Conversation with Ed Ruscha: Bernard Blistène
Edward Ruscha, The Music from the Balconies, 1984, acrylic on canvas.
This interview took place in the artist's studio at Venice, Los Angeles. Ruscha did not want the transcription from the cassette to lose the informal tone he had adopted. I thank Maggie Gilchrist for the assistance which she brought to the interview’s conception. (BB)
Bernard Blisténe (BB): It has been said that you are the artist of Los Angeles as Manet was the artist of Paris. What do you feel?
Edward Ruscha (ER:} That's almost too much to swallow. Comparisons are strange answers to things, but I don’t claim to know more about this city than any other artist. I’m not a native of Los Angeles. I’m from the mid-west, the south-west actually, from Oklahoma. When I came here it was more or less an extension of my life there. Everything was horizontal, but this was like a garden of Eden compared to Oklahoma. I knew that I would go to art school and I had a choice of New York or Chicago or Kansas City or Los Angeles, so this was the place, because it had an exotic edge to it that I liked at that time. And I still love this city, but I'm frustrated by it, it’s a love/hate relationship.
BB: So you are a frustrated man?
ER: Well, you know, I like to get out of town. I like the open areas. I like where there’s no city. I spend a lot of time in the desert. Over the post twenty years it’s just harder and harder to live in this city,
BB: It seems to me, though, that you are a man of the city?
ER: I guess I’d have to say that solitude is the best thing, although I can have it right here if I want it. I like to work by myself in my studio, no assistants, and not even have to worry about what's happening in the outside world. I’m not the kind of artist that hangs around Hollywood and Vine, locking for action. Inspiration from the city is in my work, though I doubt that my work would be much different if I lived in Chicago or New York or anywhere else. But, above all I would say, my inspiration comes from mass communication rather than cerebral or historical things. My real inspiration is the plastic side of life, what you might call city life, not television, I was never really into television, but, as you know, the print media, photography and books. It’s true that I came to painting later.
BB: But why so insistently painting when, obviously for you, there were other possibilities?
ER: Well, it happened in art school: I totally bought the life of an artist, lock, stock and barrel. I knew I was going to be an artist in some way or other. At first I wanted to be a commercial artist, I learned sign-painting and painted many signs commercially.
BB: Can you be more explicit?
ER: I painted signs, this is for sale, that is for sale. I worked for a company here at Christmas. I would letter children’s names on gift items, cheap gift items. I’d do thousands of them every year. I also worked at an advertising agency. I did lay-outs and studied printing techniques which later developed into my interest in books. So, in the beginning, it was photography, printing and painting. Then later, in art school, painting began to take me over, and I saw that this was the answer. I couldn’t say what | wanted to say in any commercial art form, it was impossible, so I committed myself to painting. It wasn’t even my choice in a sense. I’m a victim! I saw that there were things to say and work to do, and I wanted to do more with my life than work for someone else. I like the idea of working for myself, alone. I’ve always liked that. The climate at that time, too, provided a certain camaraderie with friends and fellow artists, all of us doing similar things. So I began to meet more artists, more painters, and I could see I was just born for the job, born to watch paint dry.
BB: Who did you meet in those days?
ER: I studied under a man named Richards Ruben, this was in Los Angeles in the late fifties, and Robert Irwin, and then I met John Altoon and Billy Al Bengston and Ed Moses and Kenneth Price, these were artists who were already beginning to make their commitment to working. I found them almost priest-like in their commitment to their art and I decided I had to commit myself, in this way, to painting. I guess it was a strange alchemy, a mixture of things that just happen to you, a desire to say something, and also a commitment to have the traditional artist's way of life.
BB: Yes, but did you know that by adopting the particular approach you have taken in your work, you have been in fact fighting against a certain view of painting, that you have been developing a particular attitude?
ER: Well, I was trained and sort of programmed to think like an Abstract Expressionist, and I was part of that for a while, and, looking back, I can see that Abstract Expressionism is vital painting, it’s real, and I still love it. So I don’t find it foreign to me. But it’s only a step towards my direction. I think an artist has to negate one thing in order to move on to something else. So, it became a question of either loading the brush with colour and attacking a canvas that was pure white, or something else, something preconceived. I took the second way. My paintings were almost dreamed about in advance, rather than painted on the spot, I began to plan my work.
BB: But everything we do is planned.
ER: Yes, and funnily enough it all seems to come from a source, even abstract painting, in a way, has an approach and some connection to reality.
BB: But which reality? Is your work about evocation?
ER: I guess the idea of noise, of visual noise, somehow meant something to me, and still means something to me. The idea that you can say a lot in a small given area somehow has always intrigued me, and this seems to be one of the principal guidelines in my work. I never forget that I have a given space in which to make noise, or lose sight of the idea that it is going to echo whatever I feel.
BB: When you say that you like to make visual noise with your painting, is this some kind of definition?
ER: It is. It’s a freedom to insult people or assault people.
BB: So now I understand why you are not a writer. It is a question of impact.
ER: Yes, I never wanted to write. I prefer the economy, the directness, of visual tools, rather than communicating as a writer. There are some similarities, but my words are always instant choices.
BB: In your work I find a kind of chiasm, a cross between what you paint and what is written on the canvas, whereby what is written on the painting never refers to the image: what Duchamp called an intentional distortion.
ER: Very true. I think of it that way myself sometimes. There is a vast separation: I see myself working with two things that don’t even ask to understand each other. I like the emptiness of things at the same time that I like things that are power-packed.
BB: Yes, but you mix both kinds of reality—they intersect. Is it perhaps a question of not being able to say what you see, and vice versa, a kind of collision?
ER: Yes. Despite the fact that I use words, I work in and on a non-verbal world, and this is the irony.
BB: And you use slang and ellipses, things which, it seems to me, come from a film-maker’s imagination, phrases or snatches of conversation which remind me, for example, of Lauren Bacall in ‘The Big Sleep’: of the moment when she asks for a cigarette in the very instant that she appears on the screen.
For me, the irony in your work is that in spite of the attentive, formal approach, there is a strong impression of immediacy and improvisation.
ER: I believe in intuition and approaching things as instant gratification. Just do the things you want to do, make the kind of pictures you want to make.
BB: l am thinking also about your interest in music, in jazz, for example.
ER: Yeah, jazz, and other forms, I do get inspired by music.
BB: I am thinking, among others, of Charlie Parker.
ER: And even earlier jazz, from the twenties and thirties, but mostly from the fifties and sixties.
BB: For me, the construction of your work is similar to free jazz.
ER: Yes, improvisational jazz. I see somehow a kind of motivational device for myself in listening to music, it’s a way of freeing your spirit and it also gets very vernacular. I like blues, rhythm and blues, country and western music, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart.
BB: The process of your painting is becoming more complex—and more sophisticated. I am thinking of the black paintings, for example. Would you agree with this?
ER: Perhaps, but that’s not by design. It’s not as though I sat down and did some mathematical calculations and saw that the only way for me to go would be black and white. I’d rather keep the paintings fluid and spontaneous and free.The longer I am at it, the less I want to look at my work historically. I don’t want to have to go back and appraise myself. I’m doing different work now, but I still feel that it is rooted in the oldest things I was inspired by.
My work has its roots in the earliest things that I did. I knew there was a real hot area in the world of art when I was introduced to Dada, Futurism and Dada. Futurism mostly for the attitudes, the things they wrote were very good, and even the paintings. I liked Futurists and I feel that there’s some of me there, also Dada and Schwitters. So I felt more rooted in earlier art than I was in, say, Abstract Expressionism, although I learned a great deal from Abstract Expressionism.
BB: Can we come back to language and the manipulation of words? The language you use is so “spoken” that it stops me from speaking when I look at your paintings. For me, the impact of your work has much to do with a kind of relocation from movies and books to the canvas, to the extent that I am blocked from having the kind of speech I might normally have with a painting; and this, I would add, is not a bad thing. Something which we might otherwise say about painting no longer comes into play.
ER: My work doesn’t come with a set of instructions. There are no rules for looking at my paintings. They come, as I have said, from my intuition.
BB: Questions of language have become central to the century. It seems to me that you have wanted to bring about a distinction in your work between what we would call in French “la peinture” and “le tableau.” You never cease to work with the possibilities which remain open regarding, so to speak, the painting which can be read and the book which can be seen. Is it at this point that, for you, language becomes subversive? And is this the reason why your books have become a form of subterfuge?
