'...A Kind of Huh': An Interview with Edward Ruscha: Willoughby Sharp

Ed Ruscha, Colored People, 1972, book.

Ed Ruscha, Colored People, 4-color offset printing on Flocote Enamel paper 60 pages, 15 photographic illustrations, edition of 4065, 1972.

WILLOUGHBY SHARP: What interests me most about your books is the particular sensibility, the kind of ironic take you have on ordinary things.

EDWARD RUSCHA: Mmmm. Yeah. That's going to be hard to get at because what it amounts to is a style of living and the taste of things .. . filtering the taste with the style of living and then coming up with statements.

WS: Like what?

ER: Like The Colored People. That’s a product of everything I think about, and everything I do, and everything I buy, and every way I live. All that stuff goes into the funnel and comes out as The Colored People. That’s what's funny, that’s what's curious... don’t you think? (Pause.) Do you want to smoke something?

WS: I’d love to, yeah. I’m just going to move this mike around.

ER: Right in the flowers, thats good.

WS: Do you have these flowers piped in for you?

ER: We just stopped and got them.

WS: It’s nice to see flowers around.

ER: I get them all the time. I buy roses a lot. Flowers don’t really have to cost that much. In Los Angeles you can buy them on the street for about a fourth of what they cost in the flower shops.

WS: Was Twentysix Gasoline Stations your first book?

ER: Yeah, months went into the planning of that. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by loosening up. You know, not gotten so concerned with how I wanted the thing to look. I changed the format about fifty times at the printer's. I couldn't decide what I wanted. I just won't jump right in and do something spontaneously. I’m talking about making a work of art, not about anything else.

WS: It seems you have a very serious attitude towards . . .

ER: Well, yeah, I am serious about it. I’m dead serious about everything I make.

WS: That’s part of your humor, though, isn’t it?

ER: Yeah, to have something come across as humor you have to be methodical about it. It has to be planned carefully.

WS: In 1962 you were painting and drawing. What made you decide to do a book?

ER: Ah Well, I’d always wanted to make a book of some kind. When I was in Oklahoma I got a brainstorm in the middle of the night to do this little book called Twentysix Gasoline Stations. I knew the title, I knew that it would be photographs twenty-six gasoline stations. Blind faith to an idea. I do that a lot. When I get an idea I don’t disturb it. I’m not always sure what form it will take, but I keep the idea.

WS: And that’s the most important thing the idea?

ER: Yeah, yeah.

WS: That’s why you relate somehow to a lot of work that started much later which has a conceptual basis. It seems to me that this approach is something you pioneered with Twentysix Gasoline Stations precisely because the idea had priority over the execution, which you made as anonymous as possible. You shot fifty stations and pared them down to twenty-six so the original idea carried. I’m interested in your reaction to that.

ER: I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of a “Huh?” That’s what I’ve always worked around. All it is is a device to disarm somebody with my particular message. A lot of artists use that.

WS: Give me some examples of “Uh.”

ER: I don’t know, somebody digging a hole out in the desert and calling it sculpture. You know, it’s a surprise to people.

WS: Would Duchamp be the first “Uh” artist?

ER: I think that would be spelled H-U-H, with a question mark.

WS: Or H-U-H-U-H-U-H.

ER: Well, then that would be like a “yes,” that would be like uh-huh.

WS: Uh-ha, right.

ER: I Just use that word to describe a feeling that a lot of artists are attempting to bring out, and some are doing it very well.

WS: Yes.

ER: The entire collection of my books just doesn’t have that feeling of “Huh?” When you go through the whole collection it begins to make some sense; it shows more about the attitude behind them than one of them does. One of them will kind of almost knock you on your ass.

WS: Nine Swimming Pools does that... . I see you have a book on Vermeer here.

ER: Well, I was curious about Vermeer’s life and some of those pictures. The paintings in that book are all the ones he ever did, aren’t they?

WS: Yes, I think he only did thirty-six... . Would you say that you pioneered the book form as-an artwork?

ER: Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that traditionally the book has not been accepted as a work to be put in an art gallery.

