Ed Ruscha, Young Artist: Dead Serious About Being Nonsensical: Patricia Failing

Ed Ruscha. Su, 1958.

Ed Ruscha, Su, 1958, oil, ink, and fabric on canvas.

Ed Ruscha’s business cards identify him as “Ed-werd Rew-shay, Young Artist.” He might draw a picture of a tree on the card to prove it. Or maybe a 1950 Ford. “But I'm still amazed,” he says, “really amazed that I can be an artist and that people will buy my work.”

Forty-four-year-old Ruscha has been a “young artist” for more than twenty years. In 1963, three years after graduation from Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, his first one-man exhibition was held at the nearby Ferus Gallery. Since then, there have been sixty-five one-man Ruscha exhibitions and his work has been included in more than two hundred group shows throughout Europe and America. On March 25, the first full-scale Ruscha retrospective opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Ant; it will later travel. In conjunction with the show, Hudson Hills Press of New York has published The Works of Edward Ruscha, a comprehensive volume designed by the artist himself. [. . .]

Ruscha first became known as a Pop artist, painting commercially pristine images of California icons like Standard gasoline stations and the 20th Century Fox trademark. In the mid-’60s he narrowed his subject matter to single words, often rendered as three-dimensional objects that could be squeezed, poured or set on fire. From 1970 to 1972 Ruscha stopped painting and made prints of words inked with substances like baked beans, caviar, daffodils, cherry pie filling, axle grease, chutney and Metrecal. Later he branched out into photo-silkscreening and etching, started painting on unconventional surfaces including taffeta and satin and made innumerable pastel drawings of favorite phrases such as “Honey, I twisted through more damn traffic today” and “Headlights are similar to people's eyes.” He has also made two 16mm films and published fifteen amicably black-humored books.

Despite the variety of his production, a lot of people still think of Ruscha as a standard Pop artist. New York’s commissioner of cultural affairs and former curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum, Henry Geldzahler, points out, however, that “it is difficult to pigeonhole [Ruscha’s] style at all. Conceptual, Pop, Surrealist, Dada, neo-Dada, earth art—all these are, arguably, elements of his style. Ruscha can be pinned down partially by any of these labels, and yet he escapes all of them.”

Ruscha prefers it that way. “The best labels are pressure-sensitive,” he says. “They should be peeled off easily because labels pin a man down. . . . If any of these labels stuck, my career would probably be over, because fashions come and go.” [. . .]

Ruscha is a man of medium height who tends to grin rather than smile, and whose casual attire contrasts with his carefully tended haircut. A reporter from Rolling Stone once described him as looking “as if he would be an elegant card dealer if only he'd favor ruffled shirts.” He speaks politely and openly to studio visitors about his work, although he rarely seems to say what the more philosophical among them want to hear. This kind of visitor, usually front out of town, believes that artistic issues such as literal versus depicted space, the muse of mathematical composition systems, transubstaniation of word and image, non-narrative discourse, and the objectification of vernacular speech all have something to do with Ruscha’s work. But in responding to questions about, say, the a priori numerical field defined in his book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha tends to change the subject discreetly. “You know, what really interested me about that project,” he might reply, “was the sound of the number ‘26.’ I really like the number ‘26,’ and I wanted to do something with ‘26’ in it.”

Such behavior seems to have confounded serious critics, who tend to make appreciative noises about Ruscha’s work without subjecting it to in-depth analysis. Composing a catalog essay for Ruscha’s retrospective, critic David Hickey found himself “charged with the obligation of summing up a body of critical opinion which no one had been so bold as to venture. I mean, here was a guy who was about to have a retrospective who managed to generate about as much critical comment as Sonny Bono. . . . It made Edward Ruscha look like a genius, of course, to have gotten so far into deep water without having acquired any academic pilot-fish; me it made look a little foolish: kamikaze intellectual stalks white idea with snorkel and Brownie.”

Talking with Ruscha, one soon realizes that if there are any direct answers to questions about the “meaning” of his work, they are probably autobiographical. The fact that he grew up looking at the flat, low horizon landscape of Oklahoma, for example, left an indelible impression that Ruscha transferred to his paintings. With his middle-class, middle-western Catholic upbringing, Ruscha felt liberated by California culture and intrigued by the artist-celebrity lifestyle it could support. Also significant is the subversive conception of art and nonsense he developed along with his Oklahoma City high-school fraternity brothers such as composer Mason Williams and painter Joe Goode.

Ruscha, Goode and Williams are still close friends. “When the spirits of people you're attached to as you grow up tend to keep going along in the same direction, you tend to influence each other,” says Ruscha. “We all seemed to grow up in the same strata too. In Oklahoma back in the early ’50s we were experiencing a kind of runny-nose prosperity—we weren't sodbusters exactly. We did have the opportunity to go away to school—as far away as California—and not be saddled with the kind of Bible Belt values I grew up with—the success-and-prosperity consciousness that said you had to go out and emulate your parents. We could see, growing up in Oklahoma, that there was no room for poets and artists—absolutely no room.”

No room, at any rate, for the kind of art and artist who really interested Ruscha. “I looked at a lot of pictures in books on Dada in the library. It wasn't because I was interested in developing a scholarly appreciation—I was more attracted by the titillation I got from the works I saw in those books. I was inspired by this sort of lunatic group of people who made art that ran against prevailing ideas. Their nonsense was synonymous with seriousness, and I’ve always been dead serious about being nonsensical.”

After graduating from Classen High School in 1956, Ruscha and Williams drove to California in a lowered ’50 Ford with Smitty mufflers. “California seemed the most natural place to go,” Ruscha remembers. “New York was out of the question—it was stepping backward somehow. I suppose because of the media images we had seen, California had more appeal. The magnetism could have had to do with pure colors—the colors of the palm trees—or it could have had to do with pure ideas, like blonde girls running on the beach. I knew there was a cold intellectual side to New York, and that did have some appeal to it—but not enough. I didn’t want to freeze back there. It was cold enough in Oklahoma.”

Ruscha enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute, the Walt Disney—backed school that became the California Institute of the Arts in 1971. Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, and John Altoon were teaching there, and fellow students included Larry Bell, Llyn Foulkes, Wally Batterton, Eddie Bereal, and Oklahomans Goode, Don Moore, Patrick Blackwell, and Jerry McMillan. Ruscha tried without success to become an Abstract Expressionist. “They would say, face the canvas and let it happen, follow your own gestures, let the painting create itself. But I'd always have to think up something first. If I didn’t, it wasn’t art to me. Also it looked real dumb. They wanted to collapse the whole art process into one act; I wanted to break it into stages, which is what I do now. Whatever I do now is completely premeditated, however off-the-wall it might be.”

In 1957 Ruscha saw a reproduction of Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces in Print magazine. It was the “atomic bomb” in his training, he says. “I saw it as something that didn’t seem to follow the history of art. My teachers said it was not art. I didn’t need to see the colors or the scale—it was just a pure, powerful image to me that came across in a halftone illustration. It was a strange fruit, and I guess I was really ready for that.”

Ruscha, in fact, “never was inspired by the holy world of painting. I was always more interested in photographically oriented image consciousness—printed pages, detached imagery.” He also developed special appreciation for Marcel Duchamp’s painting The Chocolate Grinder. “It was like a mystery that did not need explaining to me. I'll never need to take an intellectual delving into that subject—not because I’m afraid to, but because I don't think there would be that much to offer over something that just has its own power. The real oddity of The Chocolate Grinder is that it has a dedication to certain classic truths about the making of a picture and the illustrating of an object and then it also has this inane-ness to it.”

In the late 1950s Ruscha started making collages and montages and then began painting the covers of hardbound books. “I began to see book covers as juicy surface to work at and on. Books and their titles have always been important to me. So the title of my artworks is very important to me—sometimes as important as the work itself. I looked at books as canvases almost because they were three-dimensional in the same way canvases are—so on some of my later canvases I also painted titles along the so-called spine of the canvas.”

Using a format analogous to a book cover, Ruscha composed one of his first word paintings, Su, in 1958. Its two letters centered alone on a square, neutral background, “Su” referred to Su Hall, a girlfriend at the time. “I thought of it as my painting of her and for her—my portrait of her,” says Ruscha.

