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<\/p>\nA rich perfume wafts through the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, where the installation of Ed Ruscha\u2019s full-dress survey \u201cNow Then\u201d is underway. You sense it before you see it: a room where the white walls are turning velvety brown. A chocolate room.<\/p>\n
The McPherson family, dressed in their La Paloma Fine Arts company T-shirts, bustle around their rig. Edan McPherson dips a long squeegee into a pool of melted chocolate, draws the rubber blade across the coarse mesh. His son, Daniel, whisks the prints away, while his sister Robyn feeds fresh paper. His wife, Lynda, and daughter, Kayla, monitor double boilers of chocolate in reserve. The drying racks fill up, two tenths of a pound of dark chocolate coating each sheet. When the chocolate sets, they\u2019ll trim and hang each print, floor to ceiling, like shingles on a Craftsman house.<\/p>\n
\u201cChocolate Room\u201d is an oddity in Ruscha\u2019s influential oeuvre. Of the 85-year-old Nebraska native\u2019s hundreds of projects \u2014 paintings, prints, and photo books; dry eulogies of Americana like SPAM cans and Mobil stations and two-lane blacktop \u2014 \u201cChocolate Room\u201d is his only installation. It\u2019s been shown just seven times since its creation in 1970, and never before in New York.<\/p>\n
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Yet for all that, \u201cChocolate Room\u201d is a remarkable distillation of Ruscha\u2019s sensibility: chalky humor, sweet gumption, American bleakness, an existentialism that rests on objects of pop culture, like common chocolate.<\/p>\n
Christophe Cherix, MoMA\u2019s chief curator of prints and drawings, called it \u201calmost mythical. You read about it, you hear about the insects, the smell.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChocolate Room\u201d might have remained a legend, but in 1995 the curators Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer featured it in a survey of conceptual art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The museum acquired \u201cChocolate Room\u201d in 2003.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think we surprised Ed with our proposal to remake the work,\u201d Goldstein, now the deputy director of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute in Chicago, said over email. They saw the piece as \u201ca union of painting and conceptual art.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Cherix agrees. In the MoMA show\u2019s floor plan, \u201cChocolate Room\u201d is crucial, connecting Ruscha\u2019s 1960s pop-art paintings and conceptual books to his prints and drawings in unusual materials like gunpowder and tobacco. Like taste, \u201cLanguage comes from the mouth,\u201d pointed out Michael Govan, director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the show travels next and where \u201cChocolate Room\u201d will be remade again. He said \u201cChocolate Room\u201d was the first piece he and Cherix chose.<\/p>\n
For his part, Ruscha seems charmed by the resonance of that wholesome, elegant gesture \u2014 wallpaper a room with chocolate. \u201cIt\u2019s locked into itself,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m not sure where it took me, I\u2019m not sure I learned anything from it. It\u2019s just, you know, what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the end of March, while La Paloma were still fine-tuning the production, I met Ruscha in MoMA\u2019s Drawings and Prints Study Center. Museum staff had set out examples of his work \u2014 including a spare leaf from the original \u201cChocolate Room,\u201d tan with age. The cornflower stripes on his western-style shirt set off his irises.<\/p>\n
In 1970, the curator Henry Hopkins invited 47 artists to the United States Pavilion for the 35th Venice Biennale. More than half withdrew in protest of the Vietnam War. Hopkins set a room aside for rotating printmaking projects, and Ruscha\u2019s was first.<\/p>\n
The way he tells it, \u201cChocolate Room\u201d was \u201cvery much ad hoc. I was on the plane to Venice, and I said, good Lord, what am I going do?\u201d Ruscha is the modest kind of genius.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a little bit tired of making conventional pictures,\u201d he said, \u201cand so I thought I would use unconventional materials.\u201d The previous year he\u2019d made the \u201cStains\u201d portfolio \u2014 paper daubed with everything from Los Angeles tap water to the artist\u2019s blood. In London, he\u2019d been working on \u201cNews, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues,\u201d six words in gothic font printed with organic substances like axel grease and pie filling. (These series bracket \u201cChocolate Room\u201d at MoMA.) The background of \u201cPews\u201d was a mix of coffee and Hershey\u2019s syrup.<\/p>\n
\u201cChocolate has a way of laying itself out, almost like an ink,\u201d Ruscha told me. \u201cAnd I thought, well, I\u2019ll do the same thing, and I\u2019ll avoid making any pictorial statement and make what amount to shingles on a wall.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Ruscha and the dealer Brooke Alexander gathered up every tube of Nestl\u00e9 chocolate paste they could find. The master printer William Weege was stationed in the Pavilion, and he and Ruscha ran the syrup through the silk-screen press, onto deluxe, handmade Fabriano paper. They trimmed the edges and tacked up the sheets four high.<\/p>\n
