Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Ed Ruscha / Now Then
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Through October 6, 2024
By LITA BARRIE September 25, 2024
For Los Angelenos who regularly view the real signs that Ed Ruscha immortalized in art, from their car windows, his sprawling retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an entirely different experience than it would be for a non-resident unfamiliar with these landmarks.
Ruscha is not only one of the most important artists in the world, he is the only artist who has created a simulacra of a city that is itself a simulacrum; because Los Angeles is not really a place - it is an idea, we experience as a journey. The retrospective’s design is so well calibrated, it also takes viewers on a journey that traces how Ruscha’s subject matter evolved in parallel with changes in L.A.’s culture, architecture, immigration, racial diversity and even slang over six decades.
Ruscha creates urban landscapes where there are no people to be seen; only the signs and stains of human activity. When we look at Ruscha’s unpopulated urban landscapes, we fictionalize them as we do with everything in life, but Ruscha makes us more aware of how much we see the world we live in through our imaginative input. For those of us who live our daily life in a city which Ruscha explores as a cultural construction, this retrospective is not only a testament to his artistic insight and skill, but we leave the museum with a new perspective on the everyday things in the world we live - which is a gift only a great artist can give.
The retrospective debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last fall, and is now on view in the city which is his muse. For Los Angelenos, this long anticipated retrospective with 76 paintings (of the 80 shown in New York) is an entirely different viewing experience. We see the city’s familiar landmarks presented in an unfamiliar way: from the Hollywood sign, the 20th Century Fox logo, gas stations, apartment buildings and parking lots - even paintings of LACMA in flames inside the actual museum.
Ruscha re-contextualizes everyday things L.A. residents take for granted, to show us they really exist in our collective imagination, of a city that is not quite real, but a mirage. L.A is a desert basin filled with freeways, signs and buildings that sprawl through arroyos and canyons where the evanescent light gives everything a cinematic quality. Although his work might appear like realistic depictions, he skillfully stages much larger cultural memories. What makes the retrospective so impactful is that it is designed to allow us to be detectives tracing the journey of Ruscha’s artistic development over 65 years, as we discover clues to his career long themes without the intrusion of curatorial didactics. This absence of the usual critical commentary was a decision by Ruscha and the lead curator, Christophe Cherix, to let Ruscha’s work speak for itself so the viewer is more engaged.
The retrospective begins with Ruscha’s fascination with words as visual constructs, which are not constricted by size. Using various typography, he recreates words as sculptural objects. The first three rooms display “classic Ruscha” from the 1960s. Meticulously painted, seemingly mundane and stupid things once considered unfit to be the subject of fine art are transformed into simple onomatopoeic words writ large which leap the canvas (“SPAM,” “BOSS,” “ACE,” “HONK,” “OOF,” “ANNIE”). Alongside are paintings of buildings with large signage (“Standard Gas Station,“ “Norm’s,” “20th Century Fox”). Finally, there are several versions of the Hollywood sign which might be a visible presence on the land to those of us who live here, but Ruscha demonstrates that it really lives in our mind’s eye and collective consciousness. Ruscha depicts the word “Hollywood” riding along the crest of a hilly ridge, when in fact, it sits below the ridge. He also depicts light glowing behind the diagonal line formed by the top edge of the letters, although this is not what we actually see in real life because the sign faces south.
In Actual Size (1962), an exploding can of Spam with trailing yellow flames like a space capsule or comet, blasts across a galaxy of splattered blue brushstrokes below a giant yellow product logo. The joke is multi-layered, because words do not have fixed dimensions and it is funny to make art about something as banal as “special processed American meat”. But it is also an art world joke about the bravado of gestural masculinity in Abstract Expressionism’s “meaty paintings.”
Ruscha is also a master of trompe l’oeil effects. In Standard Station, Ten Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) a ripped pulp western magazine sits atop an expanse of sky. In Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963) the word “noise” comes alive, appearing to be projected from the top corner in a receding octagon mode ( like the 20th Century Fox logo in an earlier work). Two small pencils on the opposite left and right edges of the deep blue canvas suggest that the noise could be from one pencil breaking because it is bent in a clamp. A pulp-fiction magazine at the bottom of the dark expanse - that recalls color field painting - suggests the persistence of our collective memories of popular western culture. In Strange Catch for a Fresh Water Fish (1963), a delicately rendered leaping fish has a pencil in its mouth. Angry Because It’s Plaster Not Milk (1965) is an exquisite depiction of a bird with a tipped-over glass that appears to contain milk, but the contents remain solid. In these trompe l’ceil paintings, Ruscha continues to explore the idea of what is and is not real, by deceiving the eye, recalling Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe.
Chocolate Room (1970) is a radical minimalist room made from aromatic chocolate coated rectangular sheets of paper which are screen-printed with the warm brown paste that cover the inside room, from top to bottom. Although the enticing scent might be inviting at first it then becomes sickly and off-putting, as a reminder of the dangers of excessive indulgence - that calls to mind Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, as a test of character.
The next gallery contains vitrines that display photographic contact sheets, sketches, storyboards and mock-ups that show Ruscha’s process of assembling his work. Ruscha created some of the first and most important artist books in history, like the 25-foot accordion-format Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963). However, Ruscha used photography not as an end product, but a “process tool” for creating source material for later paintings. His subsequent photo-books, like Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), have aerial views of unpopulated, empty car lots with white striped asphalt - including Dodger Stadium and Universal Studios - with occasional stains left from cars in the past. Stains later appear as a leitmotif in Ruscha’s word paintings which are as comic as they are cosmic - for anyone raised Catholic, as Ruscha was. Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) - created by mounting a camera on the back of a flatbed pickup truck and driving the length of the boulevard - shows how Ruscha’s systematic method of image-making would evolve over time beyond matter-of-fact photography.
Ruscha’s signature style of using hard light and flat images in his paintings originates from his use of a camera, as looking through a viewfinder turns a dimensional work into a flat plane. Here re-imagined the underwhelming boxy architecture of real gas stations and apartment buildings seen in his early photography into elongated facades. He also began using horizontal and diagonal angles to divide the canvas in half. With minimalist precision, Ruscha can use a shaft of light to give a logo a humorous metaphysical significance.
The next room shows how Ruscha created words in the 1970s using alternative mediums: gunpowder, food, condiments, chewing tobacco, rose petals, salmon roe, egg yolks and even his own blood to reflect everyday American life through what people eat and use. He began using more lapidary phrases and sentences (such as “FIND CONTACT LENS AT BOTTOM OF SWIMMING POOL”), painting negatives of these sentences, masking the sheet with pencil letters, then coating the remainder with misty fields of aquamarine and bright yellow. Ruscha is often prophetic, because these works contain the soft gradients that anticipated smartphone and Instagram filters, just as electronic spam recalls his famous canned meat space capsule.
Ruscha’s work takes a sharp turn in the 1980s, seen in the next room dedicated to haunting, cinematic paintings created with monochromatic spray-painting techniques. Inspired by the extreme tonal contrasts used in classic film noir, these works have a much darker melancholic mood, not unlike Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which itself was a cultural construct and re contextualization. Much like an old film, the backgrounds of these works have tears and scratches like a celluloid reel. Jumbo (1986) is a shadowy depiction of an elephant climbing a hill, Brother, Sister (1987) has two tall ships tossing at sea, and the only word painting,The End (1991), has the closing title of a film that seems to be stuck in a projector. These atmospheric works are in stark contrast to the bright colors Ruscha adopted from commercial signage aesthetics in his earlier paintings.
The final galleries display Ruscha’s newest works from the 1990s to present day, and feature a cycle of American decadence named “Course of Empire” after Thomas Cole’s series of five paintings of the rise and fall of an ancient city-state. In the early years of the new millennium, Ruscha revisited his prior work, with the boxy buildings now becoming decrepit, as he sets industrial structures with the lettering pulled off their facades against gloomy, smoggy skies. In Old Trade School (2005), a former educational building now appears more like an incarceration site.
The most recent Ruscha paintings depict mountain ranges topped with snow, overlaid with non-sequiturs like “PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL.” Like his early gas station paintings, these majestic backdrops are a romanticized idea, both artificial and mythological. In a provocative gesture, the final work on display is Our Flag (2017), featuring a panorama of a frayed Stars and Stripes painted during Donald Trump’s first year in office. Less metaphysically ambiguous than the classic Ruscha witty word paintings, this closes the exhibition with a startling warning.
Why is Ruscha’s work so timeless that we still feel a sense of surprise, even though we know it so well? Not only has the premise for his word-based work remained constant along with his use of straight edged letters that have no curves in different fonts (he even designs) but Ruscha has an immediately recognizable signature style of minimalism - as “lean” as Ernest Hemingway’s powerful prose. Ruscha may be heralded as a pioneer of pop art and conceptual art, but his work is much more than that. Rather, he is a dry-wit poet who explores the disconnection between the idea of things and the reality of things - whether they be a word, a sign, a gas station, a parking lot or a mountain top. By showing how everyday things possess an irony that is unexplainable Ruscha gives us a new filter that changes our perception and for Los Angelenos this is a gift that keeps on giving. WM
Lita Barrie is a freelance art critic based in Los Angeles. Her writing appears in Hyperallergic, Riot Material, Apricota Journal, Painter’s Table, ArtnowLA, HuffPost, Painter’s Table, Artweek.L.A, art ltd and Art Agenda. In the 90s Barrie wrote for Artspace, Art Issues, Artweek, Visions andVernacular. She was born in New Zealand where she wrote a weekly newspaper art column for the New Zealand National Business Review and contributed to The Listener, Art New Zealand, AGMANZ, ANTIC, Sites and Landfall. She also conducted live interviews with artists for Radio New Zealand’s Access Radio. Barrie has written numerous essays for art gallery and museum catalogs including: Barbara Kruger (National Art Gallery New Zealand) and Roland Reiss ( Cal State University Fullerton). Barrie taught aesthetic philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, Art Center and Otis School of Art and Design. In New Zealand, Barrie was awarded three Queen Elizabeth 11 Arts Council grants and a Harkness grant for art criticism. Her feminist interventions are discussed in The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand and an archive of her writing is held in The New Zealand National Library, Te Puna Matauranga Aotearoa.
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