Ed Ruscha
Now and Then

Is the painting an epic treatment of a completely ordinary building? The angle at which the station is realistically rendered, along with the fact that we are forced to look up at the image as if it were to be seen like an idol from above, only reinforces our sense that the image is an apotheosis of an example of American functional industry. It was part of Ruscha’s standard visual life, and he presents a full, perhaps slightly exalted view of what he lived with and saw. Usually, we expect art that changes our vision and understanding of the object, most usually for the better. But Ruscha’s reluctance to beautify the gas station makes it clear that he wanted his realism to function as accurately as possible–as if art’s objective reportage could capture its use, and that use would be enough to justify its painterly treatment. Still, the positioning of the gas station and the angled lines lean in the direction of high praise, as if the demotic, if understood for what it was, could be viewed so positively as to suggest awe. This is the American bias at work: the characterization of material objects as indicative of a truth a good deal greater than most of us notice on our way home.

​

The same could be said of Ruscha’s one-word paintings, which are both only what we see on the surface. At the same time, epiphanies of the word can quite literally be read for their meaning, or as physical objects, dense with actuality. Meaning in art is visual, usually, but the addition of just one word transforms the image into a text, which we contemplate even if the word is entirely isolated and grammatically meaningless. In one of the later paintings Ruscha took the word “Faith” and gave it a bravura treatment–as if the word alone could  The introduction of literary meaning here may not be as important as we think; Ruscha rescues the single words from hopeless reductionism, but also keeps each word from becoming grander than it might. Thus, the word is simply what it is: neither grandeur nor diminution wins out. Whatever the artist wants us to think about paintings like these, it seems clear that the tension between seeing them and making them work meaningfully, as they usually do with words, promotes a balance in which the words can be understood abstractly just as they can be seen as connotative in a regular context.

​

Throughout the show, the technical skill of Ruscha is quite apparent but this is particularly true of Rucha’s drawings, made with graphite or gunpowder. In 1967, Ruscha used gunpowder to create the striking drawing called Self. Drawn in an exquisite rounded script, whose forms rise to face the viewer,  a shadow-like background throws the four cursive letters into high relief. As a result, Self reads as a sharp tonal relief, whose rounded shapes justify the making of the drawing alone. We can only admire the precision of the lines forming the letters, rounded or straight (the curves of the letters are done with such detail, that they are nearly palpable). But what about the word “self” pushed more or less into a lost space by isolation the artist lets go by? The word “self” is central to Western culture, in art especially. The artist’s activities result in a force most quickly and effectively called “self.” But it is also a vaguely determined word and concept, too large to make easily accessible sense. It reduces the energies behind the art object to a gestalt determined by the chthonic force of the object, making it slightly unknown perhaps even slightly menacing. The untoward, unknown relations between the fact of the object and the figure responsible for it become a conflict out of which meaning is made. If the word exists on its own, as an object, which it does, a metaphysical charge presides as well, forcing the object out of the hands of its maker and into the world. The push behind the fore, then, is the self–and the time needed to invest the world with its full meaning.              

​

In 1977, Ruscha painted the long horizontal work called Back of Hollywood, The place name is seen from behind, and the letters stand out against a reddish sky, which is about to turn into a sunset. A bit of bright yellow sunlight illuminates the lower left of the painting. The bottom of the composition is meant to depict the soil or dark walk on which the back of the notorious Hollywood sign stands. This work is a fair copy of a major pop icon, but it is rendered backward, and the sunset, while robust and brilliantly colored, also suggests an endgame scenario. Is Ruscha rendering the beginning of the collapse of Hollywood as we know it, or is that too symbolic a reading for a simple version of a well-known but overpraised place word that is now more than what it says? It seems to me that the painting shows the artist’s familiarity with the film center, its romantic attractions enabling Ruscha to paint a beautiful but also deliberately banal sunset–as if the golden history of film stars and spinning celluloid were nearby. Hollywood has become a carbon copy of itself, just as the sign is duplicated endlessly in a frenzy of star-studded duplication. The self-reference turns full circle, both caricaturing the American obsession with the film star and our need to iterate, again and again, an image that both defines us and undermines our need to be triumphally different, a glorious assertion belonging to Americans alone

​

Ruscha is far too smart to fall for the trap of endless stardom, although he does use the idea to play with its absurdity. In film we live forever, neither aging nor losing strength. Ruscha’s work transforms experiments, often with imageries and words that would not attract interest if they were not painted and drawn so well. He wants an immediately recognizable landscape, just as Cezanne did in Provence. The problem is that Ruscha’s Los Angeles defies the lyricism of France’s rocky mountainside, although Ruscha does an excellent job of discovering his area’s pleasing quirks, however urban they are. Somehow, in his paintings, the moment changes from the cliche to something bigger, and grander, than a copy of metal and glass industrial stereotypes, It must be that the sights informing Ruscha’s earlier cityscapes–it is likely that the view is less idiosyncratic and more arranged. Little opportunity for creativity exists anymore; the city landscapes change at a slower pace. But Ruscha knows, as Cezanne knows, as well as anyone painting today, that if the artist is true to what he sees, suddenly the view becomes larger and more meaningful than it ever was before.