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\u201cChocolate Room\u201d was playful and abstract, evocative in the way of scents \u2014 and slightly brutal, a fragrant blank. Ants marched in. Visitors drew peace signs and antiwar slogans with their fingers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember not being too insulted by it,\u201d said Ruscha. \u201cI\u2019d prefer that nobody graffiti that thing here,\u201d at MoMA, he added, \u201cbut, you know, it\u2019s possible.\u201d Not to mistake his ease for apathy, but Ruscha seems to embrace contingencies. Certain parameters are fixed, others wild. \u201cIt\u2019s like a quiet fun house,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Of the MoMA version, Cherix said: \u201cWe want to preserve the presentation as much as we can.\u201d But when I talked to Ed about that, he couldn\u2019t care less.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cherix laughed. \u201cHe said, well, the work changes, chocolate changes color, that\u2019s what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t try to replicate what\u2019s been done before,\u201d Ruscha said. \u201cI don\u2019t stand up there with a color sample and demand accuracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
For accuracy, there\u2019s La Paloma. \u201cThey\u2019re fabricators extraordinaire,\u201d said Ruscha.<\/p>\n
While Ruscha was in Venice cornering the market on Nestl\u00e9 syrup, Ron McPherson, Edan\u2019s father, was working the press at the storied Los Angeles print shop Gemini G.E.L. That\u2019s where he first met Ruscha. When Ron started La Paloma, shifting to fiberglass and metal fabrication, they continued working together \u2014 in 1985, for instance, his company built a set of giant curved stretchers for Ruscha\u2019s mural in the Miami-Dade Public Library rotunda. When the call came in 1995 to revive \u201cChocolate Room,\u201d Ron was his man.<\/p>\n
In late March, I visited La Paloma\u2019s vast workshop on the fringe of the San Fernando Valley. Ron and his team, now led by his son, Edan, have installed every \u201cChocolate Room\u201d but the first: \u201cLos Angeles twice, Palm Springs, Anchorage, Reno, Oklahoma City.\u201d The New York install is different. Ruscha\u2019s survey is an occasion to dial in the \u201cChocolate Room\u201d recipe for the ages.<\/p>\n To get the shingles to hang straight, they chose a coated paper. They experimented with different chocolates, too. \u201cWe wanted to stick with a commercial mix,\u201d Edan said. \u201cSomething you could get consistently.\u201d<\/p>\n They\u2019d always used regular Hershey\u2019s bars before. So long as the brand uses pure ingredients, it\u2019s a matter of color. They\u2019d winnowed it to three \u2014 Hershey\u2019s regular, a dark Ghirardelli\u2019s and a darker Callebaut \u2014 and sent samples to Ruscha\u2019s studio. He chose the Callebaut. MoMA\u2019s team matched it with a touch-up paint, to fill in around the walls\u2019 edges: Benjamin Moore Arroyo Red.<\/p>\n Most of all, La Paloma wanted to prevent the powdery, fatty bloom that sometimes, not always, covers the chocolate\u2019s surface. The trick, as chocolatiers know, is to temper the chocolate, and keep it tempered as it\u2019s shaped.<\/p>\n The double boilers they\u2019d been using to melt the Hershey\u2019s bars were inexact. Now they travel with the ChocoVision Revolation Delta, an electronically regulated, air-heated, self-stirring metal bowl that puts chocolate through its paces, up to 115 degrees or so, then back down to 86. Then, explained Edan, \u201cyou add a little bit of unmelted chocolate, and that tempers it.\u201d It\u2019s called \u201cseeding\u201d: \u201cThe seeding tells the cocoa butter molecules how to realign correctly inside the chocolate.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe printed and then everything looked fine,\u201d Edan added. They hung up some test sheets at LACMA. \u201cBut then several days later it started to bloom.\u201d<\/p>\n They realized the light bulbs they\u2019d rigged over the press to keep the chocolate flowing were a little too hot, and it was separating again. Now they use controllable heat lamps and a voltage regulator. The crew monitors the chocolate ink with an infrared thermometer. During printing, the temperature is kept around 95 degrees.<\/p>\n All this precision \u2014 but the result, almost by design, remains capricious. Every installation is different. MoMA is the first version using dark chocolate, which Ruscha said in an email, \u201cwas a visual choice and was more appealing.\u201d A few of the corners went on thicker than the rest, and look slightly toasted. The exhibition team sent photos to Ruscha. The artist approved.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2023\/09\/17\/multimedia\/17NEW-RUSCHA-01-tqpw\/17NEW-RUSCHA-01-tqpw-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg\")
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