THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

I would claim that Ruscha pulls off the same coup in a single shot, also from Parking Lots: “Dodgers Stadium, 1000 Elysian Park Ave.” Here, not only does he manage, by presenting one of the most charged event-spaces imaginable (a baseball field) utterly deserted, to implicitly inject it with each triumph and defeat, every 50,000-voiced roar of hope and fury and redemption from both past and future; but he also, in showing the surrounding urban transit infrastructure (the flyovers, the exit and approach roads servicing the stadium), allows this event-space to overspill its formal boundary, expanding into a whole cybernetic architecture of wider event-field, as simultaneously omnipresent and unquantifiable as that Elysium of which Virgil writes: ‘In no fix’d place the happy souls reside… They wind the hill, and thro’ the blissful meadows go.”

McCarthy/Jellyfish