pure you can almost smell Kerouac’s invoked apple pie – or maybe it’s the faint stench of exhaust fumes.
Director: Matthew Miller
Producers: Ways & Means, Christopher Broyles
videoHistory of science
Insect aesthetics – long viewed as pests, in the 16th century bugs became beautiful
8 minutes
videoNature and landscape
After independence, Mexico was in search of identity. These paintings offered a blueprint
15 minutes
videoArt
A young Rockefeller collects art on a fateful journey to New Guinea
7 minutes
videoEconomics
A tour of New York’s gaudiest neighbourhood with the Marxist geographer David Harvey
13 minutes
videoArt
Defying classification, fantastical artworks reframe the racism of Carl Linnaeus
8 minutes
videoFilm and visual culture
Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation
5 minutes
videoArt
When East met West in the images of an overlooked, original photographer
9 minutes
videoEarth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
3 minutes
videoNature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes