In the late 1960s, Ed Ruscha began experimenting with a slew of unconventional materials, from gunpowder in place of graphite to liquids like Pepto Bismol, water from the Pacific Ocean, and blood. Many of these substances, like egg yolks or whiskey, have been edible, but perhaps none of his works have been as tempting as the installation Chocolate Room.
Ruscha first produced Chocolate Room in in 1970 in Venice, Italy, for the American Pavilion’s exhibition at the 35th Venice Art Biennale. After stumbling across tubes of chocolate paste in a supermarket that reminded him of oil paint, he was inspired to screen print Nestlé chocolate onto 360 sheets of paper, tiling them across four walls of the pavilion.
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Since then, each time it is displayed, Chocolate Room must be completely recreated anew, and printing the chocolate sheets for it often requires extensive experimentation. This holds true for the current iteration of the installation on view in ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN at LACMA.
“We made it on site here, adjacent to the installation, on the floor of the galleries,” said Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA. “We invited the printers, who are a local print shop, La Paloma Fine Arts, a family owned-business who have been the ones printing the Chocolate Room for ages.”
“They melted down 100 pounds of Belgian chocolate and printed that chocolate onto large, very glossy pieces of white paper,” continued Morse. “So that chocolate sits on top of the paper—it’s very delicate—and then trimmed on the left and the right and the bottom with a little piece of white at the top, and that’s where it’s stapled along the edge, so it’s shingled from the bottom to the top, kind of like a California bungalow.”
Although visitors can’t actually taste the Chocolate Room, they can step inside and immerse themselves in the sights and scents of this mouthwatering installation.
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN is on view in BCAM, Level 2, through October 6, 2024.