Photograph, colour on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
ARTIST ROOMS
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edward-ruscha-1882" aria-label="More by Edward Ruscha" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Edward Ruscha</a>
Pool 6
ARTIST ROOMS 
Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Artist Rooms Foundation 2011
architecture
baths
countries and continents
emotions, concepts and ideas
formal qualities
garden
garden structures
natural phenomena
palm
photographic
places
public and municipal
reflection
sequence
sunshine
USA, California
weather
<p>This image was included in Ruscha’s artist’s book <span>Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass</span> 1968. This was Ruscha’s first colour photographic series. As the title indicates, the book includes nine photographs of pools and one of a broken glass tumbler, placed at the end almost like the punchline of an absurd visual joke. This series continues Ruscha’s project of documenting the Los Angeles landscape. All the pools are located at low-budget motels. These highly artificial leisure spaces can be seen as symbolic of Southern California’s ‘easy living’ culture.</p><p><em>Gallery label, July 2019</em></p>
paper print photograph colour
22 February 2013 – 22 May 2013
2013-05-22
22 February 2013 – 22 May 2013
2013-05-22
2013-02-22
Hatton Gallery (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)
2013-02-22
ARTIST ROOMS 2013: Ed Ruscha
Loan-out
29 April 2017 – 29 April 2018
2018-04-29
29 April 2017 – 29 April 2018
2018-04-29
2017-04-29
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh, UK)
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/
2017-04-29
ARTIST ROOMS Ed Ruscha
Collection based display
Pool #6
unconfirmed, image: 394 × 394 mm
unconfirmed, support: 610 × 610 mm
frame: 580 × 580 × 45mm
<a href="/search?gid=999999788" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">ARTIST ROOMS</a> 
Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Artist Rooms Foundation 2011
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>Pool #6</i> 1968, printed 1997 is a colour photograph taken by the American artist Ed Ruscha. It depicts an outdoor swimming pool which takes up most of the image. Five pale lap-lines run vertically across the length of the pool, with the outer lines appearing to converge diagonally towards a vanishing point. The poolside is visible at the top of the image, featuring grass, trees, signage and seating. The tops of the trees and the building that surrounds the pool are reflected in the still blue water despite being cut out of the scene by the photograph’s upper edge. The shadows of a palm tree and a diving board are also cast over the water from the right, but the objects themselves are not present in the image.</p>
<p>This photograph was originally part of Ruscha’s photobook <i>Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass</i> 1968. To create this series Ruscha took nine photographs of privately owned and municipal swimming pools while travelling around Las Vegas and his native Los Angeles. He concluded the suite with one image of a shattered drinking glass. <i>Pool #6</i> was captured using a lightweight and portable 2¼-inch format Yashica camera, as was typical of the artist’s practice at this time, lending itself well to his interest in photographing outdoors. This book was Ruscha’s first self-published series in which he experimented with colour film; for many of his other series during this decade, such as <i>Every Building on the Sunset Strip</i> 1966, he used black and white film. <i>Pool #6 </i>now exists within a separate print portfolio titled <i>Pool Series </i>1997, which consists of large-format reprints of his swimming pool images. All of these are in the ARTIST ROOMS collection (see Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ruscha-pool-1-al00274" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AL00274</span></a>–<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ruscha-pool-9-al00281" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AL00281</span></a> and <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ruscha-pool-8-al00226" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AL00226</span></a>).</p>
<p>The<i> Pool Series</i> is architectural in focus and so underscores Ruscha’s sustained interest in the built environment of Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s. In a departure from his frequent focus on subjects surrounding Los Angeles’s emergent car culture, such as gasoline stations (see, for example, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ruscha-enco-conway-texas-from-five-views-from-the-panhandle-series-al00242" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AL00242</span></a>) and parking lots (see, for example, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ruscha-good-year-tires-6610-laurel-canyon-north-hollywood-al00252" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AL00252</span></a>), the swimming pools in this series appear as a motif of leisure. Now seen as one of the city’s most clichéd symbols, the backyard pool has become synonymous with the increasingly prosperous, active and social lifestyles that developed on the American West Coast after the Second World War. However, as art historian Alexandra Schwartz has written, ‘these pools were often located at various cheap Las Vegas motels, not glamourous Beverly Hills estates’ (Schwartz 2010, p.160). Despite the technicolour aestheticisation of <i>Pool #6</i>, the grass that surrounds the inviting azure water is sun-bleached and unkempt, and the scene is empty of subjects.</p>
<p>
<i>Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass</i>, despite containing only ten photographs, is sixty-four pages long. The images are distributed irregularly throughout the book and are often separated by blank pages, which perhaps echoes the vacancy of the pools themselves. Ruscha claimed that he printed the series in this way because it was the cheapest way to do so in colour. However, the artist has also noted that the blank pages ‘gave body to the book’ (quoted in Rowell 2006, p.30). This sentiment was echoed in another interview with critic A.D. Coleman, where Ruscha claimed: ‘I’m not interested that much with the medium … I want the end product; that’s what I’m really interested in’ (quoted in A.D. Coleman, ‘I’m Not Really A Photographer’, <i>New York Times</i>, 10 September 1972, p.35). The subject of <i>Pool #6</i>, and in turn the other images in the suite, appears less important to Ruscha than the physicality and objecthood of his photobooks. This has led art historian Margaret Iversen to contextualise these works within a legacy of conceptual art practice originating from the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. Ruscha’s interest in the tactile and material nature of his books reflects Duchamp’s focus on the object-as-art, as seen in his ‘readymades’, such as <i>Fountain</i> 1917, replica 1964 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>T07573</span></a>). The book format also allows Ruscha’s photographs to be ‘circulated without the support of the framing gallery system’, echoing Duchamp’s frequent rejection of institutional valuation (Iversen 2010, p.13).</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Margrit Rowell, <i>Ed Ruscha: Photographer</i>, exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 2006, reproduced p.112.<br/>Margaret Iversen, ‘Auto-maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography’, in Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen (eds.), <i>Photography After Conceptual Art</i>, London 2010.<br/>Alexandra Schwartz, <i>Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles</i>, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2010.</p>
<p>Aaron Shaw<br/>University of Edinburgh<br/>January 2016</p>
<p>
<i>The University of Edinburgh is a research Partner of ARTIST ROOMS.</i>
</p>
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Summary
2017-01-27T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div class="text">
<p>This image was included in Ruscha’s artist’s book <i>Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass</i> 1968. This was Ruscha’s first colour photographic series. As the title indicates, the book includes nine photographs of pools and one of a broken glass tumbler, placed at the end almost like the punchline of an absurd visual joke. This series continues Ruscha’s project of documenting the Los Angeles landscape. All the pools are located at low-budget motels. These highly artificial leisure spaces can be seen as symbolic of Southern California’s ‘easy living’ culture.</p>
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Display caption
2019-07-26T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
architecture baths countries and continents emotions, concepts and ideas formal qualities garden garden structures natural phenomena palm photographic places public and municipal reflection sequence sunshine USA, California weather