ER: My books were very hot items—it was hot art to me, almost too hot to handle. I liked the idea that my books would disorient, and it seemed to happen that people would look at them and the books would look very familiar, yet they were like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I felt that they were very powerful statements, maybe the most powerful things I’ve done. I’m kind of considered part of the mainstream of art history now. My work is not revolutionary, but the books that I did were, at that point, a can opener that got into something else. My books were art objects to me, but a lot of people chose not to even accept them, and for this reason they have always been underground—and still are. I consider my books to be strictly visual materials. I even perceived them as bits of sculpture, in a way. They were three-dimensional, they were thick. I even painted on the sides of my canvases for a few years to accentuate the idea that this was a three-dimensional thing. I would make a painting that said “Radio,” for example, then paint the title on the side. In an odd way, it was like a book, and so my paintings were book covers in a way. That’s it, I do book covers. If you make a book cover and put a word on it, then it’s immediately accepted by people, but if you do so in painting, then it’s sort of disorienting. And isn’t disorientation one of the best things about making art?
BB: Would you say that this sliding between two things, that these transpositions, are at the heart of your sense of irony and the absurd?
ER: Absurdity for its own sake is rich. The selection of something absurd or the absurd handling of an absurd subject has attracted many artists. We have “bad” painting, we have “absurd” painting. Artists forever have been trying to do things that are unacceptable. That’s the nature of being an artist: to do things that are unacceptable... and would I change the natural order of things?
BB: Do you think that sometimes your work refers to a certain kind of surrealism? I mean,for example, Magritte or even Dalí?
ER: Not really. There are some sympathetic waves of thought maybe, but my work is more tied to the frustrations and decadence of city life—the light bulb, more than the candle. I saw Magritte and Dalí after they were forbidden. I saw them as art history, so that meant something else to me. But the forbidden things... artists always want to do things that are forbidden. They want to be tough, they want to break the rules, they want to bring on this absurdity and when it’s done right, it can be truly beautiful.
BB: We have spoken about city life. When you come from Europe, the first thing you learn is that in Los Angeles no one walks, everyone drives. I think of your work, therefore, as a huge field in which you drive—and of the canvas as a kind of windshield! Would you accept this kind of reading?
ER: That’s a notion.... Yes, that could very well be true—the automobile and space and all that, these have a lot to do with my work. If I didn’t drive, if I lived in a place where there were no cars, I’m sure I would think about things entirely differently.
BB: And, taking this idea a little further, regarding the way in which you handle space and illusion, is there not something in your work of the drive-in?
ER: That’s great, I’ll accept that... a drive-in. [Laughs.]
BB: Can we speak now about your work in terms of uprootedness, of displacement?
ER: Uprootedness, displacement.... I don’t know where my work fits there....
BB: Have you seen Stranger than Paradise? For me your work feels a bit like this film.
ER: That’s a compliment. Yes, it’s true, the film deals with a sort of lost world, without refuge. But if you are going to push me in this direction, I would have to say that it is difficult to compare a painting with a movie. With a painting you don’t get a running story-line from beginning to end, you are confronted instead by something smack, face-on, something which doesn’t move. And yet movies, the screen... these have always been closely related to my work, and that’s why I am so involved with them.
BB: Without a doubt. And photography?
ER: Yes, there’s a certain power to a photograph. The camera has a way of disorienting a person, if it wants to, and for me, when it disorients, it’s got real value. Movies and photographs are great art forms because they offer so much on a flatscreen, on a flat surface.
BB: And what about questions of the blow-up, of the zoom, the centering of images, panoramas, these processes which you employ, which belong to cinema and photography?
ER: Yes, for example, how to make things bigger than they were intended to be, yet words were never meant to be a particular size. They can be this small and they can be that big. They can be huge, billboard size. There is no reality when it comes to a word, and that's why I feel it’s a real comfortable zone for me to work in. l am not forced to register particular sizes.
BB: By combining words and images, words and colors, you run the risk always of literal readings. Yet you continue to short-circuit such literal interpretations. Do you think this is due to a kind of paradox; to the pursuit, if you like, of the subversive image?
ER: I am careful not to be literal, not to offer this other option to anyone. If I paint a picture of the word “cool,” I don’t use a lot of blue or other cool colors—instead, I find myself deliberately taking another route.
BB: To bring about the juxtaposition of two things which have no relation to each other, except in being together on the same canvas or on the same screen?
ER: Yes, and sometimes it’s about oddness. I’ve always had a deep respect for things that are odd, for things which cannot be explained. Explanations seem to me to sort of finish things off.