WS: I can’t think of anyone else who used the book medium as an art vehicle.

ER: Well a lot of poets have done it but it hasn't been called gallery art art.

WS: Have your books been getting more frequent?

ER: Well last year I did three but Colored People is the only one I’ve done this year. Everything in the media is paced for people's pace. Time magazine comes around once a week and that’s about the time you've forgotten the last one. Or Popular Mechanics or what have you. A newspaper. I've gotten into the style of reading a newspaper in the morning for a couple of hours after I wake up. All the media are filtered that way to the cycles we live in. You know, we live in daily cycles, we live in weekly cycles, we live in monthly cycles so once a year an artist has a show; he might make ten shows a year but they'll be in different cities. It’s all paced out. It’s very natural the way all those things happen.

WS: Does that apply to your own work?

ER: The way to produce art is the same way as the media, to sort of go with that rhythm. That’s why I don’t do twelve books a year, because other people aren't ready for it and neither am I. I’m not ready to make twelve statements a year. I could, and possibly | could push my craft much further because I’m dedicated to this whole publishing thing. I really owe a lot to it. It’s a responsibility, it’s my baby. I have to develop it. When I did the books I had a complete feeling of creation in the same sense that a woman would have a child. I even wrote that down: “These books are my children.” But when I got Colored People back from the press, I yawned, I just yawned.

WS: Was there a point in your career when you started losing interest in making things with your hands?

ER: Yeah, definitely. About three years ago, I just didn’t have the desire to work with my hands, make a painting. I didn’t want to take the time. Then it occurred to me that a way out was to find somebody who could paint and have him do it.

WS: Have you ever rejected anything that was already printed?

ER: Mmmm. I’ve had practically a cardiac arrest over the reprint of one of my books, [Every Building on] the Sunset Strip. I had to go get a lawyer. The original printer finished the job and it was gonna go to the bindery but they cut and folded the whole job wrong. Then I showed them the dummy so they could see that it was not folded right and I said, “You’ll have to do this over,” and they started to argue with me and I just broke out in hives. I really had spots on my face; I was ready to have a heart attack on the spot and I got a lawyer and they finally did the job over again. They had to pay for the cost of the paper and printing and all that. I’ve run into all kinds of problems working with people like that and I’ve had to buy color separations and other things on the outside.

WS: Then isn’t it desirable to find a medium that doesn't even...

ER: No, no, unless I just want to sit back . . . painting a picture is a very simple thing to do. You don’t have to rely on other people; you’re in total control. But you don’t pick a particular medium so you can have total control over it. If you can’t work, with those people, you’re not going to get a good product.

WS: How could you make a better book?

ER: Better? I don’t know how it can be better. I’m satisfied with the results that I’ve gotten so far. There are technical problems that I need to... .

WS: Like?

ER: It’s a job making sure the thing gets delivered properly and that they keep on schedule. For example, Colored People had to be finished in time for the November opening at Castelli and it was pretty close to the wire. I got them about four days before I left for New York.

WS: That book was your one-man show, but do you really need a gallery context for it?

ER: Uh, well, I don’t know whether I need a gallery for the books to survive or not.

WS: No, no, what I meant was your book becomes a one-man show no matter where it is.

ER: Absolutely.

WS: You don’t rely exclusively on the gallery situation to show your work. It passes into the culture as a product first. It isn’t tied to a place. Most of the most significant works of the ’60s were made for specific places. And by putting your art in a book you’ve transcended... .

ER: Not transcended, no. Just traveled away from. . . .

WS: . . . the problem of trying to fit art into a gallery context which is limited by its physical environment and its inability to reach other people who might benefit from it.

ER: The books are definitely not works of art in the same sense as paintings, but I wouldn't call them traveling works of art. They’re tied to place in the sense that they’re tied to a bookshelf.

WS: Well, that’s like a painting in a storage room. But what about the multiple aspect of your books? When you make a painting there’s only one, but your books are printed in editions of thousands. You’re adapting a medium that exists very pervasively in the culture into something which is beginning to be classified as art. And it’s a work of yours that people can buy for six bucks. Now some people might construe that to be a rather revolutionary idea. I can’t think of any artist of the ’60s who could produce something he could call his art for a couple of bucks.

ER: Oh, you mean they always sold for much greater prices? [Laughs. ]

WS: Is there a relation between your work and Salvador Dali's?

ER: Yeah, more so now than I think I knew before.

WS: Does he have that “Huh’’?

ER: No, he doesn’t really have it.

WS: No. It seems to me that the thing that we have to talk about is the special kind of sensibility in your work and particularly its irony.

ER: Everything possesses irony. Nothing gets away from it. You know, that chair being right there. The way it’s broken. It’s ironical how that picture got up on the wall. Irony is everywhere.

WS: That’s a surprise. Is there a certain surprise element in it?

ER: No, no. I don’t look at irony as though it’s a surprise. Irony to one person is not irony to another. It’s an extremely personal . . .

WS: The obvious and the ironic.

ER: Yes. I mean, you can go through here and look at this room and it can just be a belly laugh, the way everything is placed in here. . .

WS: We haven't laughed much though, have we?

ER: No. [Laughs.]

WS: Let’s take Colored People. . . . There aren't any people in it.

ER: It’s blind faith in two separate things. One is the term “Colored People,” the two words together, and the photographs of the cactus is another [. . .].

WS: The title is independent of the book?

ER: In some ways. My amusement with the whole project was being able to use them together through thinking that they weren't really too similar. . . . I’ve always tried to keep people out of my books.

WS: Why?

ER: I don’t know. Just to eliminate the unnecessary human aspect. The first thing Andy [Warhol] said when he saw my book—I gave him Twentysix Gasoline Stations—was “How do you get all these pictures without people in them?” and I hadn't even thought about it before, but there aren't any people in them. Every once in a while you'll spot one. I seem to unconsciously eliminate people from them and I’ve never . . . I don't like imagery of people. Instead of using people, I'll use something else. But I’ve painted a picture of a dead man—it was actually a painting of a magazine cover that had a dead man on it. So I was painting a painting of a painting.

WS: A painting of a photograph of a magazine cover?

ER: No, it wasn’t a photograph; it was a painting on the cover of a magazine. There’s a ten-cent novel with a painting on it of a Texas Ranger walking out of a bank who's just shot a guy for trying to rob the bank, and the guy’s dead over in the corner. So that’s the painting I did.

WS: All the same, your movie has a cast. . . . Leon Bing, Tommy Smothers, Larry Bell and Rudi Gernreich.

ER: Premium, yeah.

WS: It’s based on the same story as your book Crackers [1970; co-authored with Mason Williams]. Were they both done at the same time?

ER: No, Premium was done two years after the book.

WS: Really.

ER: I’m considering pulling the book off the market. I just don’t think it’s very good. Maybe I thought it was all right when I did it, but then the film negated it.

WS: In what way?

ER: The film told the story so much better and that’s what I was after in that little act, telling the story.

WS: What struck me was that your attitude to the film was similar to your attitude to the book, kind of directorial.

ER: Well, in a sense I was impartial because I felt it was an opportunity to be a raconteur and I subjugated everything else to that function. I’ve always wanted to tell a story in another medium, rather than to tell it to someone as they're sitting next to me. The film was not my ultimate artistic statement, not that I know what my ultimate artistic statement is. It’s not autobiographical. It’s Mason Williams’s story.

WS: How did you get Tommy Smothers to be in the film?

ER: He’s a friend and I asked him to be in the book and he was interested in that. When I told him I was doing a movie he wanted to do it too.

WS: How long did it take to do?

ER: Oh, there were five days of shooting. Not consecutive, two and then three. It would have been impossible to shoot five days in a row. The whole thing was just gargantuan, because there weren't really enough people working on it.

WS: What enabled you to do the film?

ER: I got $13,000 from the Guggenheim Foundation.

WS: For that film?

ER: No, my project was to do a book and also to eradicate the bookworm which I’ve been having problems with.