Art Lies, Volume 31, Summer 2001 Page: 68
84 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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boldly relegates it to the realm of the
utterly ridiculous, skewering Clement
Greenberg's imperative to keep painting
flat. Against a deep blue background,
Ruscha simply depicts the three-dimen-
sional text "Space" in a font straight
from a Superman comic book. At the
bottom of the painting, directly below
the hovering text, is a sharpened yellow
pencil. Ruscha's exploration of the space
within the picture plane is one that
Greenberg could hardly admire, let
alone valorize.
Even though paintings like Talk
About Space can, on the face of it, feel like
one-line jokes, Ruscha is still able to
retain a sense of purpose along with the
obvious drollery. The earnest side to his
art is found in both the topics he chooses
and the means by which he actually
paints his pictures. Ruscha will try almost
anything to avoid the usual brush on can-
vas paradigm. In this sense, a painting
like The Los Angeles County Museum on
Fire is memorable not only for the artist's
decision to depict the (then newly
opened) museum ablaze, but also for his
choice of a blank, quasi-architectural
style. Yes, there is fire and yes, there is
drama, but only as seen through a regu-
lated grid and a mechanical technique:
there is no expressionism here. In fact,
Ruscha consistently avoids the romance
of sloppy painting as a marker of person-
al expression. He has even gone so far as
to state that he doesn't actually like the
process of painting. It's almost as if he
would prefer that assistants or machines
generated his paintings. There is coyness
to Ruscha saying he doesn't like to paint,
since he could easily create a factory a la
Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons. But, instead
Ruscha keeps making the work himself.
So while a wary attitude about the pre-
tensions of art has been the foundation
from which all of Ruscha's work devel-
ops, it neatly coexists with production
that retains the hand of the artist as a
means to the continued efficacy of paint-
ing. Such contradictions of attitude are
the crux of his art.Ruscha is ambivalent about allowing
either a pictorial or a linguistic language
to dominate. He seems to incessantly cre-
ate battles between his typographic apho-
risms and his desire to make pictures.
One sees this most sharply in his paint-
ings that take single words as their sub-
ject. The painting Adios does not merely
depict a word on a flat surface, like a
magazine design. Instead, Ruscha builds
a pictorial landscape out of the word
itself. In fact, he goes to great pains to
paint the word as if it were liquefied, so
that Adios becomes a puddle of juice with
beans splayed across its surface. Ruscha
also modulates the background, subtly
grading light orange at bottom to dark
brown at top. This hazing of the canvas's
surface intimates a vast landscape. In the
end, one must admit it is both a slick and
slightly inane idea to create a cinematic,
sunset expanse of southwest oranges and
browns layered with bean juice lettering
of the word "adios." It's as if Ruscha
decided to reinvent painting by injecting
a hard-nosed typographic language with
the whimsy of a western narrative wor-
thy of a John Ford film. But, despite its
title, Adios is not the end of Ruscha's
word/image games.
The debate between writing and
pictures is also seen in Ruscha's works on
paper. Using gunpowder as his primary
material for this series of drawings,
Ruscha builds a delicate chiaroscuro to
anchor spindly, foreshortened letters. As
usual, the letters spell plain words. Sin,
City, Dusty, and Optics all depict words
that appear to have been constructed
from folded paper or twisted ribbon.
Here the combination of materials sug-
gests aggression, while a precise, almost
loving rendering helps highlight
Ruscha's joy of playful and exaggerated
contradictions.
In the mid-1980's Ruscha battled
more vigorously to reconcile his visual
and linguistic modes. During this period
imagery starts to dominate his practice.
Where in his early days one sensed that
the word held sway, in these black-and-white, filmic paintings, images appear
without any words. Ruscha, however,
could not give up words entirely.
Paintings like 17th Century still include
text, but in a fresh, altogether different
fashion. These later paintings use text
and imagery as exclusive entities. Unlike
Adios, which forces imagery into the
word itself, much of the black-and-white
work allows the two modes to exist in
parallel planes. This is a significant shift
from having the word function as the
focal point from which all other alter-
ations are made. This later work shows
Ruscha beginning to create a more equal
relationship between image and text.
Look at The Mountain. This 1998 paint-
ing illustrates a snow-capped mountain
with "The" written in bold type at the
bottom. Ruscha could not be more
explicit in displaying his decades-long
passion. Here is the image. Here is the
word. Together you get the title. As
Ruscha developed into the artist he is
today, it seems he has come to realize
that all he can do is offer up the separate
worlds of image and writing. He has
resigned himself to commenting by mere
presentation. Ruscha appears to be say-
ing that a relationship between domains
exists, but we, as viewers, must come to
terms with the meaning, or lack thereof,
in his work.
Ed Ruscha has built a career by tin-
kering with our expectations of how
words and images should mix. Using the
tools of commercial advertising, Ruscha
has simply taken this familiar language
and fused it with notions of fine art. In his
hands, art acts as an advertisement for a
particular thinking. The reason this isn't
tedious and solipsistic is that Ruscha is
bright, funny, and keenly aware of how to
make arresting art. His work is obvious
and complex, egalitarian and esoteric,
funny and serious. As this retrospective
effectively demonstrates, what keeps us
coming back to the musings of Ed Ruscha
is his clear vision and sharp wit.68 ARTL!ES Summer 2001
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Kalil, Susie. Art Lies, Volume 31, Summer 2001, periodical, 2001; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228061/m1/70/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .