Ed Ruscha is a great American art daddy, such that he has been called “the deadpan laureate of American art,” “the great American Pop and Conceptual artist,” “one of the most important figures in contemporary art today,” and “the visual deus ex machina of what has become the most overscrutinised city on earth.” This latter bombastic nugget, from Angeleno crime writer James Ellroy, refers to the inextricable coil that is Ruscha and Los Angeles, which has been home, influence, and subject for the artist since 1956. The art-historical narrative around the artist and his city, a place traditionally downplayed within the canon, has come to equate the two: Ruscha is Los Angeles is America. Aside from being an oversize load for one man to bear, this positions Ruscha as an artist of gargantuan political dimension, since representing America is necessarily snarled up with a concatenation of assumptions and assertions about empire and liberty, attended to by settler colonialism, racism, genocide, slavery, capitalism. Yet, routinely and consistently, the political implications of Ruscha’s work have been sanded, softened, and sheened away, often mentioned but rarely, if ever, the point of singular analysis. The proposition of Ruscha and his work as politically engaged, or even radical, is instead neatly diluted by a script coauthored by the artist in which he is a mere observer, a reporter of “facts,” as Christophe Cherix describes in a new exhibition catalogue, or an American innocent who is, as Dave Hickey once put it, “standing right beside us, gazing at his findings as quizzically as we are, occasionally glancing over and raising an eyebrow, going, ‘Huh? Whadda ya think?’”
Ed Ruscha, Hollywood Study, 1968, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist. © Ed Ruscha, photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Robert Gerhardt.
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art after debuting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, is the artist’s largest retrospective to date, and its comprehensiveness provides a ripe opportunity to reconsider the pervasive mythology of Ruscha as neutral. The commonly used descriptors deadpan and cool are not necessarily incorrect, but they primarily describe affect and not the substance of the work—a real shame for someone as substantial as Ruscha. Eschewing Abstract Expressionism during its prime, Ruscha employed a calm, removed aesthetic as one key tool in his larger project of cracking open an indeterminate space between symbols and their meanings, specifically in the context of America’s burgeoning commercial modernity. Questioning the power of words, as he does in the “word paintings” he is most famous for—like the early example Boss (1961), included in NOW THEN—is a bald form of questioning power itself. He extends this inquiry of power into the realm of psychic and physical geography vis-à-vis Los Angeles, a city defined by the friction between its fact—as a tangible, changing, and socially fraught city—and its fantasy as an out-of-time and otherworldly “dream factory.” The clearest example of such extension may be his combined use of documentary-style photography and the artist’s book. Rendering words, Los Angeles, and books alike into defamiliarized units becomes a portal to infinity that invites the viewer into wide-open emotional landscapes. Such existential and painstakingly constructed spaces of ambiguity deserve to be considered as a radical alternative to a confused American fantasy, where concepts of progress and liberty ceaselessly justify and mask colonialist violence. Ruscha has diligently been carving out such alternatives for decades, albeit safely under cover of his own claim that he has “no social agenda with [his] work.”
Ed Ruscha, People Getting Ready to Do Things, 1974, Collection Edward Ruscha V, © 2024 Ed Ruscha, photo courtesy of the artist.
The second gallery of the exhibition, which is organized chronologically, features several foundational paintings that attest to Ruscha’s early concern with Manifest Destiny as the psycho cultural engine of American imperialism—in other words, the immensely consequential slippage between the western US and the idea of the West as boundless, full of possibility, and imminently available. Ruscha personally and literally enacted the westward drive in 1956. As his oft-repeated origin story goes, he left Oklahoma City to settle in Los Angeles (where “art barely had a presence,” according to Christopher Knight), graduating from Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) in 1960 and intermittently working commercial-art jobs. In 1963, he painted Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, which shows the titular four images arranged like the cardinal directions on a compass; the “cheap western” is a realistically depicted Popular Western comic book. Here, Ruscha is already treating the paired mythologization and commodification of the American West as an object itself, and one intrinsically caught up with text and mass media. Rendered as an object, the fantasy narrative is also vulnerable. As seen in the nearby Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964), the same Popular Western comic is torn halfway through its middle, a pointed destruction-in-process floating like a compass rose in the sky above one of the artist’s earliest iterations of his most famous subjects: the gas station.
