E d Ruscha has spent much of his life painting words (though that’s not all he paints, draws and photographs). He’s made paintings of famous logos like the Hollywood sign, and of everyday phrases like ‘Not a bad world is it?’ and of strange puns like ‘Chili Draft’. When I spoke to him, he had just found a nice new combination of words. ‘Bliss Bucket,’ he says to me happily, ‘I like that. It has a kind of fist-clenching strength to it. And I suppose that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t have to be analysed necessarily; it just stands for its own power. I forget where I heard it, if I ever did. Maybe it came to me in a dream.’ Alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and a few others, Ed Ruscha is a leading member of the generation of American Pop artists who came to prominence in the early Sixties. Each worked on different materials in a different way. Warhol did screenprints of celebs and newspaper photos, Lichtenstein focused on comic strips, and Rosenquist worked in the style of billboards. Ed Ruscha’s shtick was simple American words and icons, that always 20 with his depiction of californian life and witty juxtaposition of phrases and images, the american artist ed ruscha has been intriguing his audience for half a century photography Laura Wilson | words Ben Lewis POETRY OF ART THe ArTisT’s sTudio ed ruscha, having just finished a painting at his studio in Venice, california, in 2006. round his neck is a mask to protect against the fumes from his air spray paint gun
Transcript
Ed Ruscha has spent much of his life painting
words (though that’s not all he paints, draws
and photographs). He’s made paintings of
famous logos like the Hollywood sign, and of
everyday phrases like ‘Not a bad world is it?’
and of strange puns like ‘Chili Draft’. When
I spoke to him, he had just found a nice new
combination of words. ‘Bliss Bucket,’ he says to me happily, ‘I like
that. It has a kind of fist-clenching strength to it. And I suppose
that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t have to be analysed necessarily;
it just stands for its own power. I forget where I heard it, if I ever
did. Maybe it came to me in a dream.’
Alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and a few
others, Ed Ruscha is a leading member of the generation of
American Pop artists who came to prominence in the early Sixties.
Each worked on different materials in a different way. Warhol did
screenprints of celebs and newspaper photos, Lichtenstein focused
on comic strips, and Rosenquist worked in the style of billboards. Ed
Ruscha’s shtick was simple American words and icons, that always
20
with his depiction of californian life and witty juxtaposition
of phrases and images, the american artist ed ruscha
has been intriguing his audience for half a century
photography Laura Wilson | words Ben Lewis
Poetry of art
THe ArTisT’s sTudio ed ruscha, having just finished a painting at his studio
in Venice, california, in 2006. round his neck is a mask to protect against the
fumes from his air spray paint gun
somehow seemed to be seen from a passing car.
In fact the whole of Ed Ruscha’s 50-year
career has the feel of a road movie. Born in 1937,
Ruscha studies fine art and commercial design
at the forerunner of the California Institute of
the Arts in LA in the late Fifties, while also working
as a typesetter. His artistic career begins,
appropriately, cruising city streets. He paints
flattened boxes of Sun-Maid raisins in 1961, as if
his tyres were squashing them into the Tarmac.
He paints the name of a cartoon strip character
‘Annie’ (1962), and the word ‘Boss’ several times.
‘“Boss” was one of the first word paintings I did,
and I think that came about because there were
multiple meanings to that word,’ he recalls. ‘There
was one “Boss” which was someone you worked
for. “Boss” was also another way of saying “cool”
in 1959. People would say “Hey, that’s boss”.
And it was also the name of a clothing label for
workmen, for Levi’s and Boss was like a blue-collar
work clothes brand.’
Then Ruscha switches on his ‘Radio’
(1964), a painting in which the big hoarding-style
letters of the word are comically squeezed by
small workshop clamps. In 1966, Ruscha stops for
gas, producing one of his best known works, a
portrait of an American petrol station, ‘Standard
Station’. The angle is low, as if we have driven in
and are looking up through the windscreen. It’s
cleanly graphic, like an architectural drawing. This
picture is about an icon of post-war America, but,
the petrol station has become the basis for a flat
slice of constructivist geometry. Ruscha explains
simply: ‘I’m a combination of an abstract artist and
someone who deals with subject matter.’
As the years speed past, Ruscha produces
series after innovative series, using words but in
strikingly different ways. He makes influential
books of photographs in the Sixties, alongside
his paintings. Twentysix Gasoline Stations is a
revolutionary artist’s book which draws attention
to a random number of petrol stations on
American highways. He follows it with Every
Building on the Sunset Strip. Then come
swimming pools, parking lots and so on. Ruscha
seems to be searching for an emptiness of
meaning – something that looks like a book, and
feels like one, yet does not serve the purpose that
books had hitherto served.
Ruscha has a favourite road movie,
Vanishing Point, from 1971, in which Kowalski, a car
delivery service employee, drives an old Dodge to
San Francisco. He breaks the speed limit and the
cops give chase. Along the way he tunes into a
blind DJ with a police radio scanner, who helps
him evade capture. ‘He breaks the speed laws,’
Ruscha tells me, ‘so the law is after him and
somehow radio stations get hold of this guy that’s LA
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22
running from the law and he becomes a folk hero
for attempting to outrun the law. And it also had
a lot to do with just driving on the road, just what
I like to do.’
In the mid-Eighties, the artist finally hits
the open road, painting slogans such as ‘A
Particular Kind of Heaven’ against ironically
romantic sunsets. In later decades he heads up
into the mountains, writing odd phrases like ‘Baby
Jet’ or ‘American Tool Supply’, which seems lifted
from a hardware catalogue, over panoramas of
snow-capped peaks. ‘The mountains are a way of
suggesting some kind of heroic thought within a
picture plane,’ says Ruscha. For these pictures he
had developed his very own angular typeface that
recalled welded metal – ‘I wanted to arrive at
some sort of “can’t-go-wrong” typeface. So
I imagined a kind of graphically inept person
making an alphabet for a poster, where you didn’t
have to make any curves in the letters, and so if
you had an R or an O it was all made up of
straight lines so that made it very easy. Then I just
kind of stuck with it.’
