Ruscha's Return: 21st-Century Pop Art
Ruscha, a virtual Johnny-on-the-spot for every artistic decade since the 60s, has been associated, at one time or another, with movements like pop, process art, conceptual art, photorealism, media-based art and, finally, today's renewed focus on painting championed by several generations of younger artists. A technically mediocre and reluctant painter, Ruscha has turned a keen, highly efficient imagination to face a changing series of artistic crossroads, working the gaps within trends in the visual arts that he has helped transform from cultural no-man's-lands to prime artistic real estate.
At different periods of his career Ruscha has investigated the space between images and words, negotiated paintings between abstraction and representation and, most recently, sought to elide advertising with landscape painting. The resulting work includes some of the most iconic images in postwar American art. That and his growing relevance among artists desperate to tend bridges between cultural phenomena like Budweiser frogs and the Internet (real life) and the stuffy tradition of fine painting (art) have, with the passage of time, made the 62-year-old Ed Ruscha quite possibly the most influential artist working today.
Edward Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963
A rare opportunity to see a full-scale exhibition of the enigmatic work of this artist is now available at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Including more than 80 paintings, drawings and photo-narrative books spanning some 40 years of his career, the present retrospective of Ruscha's work is at least a decade overdue. The exhibition, set to travel to several museums here (Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Miami Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) and abroad (the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford), is, inexplicably, Ruscha's first comprehensive museum show in nearly 20 years. The fact that "Ed Ruscha" won't be touching down in New York during a year of scheduled museum exhibitions that include Barbara Kruger at the Whitney and Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim should give the art public some pause.
"When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist," Ruscha told an interviewer in 1981, "painting was the last method, it was an almost obsolete, archaic form of communication... I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words, to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing." For a healthy, middle-class boy from Oklahoma City, it could have hardly been otherwise.
Faced with a choice of vibrant comics, colorful cartoons and nickel magazines or black-and-white reproductions of classical paintings in art books, young Ruscha naturally connected to the booming commercial arts rather than the moldy art volumes gathering dust in his school library. At the age of 19, having just finished high school, he drove out to Los Angeles, set on study and a career in graphics. Once there, he was forced into coursework with teachers who were dedicated fine artists. Their example, including that of older L.A. artists like Robert Irwin and Edward Kienholz and, above all, the influence of a single reproduction of an art work by Jasper Johns, turned Ed Ruscha from graphic designer-wannabe into a nascent contemporary artist.
"A little one-inch-by-two-inch black and white reproduction did it," Ed Ruscha has said about the article in Print Magazine that committed him to painting. The work, Johns' Target with Four Faces, instantaneously solved for Ruscha what at the time seemed the spiniest painting dilemma going. How, the question was, could an artist like Ruscha represent the teeming commercial culture that fascinated him in an age dominated by abstract expressionism? The answer Johns provided for him was simple: make the object of the painting and the painting's surface symmetrical. At a time when the prophets of advanced painting abhorred representation of any kind, Johns figured, the key was to craft not a painted likeness of a target, but the target itself. For Ruscha, always a quick study, this proved to be the solution of a lifetime.
Planning his paintings before facing the canvas?like the strategic Johns and in opposition to abstract expressionist spontaneity?Ruscha began selecting existing objects from the sprawling Los Angeles landscape to remove from their contexts. In absolute thrall to the automobile, L.A. in the 1960s was, then as now, an expanse of highways, housing tracts, billboards, shopping centers, cinemas, motels and ranch-style houses. From this kingdom of blinkered optimism and ubiquitous, easy entertainments, Ruscha began lifting portions of Los Angeles' street iconography to turn into art.
Words were the first items of popular imagery to occupy Ruscha's paintings like objects. Bold, colorful and stylized like the typography found in posters and billboards, his paintings cribbed product advertising like the clothing brand Boss (not the German clothier, but a manufacturer of farmers' clothes) and the logo from 20th Century Fox. Later paintings of gasoline stations like Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas moved his cultural conceit onto the open road, which he turned cinematic by depicting them in shallow, dramatic diagonal compositions, like rays fanning out from a massive klieg light.
Quickly classified as a "pop" artist, a term that he says always made him "nervous and ambivalent," Ruscha then turned to the unheard-of activity of producing artist's books, inventing a much-copied genre of photographic essay that he used to record ordinary buildings (Every Building on the Sunset Strip), parking lots (Thirty Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles) and pools (Nine Swimming Pools). Other experiments (brought on, the artist says, by a personal crisis with painting) included a series of word drawings Ruscha executed in gunpowder, and a series of paintings that "stained" words in media like egg yolk and cherry juice onto unusual fabrics like rayon, moiré and satin. Ironic thumbs-in-your-eyes to color field "stainers" like Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, Ruscha's words spelled out grating phrases like "Various Cruelties" or "Sand in the Vaseline" (can you think of anything worse?).
Expanding his canvases to Cinemascope proportions in the 70s and 80s, the art of Ed Ruscha successively grew its use of language in size, subsequently dispensed with it in favor of large silhouetted images and then returned to it again in paintings that feature horizontal erasures of the sort found on classified documents (the words are retained in the titles, which speak a pure pulp slang, like "When I'm released I'm smoking a straight line to you. Got me?"). A painting from one of his last series, a group of humongous mountain paintings, reinforces the symbiotic relationship Ruscha has nearly always kept between images and the words we use to denote them. Titled The Mountain, it features the English definite article before a soaring, painted massif. The statement it makes runs right back to René Magritte's ancient teaser about representation. Despite its striking hyperrealistic depiction, Ceci n'est pas une mountain.
"Ed Ruscha," through Sept. 17 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 202-357-2700.