Ed Ruscha

"Art has to be something that make you scratch your head"

I first became interested in Ed Ruscha when I went to a retrospective on Ruscha, focusing on his paintings at the Hayward Gallery in London.

Edward Ruscha, an American Pop artist, was born on December 16 1937, in Omaha, Nebraska. His first exposure to art came from a neighbourhood friend, who was a cartoonist, and Ruscha began by drawing his own cartoons.

In 1956, when he was not yet 20, Ruscha drove to California, with the intention of becoming a commercial artist. He entered California Institute of the Arts, a fine arts school known for its training of Disney artists, where he studied until 1960. On completing his studies he was employed for one year by an advertising agency, an experience he did not enjoy at the time but that he later put to good use in a series of photographic books of the California highways, in his work as a designer for Artforum magazine and in the paintings of words that were to become his trademark as an artist in as early as 1961.

Dublin, 1960

Dublin, a large painting based on a small collage of wood, newspaper and ink was the first by Ruscha to include a hand-painted reproduction of a fragment from a Little Orphan Annie comic strip. This might qualify as the first Pop painting of a comic strip image, predating even those of Warhol and Lichtenstein.

Annie, 1962

A second painting from the same source executed two years later, consisting solely of two broad areas of vivid flat colour and the word Annie in its well-known typographic form. By focusing on the word Annie it simplifies and concentrates the image, it renders the art immediately more abstract, it isolates it from key reference points such as the girl; it makes use of the brand’s association with the comic strip and the emotional carry over from the pleasure people gained from that script. This characterized Ruscha’s subsequent concentration on words as found objects. Ruscha was one of the first Pop artists to use words as a part of his art, and it is quite disappointing to see that he is much less famous than other Pop artists when his work is at least as ground breaking and impressive.

Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962

Ruscha completed Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights in 1961, one year after graduating from college. Among his first paintings, this is the most widely known, and exemplifies Ruscha’s interests in popular culture, word depictions, and commercial graphics and brands, as Warhol did with Campbell soup. These would continue to inform his work throughout his career. It was with his paintings of words that he made his most individual contribution to Pop art.

Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963

He applied the deadpan descriptiveness of the gasoline station photographs to several of his most blatant pop pictures, beginning with a large painting, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas; in its wide format, exaggerated one-point perspective, simplified colour palette, striking bold outlines and imagery of searchlights and triumphant signs, this homage to the service station as the temple of the twentieth century closely follows the pattern of his previous painting of the Fox logo. This painting of a gas station has been compared to Edward Hoppers 1940 painting called Gas.

Edward Hopper - Gas, 1940

In 1962 Ruscha's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Jim Dine, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking "New Painting of Common Objects," curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first "Pop Art" exhibitions in America.

Noise, 1963

Since 1962, Ruscha has been experimenting with painting and drawing words and phrases, often oddly comic and satirical sayings. When asked where he got his inspiration for his paintings, Ruscha responded, “Well, they just occur to me; sometimes people say them and I write down and then I paint them. Sometimes I use a dictionary.” Some people look for meaning in Ruscha’s work, whereas Ruscha is using them as a device to question meaning, to focus instead on the art as design and execution – art for art’s sake

Ruscha strives to use words differently, he explains “If you isolate a word for just a moment and repeat it ten, fifteen times, you can easily drive the meaning from the word and from the sound of the word.”

This is a list of some of his works representing single words from 1961-1966

1961
Metroploitain, Hotel ,Boss, Ace, Etoile, Espana, Comics, Paramount, Boulangerie, Par avion, Calce, Anna, Annie, Bad news, Maja,
1962
20th Century Fox, Fisk, Honk, Ace, Gas, Oof, Dublin, Annie, Spam, radio, War surplus, Service, Ice, Steak, Schwiters, Ford, Hotel, Rah
1963
Noise, Smash, Flash, Standard, Hey, Space, Electric, Motor, Room, Fuck, Automatic, cut, Look, Radio, Jelly, Blank, Paris, Also, Great,
1964
Damage, Radio, Standard, Boss, Honk, Hey, Smash, Lawyer, Electric, Scream, Won’t, 1964, Voltage, Jelly, Dimple, business, Wolf, Explosion, Book, Bull, English drama, Age
1965
fats, Annie, Nicholas, Wilder, German, Standard, Heavy Industry, Church, Foo, N.Y., Belladonna, Mud, Chaw, Gag, Fist, Pie, box, Yet, Salt, Pep
1966
Charlie, Pussy, Stardust, Pansy, Business, Eri, Piano, des Artes, Lisp, Unique, Judge, Cherish, Punk, Automatic, Important developments, Cherry, Heart attack, Sin, Ed Ruscha, respect, Sure, Surrealism, Liquids, Chemical, Glass, jazz

Faith, 1972

By the late 1960s, Ruscha was intentionally using single words that were divorced from any meaning or context. It was sufficient for a word to appeal to Ruscha simply for its graphic design or sound.

Friction and Wear, 1983

A large body of work completed in the 1980s presents text superimposed over abstracted skies. Many of these skies are brilliant gradations of red and orange that offer an arresting ground for Ruscha’s statements.

But Ruscha did not select skies because of their romantic or majestic allusions; his reasoning is more pragmatic. He said “Paintings of words can be clearer to see when there is an anonymous backdrop. I’ve always believed in anonymity as far as a backdrop goes – that’s what I consider the ground or the landscape or whatever it is that’s in a painting. I do have paintings of backgrounds with foregrounds that seem to be the words or the images. That’s why I have this kind of lofty idea of a landscape as being a pivotal point to making a picture. And so there’s a landscape that’s a background, but I don’t see it. It’s almost not there. It’s just something to put words on.”

The Act of Letting a Person into Your Home, 1983

Only a few of the major practitioners of Pop art made a decisive change of direction, Ruscha for example, created an extremely personal and original form of conceptual art that was witty and inventive in its visual use of language.

Spring Sprung, 2010.

Ed Ruscha is still alive, and still producing work, this is one of his latest pieces, Spring Sprung, produced this year. As you can see he is still evolving and trying many new styles and mediums. To me Ruscha is a key figure in the pioneering of the Pop art movement, and should be seen as such, but his public impression is much less than that of Warhol or Lichtenstein, who were no more important or influential than Ruscha.

Final Mark: 70%, 1st