Ruscha’s road trip never ends but instead
loops back on itself – like the track race at the
climax of classic road movie Two-Lane Blacktop
(1971). In 2005, Ruscha presented ‘Course of
Empire’ at the Venice Biennale, when he returned
to the industrial buildings and warehouses he’d
painted in 1992, and recorded their changed logos
against glowering skies. Why do you like the road
so much? I ask. He says: ‘Probably like a mountain
climber, I’d say I climb it because it’s there.’
Ruscha’s oeuvre is not restricted to the
road and the word. A landmark work, painted
in the late Sixties, depicted the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art on fire. It’s an oddly
confrontational image considering Ruscha’s
warm embrace from the art world, but it’s also
a sign of the other notable quality of his art – his
rebellious streak. At the tail end of the Sixties,
Ruscha executed a strange series in which pills
– amphetamines, tranquillisers and painkillers –
floated in expanses of space. ‘Pills represented to
me something that could be dangerously edgy,
and I liked them also for their visual properties;
they were tiny and potent.’ The pills are painted
exactly life-size. ‘I was doing it at the same time
that other artists were taking small objects and
blowing them up real big. So I wanted to focus on
the faithfulness of the object and just paint that.’
In the late Eighties, Ruscha painted
nostalgic subjects for the first time, plucking out
images from the black and white matinee films of
America in the Fifties: lines of wagons from
Westerns, and the silhouettes of sailing ships, yet
painted as if seen through fog. ‘These images are
based on what you might see in a book and so
you are one step removed from the reality. I’m
painting the idea of a ship. Marine painters have
always been artists that loved the sea and being
on ships. I’m the furthest you can be from that.
I’m not very interested in sailing or ships.’
Even in these shadowy images, words are
not entirely absent. Crude white oblongs lie across
parts of some images, as if the artist was blocking
out text. The climax of the series is a painting of
the last frame of an old movie that reads ‘The
End’. The image is at once an American icon, an
affectionate depiction of the scratchy surface of
old film, and a symbol of death. ‘I grew up on
he developed his own
angular typeface that
recalled welded metal
font of knowledge Ruscha has perfected his own, instantly recognisable
typeface, above. In 2009, he donated his work ‘Uh Oh’, top, to be auctioned
in aid of Laurence Graff’s charity FACET, which helps African children.
Opposite page: Ruscha has an eclectic collection of music to listen to in
the studio, top. One of his iconic Standard gas station works, ‘Burning
Gas Station’, painted in 1966, bottom
black and white movies,’ says Ed Ruscha, ‘and I
always appreciated those scratches and pops –
the little irregularities that happened that weren’t
supposed to happen – I started to mimic those.
Now movies in the future are not going to have
those scratches, so I also look at that as affecting
my art in the sense that 40, 50 years from now,
people will look back and say, what does that
mean? So I’m in a sense painting a lost cause.’
And yet, American icons and Pop Art
are half of Ed Ruscha’s art. His work is also a
philosophical investigation of the way images
and words, the two tools that man uses to
communicate and make art, create meanings.
Look at one of his pictures for a long
time, and you might feel a certain fuzziness, even
frustration, in your head, while at the same time a
wry smile crosses your face. It’s a reaction you
might have when you look at ‘Steel’, in which the
title word is photorealistically painted as if it is
liquid on a surface. And it’s the sensation you
might have when you read ‘Faith’ (1972), painted
in bright white italic capitals against an infinitely
receding mysterious background of red and black.
That is because Ruscha is playing with the
different ways that images and words function –
and the pleasure and cleverness of his works
comes from these games. Sometimes Ruscha
works with contradictions – in ‘Hell Heaven’ (1989)
he writes ‘Hell’ above an upside-down ‘Heaven’,
creating a visual, verbal reversal of the normal
spiritual order. At other times, he works with visual
literalism. In ‘Scream’ (1964), he writes the word
contrastingly in black on a bright yellow ground.
But then shards of the yellow cross into the
lettering, threatening to obliterate it, the colour
equivalent of a searingly loud noise – a scream.
Ruscha’s painting of the back of the Hollywood
sign (‘The Back of Hollywood’, 1977) is different
again – a symbol that suggests another dark side
to the glamour of Hollywood. It’s a meaning that
can only be conveyed by an image. You can never
write the back of a word; yet here, of course,
Ruscha has painted the back of the word, creating
a meaning that language can never have.
Not that Ruscha has steeped himself in
dense books about semiotics or, what philosophers
call the phenomenology of visual perception.
Rather, the impulse comes from Ruscha, the
contrarian, the artist who delights in experiencing
those moments when meaning breaks down. ‘I
just seem to find myself nodding towards things
‘i just find myself nodding
towards things that
don’t make a lot of sense’
that don’t make a lot of sense,’ he says. ‘I’m kinda
treading on eggshells here, but I also feel like I
don’t need to make any particular type of sense…’
The artist laughs, continuing, ‘I’m happy to
be in a vocation where incoherency can actually
be a virtue. I feel we’re lucky. Artists can get away
with murder. When you build a house all the nails
have to go into the right places. When you build
a painting, all the nails can go into all the wrong
places and it can be a great painting.’
Ed Ruscha is represented by the Gagosian Gallery,
www.gagosian.com
taking inspiration A collection of framed images in Ruscha’s studio,
including a portrait of a young Ed and his sister, and one of jazz saxophonist
John Coltrane, top. ‘Boxer’, one of Ruscha’s sunset paintings, from 1979, right
