In 1949, when the artist and collector Paul Ruschá was six years old, his family motored from Oklahoma City along Route 66 to visit his grandparents in California. They made a pit stop in the dusty town of Winslow, Arizona, where the five of them—Paul, his parents, and his older siblings, sister Shelby and brother Ed—ate breakfast in a roadside café. That establishment went belly-up eons ago. But the building that housed it remains, and it happens to be a mere tumbleweed toss away from El Gran Garage, a hulking, 8,000-square-foot structure that the Los Angeles–based Ruschá bought in 2006. It’s his getaway home, studio, sometime exhibition space, and all-purpose man cave.
There, Ruschá, now 81, has worked among a growing community of artists and patrons helping to make Winslow a down-low, desert-southwest Marfa.
Beginning on October 19, the Affeldt Mion Museum, located directly across old 66 from El Gran Garage (and adjacent to the Fred Harvey–era La Posada Hotel), celebrates Ruschá’s work with “Life Mask,” a year-long exhibition devoted to his career as an artist in many media—photography, painting, calligraphy, assemblage—and as a freewheeling art-world jester and agent provocateur.
Ruschá is a self-described “laugh slut,” and he says that funny runs in the family. His mother was a cut-up, and the brothers are renowned for their playfulness. “I am more animated,” he says of their divergent approaches. “Ed is Mr. Cool.” (Paul is younger by five years and is part of the team at Ed’s Culver City studio.) It’s no shocker that humor, japery, and a flair for the bizarre abound in “Life Mask.”
For a decade or so, beginning in 1970, Ruschá owned a rare pair of silver-mirrored contact lenses (think Yul Brynner in Westworld), which he would wear to disconcerting effect, both in art, as in the arresting photographic portrait Mirrors & Monkey Fur—Post Card No. 1, and in life. Once, in Paris, Paul and Ed attempted to be seated for dinner at La Coupole. An imperious maître d’ looked them over and snapped, “We’re full.” Ever determined, the brothers returned the next evening; this time Paul was wearing his silver contacts. “The same guy was at the door and he was shocked,” Ruschá recalls. “He snaked us through the entire restaurant so that everyone could get a look at me, and sat us at a great table.”
Those 70s-postcard self-portraits suggest early-20th-century Surrealism updated to the era of quaaludes and bell-bottoms. The photographs in Ruschá’s “Body Works” series—in which the artist’s body becomes the art—are infused with a similar aura, including one called Turkey Fever, which shows Ruschá’s bare backside viewed from above. “My ass did in fact look like an uncooked turkey,” he writes, with characteristic drollery, in the exhibition catalogue.
So many of the works here are as anarchic as they are discomfitingly deadpan, such as the faux-snakeskin scrapbooks filled with those little inspection slips you find in the pockets of new clothing, and the affectionate photographs of “vacuforms,” which Ruschá describes as “plastic, bubble-faced products at the check-out lines in the stores where I shopped.” And then there’s the life-size assemblage Dinner for Donald, an eerily depopulated tableau in which a dining table is lavishly set for a feast, with toilets replacing the chairs.
Ruschá’s peripatetic career has included stints as a car hop at Orange Julius, a guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a staff photographer for United Artists Records. (A few of his images reside in the Whitney’s permanent collection.) Along the way, he has been a friend and muse to artists and photographers such as Don Bachardy and Lloyd Ziff. The show and catalogue are dedicated to the memory of his longtime, off-and-on paramour, the writer Eve Babitz.
“We had great and sometimes horrifying relations,” he says of Babitz, who died in 2021. “She once wrote in a book for me, ‘Without you I’d be nothing!’” Ruschá has re-purposed that phrase as an epigraph for “Life Mask.” With its openhearted bonhomie, it’s a perfect reflection of the artist, who slyly adds, “I later realized she wrote that in everybody’s book!”
“Paul Ruschá: Life Mask” opens in Winslow, Arizona, on October 19
Mark Rozzo is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
