Ed Ruscha
The American commercial landscape was a major influence on Ruscha, as it was on the New York pop artists. He knew little of the fine-art world when he moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in 1956, at the age of 18, to become a commercial artist. And as Kerry Brougher says in an essay in the excellent exhibition catalog, the road signs Ruscha saw while driving to LA along Route 66 were a likely influence on his word paintings. Like Warhol or Lichtenstein or Rosenquist, Ruscha has produced paintings on canvas (though he didn’t for a while, eventually finding his way back by using nontraditional materials such as bleach or egg yolk on cloth and gunpowder on paper). But his paintings, unlike theirs, don’t read as depictions. Instead his models are the store sign, the product logo, and most recently diagrams and maps; when he paints movie frames, he emphasizes the scratches and dirt on the celluloid. His paintings are less worlds to be entered than objects to be confronted, problems to be thought about.
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Abandoning his commercial-art career in the early 60s, Ruscha began looking for “a new, strokeless way to paint, and a new subject,” he told Jo Ann Lewis in the Washington Post last year. He began painting carefully chosen words. In fact he’s quoted in an exhibit wall label as remarking that “words have temperatures….When they reach a certain point and become hot words, they appeal to me.”
Ruscha similarly undercuts painterly power in Ace (1962). Sloping blue letters create an illusion of speed, which Ruscha humorously exaggerates by adding streaks on the black field between them. The paint is applied so thickly, both within the letters and in the black around them, that at some borders it resembles waves crashing against a barrier. This disruptive cresting of paint not only arrests the letters’ implied speed but hints at the violence inherent in mark making.
The Back of Hollywood (1977) unmasks the illusion of the famous “Hollywood” billboard by showing it from the rear, its letters reversed. The sign is well-known, shown in many photos and postcards against a hill, naming the place you see in what might have been a Ruscha-style joke. Here its power is both magnified by a glowing sky, painted in the exaggerated yellows and reds Ruscha uses for sunsets, and defused, the sign revealed to be a flat construction. The title of Not a Bad World, Is It? (1984) is painted in white letters over a lush rural landscape, underlining the way kitschy art reduces its subject matter to predigested emotions–Rilke called it “the painting of sentiments.” And the romantic exaggerations of advertising are skewered in 17th Century (1988), which shows a galleon silhouetted on a dark sea beneath such words as “war!” “plague!” “damsels!” “melancholia!” printed in an old-style typeface on the sky. This could almost be a movie ad if it weren’t for the fact that the words “taxes!” and “firewood!” are also present.
Ruscha doubts that any of us have such power. Or does he? This exhibit also reveals the romantic residing in the Oklahoma boy who loves cars and road signs but whose work is sometimes regarded as dry and conceptual. Eternal Amnesia (1982) shows a 13-foot-wide sunset with the words “eternal amnesia” in white just above the low horizon line, at the vanishing point of perspective painting as well as the sun. One could take the phrase as a critique of romantic absolutism: just as no sunset is eternal, no truth is eternal because neither human memory nor human life lasts forever. Yet the placement of the phrase gives it a seductive power. And after a while the two words begin to suggest there might be a strange comfort in eternal amnesia. Ruscha’s seductive sunset and ultrawide format conjoin irony and the search for meaning: the human quest for some permanent home is constantly being swallowed up not only by the earth’s turning but by our culture’s tendency to label and exploit everything.
Some of Ruscha’s books are photographic narratives enacted by performers, but most inventory objects or sites–Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968). A better-integrated exhibit might have explored their relationship to the paintings, which is fascinating. In most cases, the photograph is a straightforward representative of the object shown, though the “objects” are often unwieldy enough to resist enclosure in the photograph’s rectangle and generic enough to be reduced to words or points on a map. The idea of collecting such things creates some irony: the long, scroll-like book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) really does include a photo of every building, identified by street number. But judging by La Brea, Sunset, Orange, De Longpre, Ruscha knows that you can’t try that trick on the Rockies or the Alps.