After graduating from Chouinard in 1960, Ruscha took a full-time job in an advertising agency doing layout and graphics, an experience he found to be “sheer hell.” After a year he left and spent seven months traveling in Europe, where he discovered that “the classics didn’t mean anything to me at all. I didn’t spend much time in the Louvre. I was much more interested in visiting galleries to see what was going on. And what was going on, oddly enough, was Johns and Rauschenberg.” [. . .]

[In 1962] Ruscha began moving out of his Jasper Johns phase, tightening his surfaces and painting single words like “honk,” “radio,” and “oof,” centered on neutral backgrounds. “I can’t tell you exactly why I picked those words, but I was interested in monosyllabic word sounds that seemed to have a certain comedic value to them.” Ruscha also made his first painting with illusionistic three-dimensional letters in 1962, Large Trademark with Eight [Spotlights]. Its subject is the 20th Century Fox trademark but, Ruscha cautions, “it didn't mean I was really into sign culture—community graphics—as such, although I do respond to it. I think my work always came more from the printed page than from big things out there because, for one thing, none of my paintings is big. I'm thinking of James Rosenquist and how his work came directly from his experience of painting billboards for the public. If I'd had that kind of experience, I'd probably be painting bigger paintings of bigger things.”

In addition to admiring their printed and typographical forms, Ruscha was also intrigued with words because they “exist in a world of no-size. Take a word like ‘smash’—we don’t know it by size. We see it on billboards, in four-point type and all stages in between. On the other hand, I found out that it is important for objects to be their actual size in my paintings. If I do a painting of a pencil or magazine or fly or pills, I feel some sort of responsibility to paint them natural size—I get out the ruler. Some of these ideas came together and blended in the late 60s when I painted words like ‘adios’ and ‘hey’ and had cherries and kidney beans in the letters. The beans and cherries were painted actual size, but the words were still in this anonymous world of no-size.”

Words may not have size but they can have three dimensions, as Ruscha demonstrated in Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights. And since objects are generally governed by the laws of physics rather than the rules of grammar, Ruscha began painting words as if they could be subject to physical forces. In Securing the Last Letter and Squeezing Dimple of 1964, for example, compressed and stretched letter forms are held in place by illusionistic C-clamps. In Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup, 1966, a dripping, viscous puddle momentarily assumes the form of the Little Orphan Annie comic-strip logo.

Another genre of word-objects was the “paper ribbon” drawings Ruscha first exhibited at the Alexandre lolas gallery in New York in 1967. In these trompe l'oeil drawings, words are formed from what appear to be strips and pieces of paper illuminated by a low, raking light that casts long shadows. Although some reviewers thought they were made with an airbrush, the drawings created a small sensation at the time because they were, in fact, hand-executed in gunpowder, a medium Ruscha found superior to pure charcoal, one of gunpowder’s prime ingredients.

About the same time, Ruscha discovered another way to objectify words by spelling them out in illusionistic splashes of liquid. “My ‘romance with liquids’ came about because I was looking for some sort of alternative entertainment for myself—an alternative from the rigid, hard-edge painting of words that had to respect some typographical design. These didn’t—there were no rules about how a letter had to be formed. It was my sandbox to play in. I could make an ‘o’ stupid or I could make it hopeless or any way I wanted to and it would still be an ‘o.’” [. . . ]

Another of Ruscha’s virtuoso graphic performances resulted from an invitation by Alecto Editions in London to produce a series of prints. The invitation came in 1970, at a time when Ruscha “didn’t like oil painting anymore. I had gotten interested in the idea of staining things instead, and then it began to seem natural to stain things with things that really stain, like carrot juice. It seemed simple—the direct way between A and B—as opposed to trying to illustrate a stain using traditional illustrator’s tools like oil paint.” In London, therefore, Ruscha decided to try to make prints with organic extracts rather than traditional inks. Many candidates flopped. Carnations, for example, did not pull because the paste separated from the liquid. Cream left a slimy deposit. Tomato paste dried to a gray dust. Chocolate syrup, raw egg, coffee, strawberries and tulips, however, were among the many substances that did result in successful screen prints.

