Auto‐maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography

Ed Ruscha's ground‐breaking 1963 book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations , consists of a series of photographs of gas stations along Route 66. Ruscha explained in an interview that he liked the word ‘gasoline’ and the random specificity of number 26. This paper argues that the title, formulated in advance, provided the nub of an instruction. Ruscha set himself a simple brief and understood the photographs as records of large‐scale readymades. Depersonalization or ‘auto‐maticity’ pervades the work in terms of the pre‐set project, the readymade object, the car and the uninflected snapshots. Jeff Wall's positioning the work of Ruscha and other artists of the period in relation to ‘non‐autonomous’, photojournalistic or amateur photography does nothing to capture this deliberately affectless, depersonalized use of the camera. The books are better understood if related to a certain reception of Marcel Duchamp in the United States which might be called the instructional and performative Duchamp, exemplified most clearly in his 3 Standard Stoppages .