McDonalds Pickup
A McDonalds branch on a highway somewhere in the American South; in a parking lot out front, a white pickup truck in the merciless noon sun. Projecting vertically are a lonely palm tree and a flagpole with the Stars and Stripes hanging limp. It's a typical American motif that Ralph Goings depicted in his painting from 1970 titled McDonalds Pickup. Yet despite this, his hyperrealist work seems strangely ambiguous: not a single person can be seen, either in the parking lot or in the fast-food restaurant. Not a single car on the street, not even a discarded hamburger wrapping. The square format shows a purified, nearly clinical version of reality and offers up the McDonald's branch as a symbol for a thoroughly homogenized American society.