News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues, as the series was called, pleased Ruscha enormously but failed as a commercial venture. For one thing, the results were not all that visually compelling: each word, centered in Gothic script, is rendered in colors that are often surprisingly mundane considering their origin. The organic “inks” also proved to be somewhat unstable: pinks from salmon roe, for example, slowly changed to bright yellow. Ruscha tends to regard these changes as bonuses, but traditional collectors, who pay from $300 to $4,000 for other Ruscha prints, apparently did not.

Between 1962 and 1972, in addition to publishing fifteen books, Ruscha managed to execute more than five hundred word images in various media even though he was a “young artist” only part of the time. He was also employed as a book designer and printer's devil, and from 1965 to 1967 did layouts for Artforum magazine, then headquartered above the Ferus Gallery. In 1967 he married Danna Knego, from whom he was divorced in 1972. Their son, Edward Joseph Ruscha V; was born in 1968. He also worked on projects with [Billy Al] Bengston and ceramic sculptor Ken Price and continued his close friendships with Williams and Goode, who frequently accompanied him on drives back to Oklahoma.

“I used to drive back four or five times a year,” says Ruscha, “and I began to feel that there was so much wasteland between L.A. and Oklahoma that somebody had to bring the news to the city. Then I had this idea for a book title—Twentysix Gasoline Stations—and it became like a fantasy rule in my mind that I knew I had to follow. Then it was just a matter of being a good little art soldier and going out and finishing it. It was a straightforward case of getting factual information and bringing it back. I thought of it as making a sort of training manual for people who want to know about things like that.”

Twentysix Gasoline Stations, published in 1962, was the prototype for most of Ruscha’s subsequent books. It contains black and white snapshots of gasoline stations in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Amarillo, Texas—the model for Ruscha’s famous 1963 painting, Standard Station—each photographed from across the street and identified by a one-line caption giving name and location.

Ruscha’s second topographical book, Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965, is identical in format to Gasoline Stations and serves as a training manual about typical Los Angeles habitats like the Fountain Blu, Tiki Tabu, Bronson Tropics, 11 Pompeii and Lee Tiki. Thirtyfour Parking Lots, 1967, records totally vacant Los Angeles parking lots from the air. [. . .] In [Every Building on] the Sunset Strip, 1966, Ruscha used a motorized Nikon to photograph all the buildings on both sides of the street and then pieced together the pictures into a double strip that unfolds to a length of twenty-seven feet. Other absolutely literal examples of title-content identity include Nine Swimming Pools, 1968, Records, 1971, and A Few Palm Trees, 1971.

Ruscha’s films, ostensibly straightforward shaggy-dog stories, have a similarly ironic infrastructure. Premium, 1970, based on a story by Williams that Ruscha also made into a book called Crackers, stars artist Larry Bell and includes comedian Tommy Smothers and topless-bathing-suit-designer Rudi Gernreich among its supporting cast. In the film, Bell lures a girl literally into a bed of lettuce, douses her with salad dressing, abandons her on the pretext of having forgotten crackers and then signs into an expensive hotel to eat saltines in bed alone. Another form of sexual displacement underlies Miracle, 1975, in which a slobbish auto mechanic attains salvation by eschewing his friends, his luscious paramour (played by actress Michelle Phillips) and the entire outside world to attend to the needs of the technological soul—the carburetor—of a shiny red Ford Mustang.

The point of Ruscha’s offbeat humor eludes many people, but not, it seems, his old school chums. These faithful friends share a sensibility—or a nonsensibility—that makes one suspect that some of Ruscha’s work should be interpreted as a kind of fraternity in-joke. Ruscha keeps Williams apprised by postcard, for example, of his latest creations, such as Franchise Cemeteries and Ave. of Disgust. Williams in turn suggests titles to Ruscha (“John Wayne Memorial Nuclear Playground”) and has recently “thought of another book I'd like to do with Ed. It would be called Things That Worry You and would have pictures like an eight-year-old kid with a bow and arrow standing next to your car, or a large box in front of you in the middle of the freeway.”

