By 1969, Ruscha had already reduced the Standard station to its essential geometry — the plunging diagonal roofline, the sky split by colour, the sign floating above it all like a piece of language rather than a piece of architecture. Double Standard takes that same set of screens used for the original 1966 print and pushes the palette into a cooler, more artificial register, trading the fire-and-blue gradient for something closer to the glow of a service station at dusk seen through a windscreen.

Ruscha made this print in collaboration with the musician Mason Williams, who signs the work alongside him, tying it to a wider circle of Los Angeles artists and musicians who moved through Ruscha's studio in the late 1960s. The gas station had already appeared in his earlier photographic books and paintings, but here it operates purely as a printed object, built from flat colour and hard edges rather than any attempt at documentary accuracy. Small in edition and rarely available, this screenprint remains one of the clearest statements of how Ruscha treated a mundane roadside subject as raw material for pure formal invention.

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