The relationship between text/sign and landscape documented in Learning from Las Vegas has continued to evolve in the art of Ruscha - whose more recent work isolates text completely, floating it across the picture plane in front of landscape images or abstract sunsets. It can also be seen in the work of other contemporary artists, Wayne White for example, who paints advertising slogans and colloquial expressions into 'readymade' commercial landscape paintings found in thrift stores; as well as into modern car commercials and television shows. A feedback loop of commercial culture that began with the automotive landscape continues to perpetuate itself.
The popular landscape - which is to say the 'common' or 'ordinary' landscape - and ideas of mass communication take on a different meaning in Alterations to a Suburban House , the piece presented during Dan Graham’s symposium statement, Alterations is an architectural model of a suburban home whose front facade has been replaced with an expanse of transparent glass and whose interior is divided by a continuous mirror stretching the length of the house, separating the now visible public functions of the house (kitchen, living room, dining room) from the hidden private functions (bedrooms and bathrooms). The mirror reflects the lives of those within, but also the facades of the homes across the street. The glass facade becomes a billboard that communicates both the physical structure and the social structure of the American suburb, while simultaneously subverting both. The relationship between private and public blurs as passersby are reflected in the interior of the house, existing within the same plane as those who actually reside within the home.