BB: For the present generation, you are a key figure. You have taken a real freedom with many things. Your art has a phlegmatic quality which expresses itself superbly in the mediation between words and painting. Your work is not tragical-romantical, there is nothing in it of the hari-kari which is characteristic of the work of a good number of your contemporaries. On the contrary, what comes through is a sort of pleasure and coolness, a supreme detachment.
ER: Well, the idea of getting pleasure from art is part of it for me.
BB: It is, however, an idea which has been rejected by a number of your contemporaries.
ER: Perhaps, but take Matisse and Picasso—they were not tortured gentlemen, as far as I know.
BB: Not at all, but they avoided confusion before it had a chance to arise. Can we speak, though, of artists who are important for you? There is often, as you know, the temptation to see in your work a resemblance to the work of Edward Hopper.
ER: I don’t know why, but I’ve always found his work to be kind of institutional, not modern—it’s the reverse of modern. There’s something too obvious, too clean about it... too cosmetic. But you are right, people do compare my work with Hopper’s, because of the gas stations and other useless comparisons which I don’t find at all accurate. I don’t dislike his work. There are some classic paintings which were timely, which summed up the 1930s—these paintings are historic, you respect them for what they are, but the real meat of his work never got me. I never responded to that at all.
BB: Do you think that your work is an expression of its time, as you recognize Hopper’s was of his, and is timeliness a subject for you?
ER: You know, for a good long while, I felt like the art world moved along so slowly and that it had little to say; while movies, on the other hand, seemed to offer so much. Now I think painters are saying more than filmmakers... which is strange for me in a way, because my paintings have a closer relation to movies than to painting.
BB: The first thing to be said regarding making movies is that there is always a range of constraints. But beyond this question of a mediation between cinema and painting, I feel that your work, in the context in which you do it, is emblematic of a particular America which remains, for us, an exoticism.
ER: This is never a question in my mind; and yet my paintings do come out of an American sensibility, out of urban frustrations which are characteristic of where I live. My work has no connection to Europe. There is no doubt that my paintings, to a degree, feed on movies, and yet I have stayed a painter. I guess you could say I am interested in the possibilities that remain in a time which tends to favor the moving image. It’s a paradox, but I find that painting offers more possibilities than movies, perhaps because making a film is such a formidable undertaking. There are always so many people working on it. But I am surprised that the cinema, which is such a young art form, hasn’t questioned its own foundations to the extent that painting has. As I said, it’s perhaps a question of medium; it’s easier to bring off a painting than a film. This is also why I prefer to stay alone with my paintings.
BB: From time to time you use culinary metaphors, you speak about cooking, and you have included various culinary ingredients in your work—vegetable juices, carrots, spinach, chili beans—to, as it were, “prepare” your paintings.
ER: That’s true. I guess making art is a bit like working in the kitchen: there are all these vegetables. I’m always looking at ways to concoct new things, I use different elements, and I feel I have to surprise myself, while at the same time staying faithful to my art.
BB: Can we speak now about the size of your paintings?
ER: Proportion is a lot more important to me than size. A large work will over-power you in a certain way that a small painting cannot. I dream of getting into paintings that are vertical, that are narrower than they are high, but most of my proportions are affected by the concept of the panorama. Like I say, I’m a victim of the horizontal line and the landscape, which is almost one and the same to me. So I’ve eliminated a lot of unnecessary sky and unnecessary ground. I try to focus on where the sky meets the ground so that you have a stretched-out version, something panoramic—a panavision format. I find myself always coming back to this horizontal idea. Back in the early ’80s, I was doing these paintings that were very long and skinny. Then they became more than paintings, they became objects, and were taken out of the common, friendly—let’s say, user-friendly—shape of a painting. I guess maybe I’m trying to put more time and mileage between one end and the other.
BB: Continuing this notion of the panorama, of a cinerama or panavision, it seems to me that your work is nourished more by the thought and reflections of certain artists such as Robert Smithson—whom you knew and with whom you were at various times closely associated—but, in contrast to such artists, you wanted to locate this way of thinking strictly within the framework of painting. As I see it, the alignment of your work with Pop Art has been confusing, and it is even more evident today that your work has closer links to the thinking of land artists, or even certain conceptualists such as Lawrence Weiner. In fact, the sources of your work are always to be found outside the pictorial field, and it has become your task, as it were, to transpose or transplant them.
ER: It is always too simple to reduce an activity to a category. I have drawn from everything which is around me. This is maybe what you call freedom, or is a part of your definition of exoticism.