It was Williams, in fact, who suggested to Ruscha that he keep the journal that now serves as a kind of creative linchpin, On its pages Ruscha records phrases from books, dictionaries, the radio, magazines and conversations that may later turn up in one form or another in his work. Looking them over, he comments on some of the notations he has actually used. Slobbering Drunk at the Palomino: “That’s from a Frank Zappa song.” Mysterious Voltage Drop: “I read it in an electrical manual.” Malibu = Sliding Glass Doors: “That whoosh they make sounds like the ocean.” Talk Real: “My kid said that once to me when he was small.” Hello I Must Be Going: “A Groucho Marx quote.” He Walks Into A Meeting Hall Full Of Workers And Yells Out, “O.K. What Is It You Guys Want, Pontiac Catalinas?”’: “It came to me in a dream.”

But what kind of messages are these? How should they be interpreted? In 1971, when Ruscha was clearly equating words with physical objects, critic David Bourdon wrote that “a knowledge of the English language is not a prerequisite for enjoying Ruscha’s work... . His work is more visual than conceptual because he obviously is more interested in the transformation of words into pictorial images than he is in making literary or intellectual allusion.”

True enough in 1971, But since 1975 or so, much of Ruscha’s oeuvre has consisted of pastel drawings of phases like “just us chickens” and “squeaky lil’ tummies,” spelled out in plain block letters on completely anonymous backgrounds. ‘This work obviously isn’t “more visual than conceptual,” and no foreign language dictionary decodes fragments of colloquialisms like “just us chickens.” So what does Ruscha think he’s doing here? “I'm not thinking of the literary aspects,” he says. “I’m not a poet. I’m more of a wordsmith—like a tunesmith—than I am a writer. | go for quick, simple combinations of things. I'm not into storytelling. I’m more into just—still— exercising my own fantasies.”

For the last two or three years, Ruscha’s fantasies have also included “grand horizontal” paintings that nudge words and phrases into a kind of cosmic dialectic. The thirteen-foot-long rectangular backgrounds of these paintings represent Panavision-like sunsets or, more recently, the ionosphere at night, and serve as stage sets for expeditions from one extreme set of concepts to another. Tiny white letters on the left end of one canvas, for example, say “wolves/explosions /disease/poisons,” while on the other side of the curving globe, to the right, we find “home.” On another canvas “ancient dogs barking” is lettered on the far left corner, and “modern dogs barking” on the far right.

These paintings have not been as well received as most of Ruscha’s other work, perhaps because his prolific production has begun to obscure the intricate relationships between these canvases and the rest of his oeuvre. “Ed’s real strength is the depth of his works rather than any of its particular facets,” observes his friend Larry Bell, “and maybe this will come out in a retrospective.” Ruscha’s strength also derives from his ongoing infatuation with the false magic, film personalities and high-tech euphoria of Los Angeles. “Ed’s a very kind person and not defensive like some artists,” Bell explains, “which gives him a more fluid access to something like the show-biz milieu. On the other hand, Ed’s one of the toughest people I’ve ever known. You have to be very tough and ambitious if you're going to make it in L.A.”

As proof of Ruscha’s aggressive grip on L.A. culture, critics sometimes cite his sensational painting The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-68, now at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Questions about the painting's exact political symbolism, however, tend to produce answers from Ruscha like, “You know, what really interested me about that project was its oblique aerial perspective, which is very important to my work. It’s also important because it contains another generality about what I do. It reads from the lower left-hand to the upper-right-hand corner. Standard Station and Large Trademark do too.” (And, one might add, so do the spoon, plate and clock in the 1974 “Domestic Tranquility” suite and, among others, the 1973 Insect Slant from the “black ant and cockroach” series.) Pressed further, Ruscha admits that “although I didn’t have any particular gripe against the L.A. County Museum, I do have a basic suspicion of art institutions, period. You can engrave that in marble. But I actually feel like there’s something classical and gentle about that painting. There’s this nice green lawn around the building and everything's so peaceful—and suddenly there’s this little flame over there on the side”—he says this somewhat gleefully— “that looks as if it could possibly engulf the whole building. But the fire is really like an after-statement—like a coda, as in a coda to music, which is something I find myself doing a lot in my work. And, I guess in a way, it’s important that the subject is an L.A. museum. I’ve wondered at times whether if I lived in another city, my art would be different, and I suppose it would be. The iconography of this place does mean something special to me. I love it, and I’ve always loved it, because it feeds me and it feeds my work.”