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), Ruscha’s early, iconic artist’s book, appears at LACMA in a vitrine in the same room as the landmark painting Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962). The former debuted Ruscha’s style of cataloguing and categorizing built environments through photography, with twenty-six images of twenty-six gas stations along Ruscha’s driving route between Oklahoma City and Los Angeles. The latter shows the Twentieth Century-Fox Film logo projecting from the canvas’s lower right, bisecting the picture plane as it grows to completely occupy the painting’s left half. Nearby, the small colored-pencil sketch Photo, Riot, 400 Books (1963) visually and conceptually triangulates between Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Large Trademark. Here, the Twentieth Century-Fox Film logo is replaced by upright copies of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, stacked to assume the volume of a boxy building with eight spotlights behind it. In line with Ruscha’s strong Surrealist tendencies, these three works together recognize and make primordial goo of categorical boundaries of scale, identity, and meaning, specifically in the context of two symbols tied to American westward expansion: the gas station and a logo tied to Hollywood as dream factory. Text, landscape, building, and book become interchangeable, not fixed in space after all.
Ed Ruscha, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, Whitney Museum of American Art, © Ed Ruscha, photo credit: Paul Ruscha.
What is freedom if not the ability to define and redefine oneself in relation to space? If, from the beginning, Ruscha’s works have grappled with the freedom-fueled mythology behind American imperialism (and the conflation of “freedom” with the gaining of capital), they have also continually suggested alternative modes of liberatory expansion. Language said, “Go West, young man” to certain types of young men; Ruscha went as far west as he could go and then set to work undoing language. Los Angeles was touted as an abstract, lush paradise, so Ruscha diligently catalogued A Few Palm Trees (1971), providing unromantic photographic evidence of the paradisiacal fauna as scraggly, varied, and rooted in actual street intersections. And by poking fun at the taxonomical impulse by half-assedly pretending to enact it, Ruscha gives a baked-in rebuttal to the label of “anthropologist of the mundane” suggested by Cherix, and deflates the precision-oriented cartographical approach that has historically bolstered colonization. In NOW THEN, an edition of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha’s 1966 artist’s book, is stretched nearly the length of an entire gallery. In what was decidedly his most earnest attempt at true documentation, Ruscha quixotically undertook to photograph the entire strip; but by compressing a geographic location with major symbolic import into a small volume, and then designing the book as an accordion that could take up relatively large amounts of space, he simply and effectively reveals how malleable territory and narrative can be.
Ed Ruscha, Parking Lots (May Company, 6067 Wilshire Blvd.) #25, 1967, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Discretionary Fund, © Ed Ruscha, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.
Roughly the latter half of NOW THEN descends into a thematic darkness that can be read as a more open critique of American empire (called out by name in the 1992–2005 suite Course of Empire), even if Ruscha himself might decline to say so out loud. Ranging from his moody, fuzzy silhouette paintings to explicit considerations of time, as in the clock faces of Five Past Eleven (1989) and Clock (1994), the proposition embedded within The End (1991), or the globalization focus of Course of Empire, these works have a decidedly heavy, existential bent. Still, amid even his most forthrightly grave works, Ruscha literally makes space for a different story by toying with text redaction as a multivalent tool. Two specific examples stand out. The 1996 painting Note We Have Already Got Rid of Several Like You—One Was Found in River Just Recently uses black redaction blocks to “erase” a death threat sent to the baseball player Jackie Robinson. While Ruscha could be personally condemning the threat’s content by “covering” it up, the text itself, from which the title is drawn, is the key to understanding the work. As ever, Ruscha is questioning the power of words in relation to power itself, here more explicitly in terms of American white supremacy. The earlier 1987 canvas Mother’s Boys, which hangs one gallery over, also bears a redaction-like mark: a large white rectangle placed like a caption beneath a shiny and billowing American flag. The patriotic representation immediately conjures the proud, if vague, memorialization used for those who have died “for the flag.” Maybe the white box is there to tell us what the flag could mean: a literal blank canvas for writing another narrative where mothers’ boys aren’t forced or conned into dying to kill other mothers’ boys in perpetuity.
Ed Ruscha, Cameo Cuts, 1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of The Jane & Marc Nathanson Family Foundation, © Ed Ruscha, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.
The American flag resurfaces in the exhibition’s final gallery. Our Flag (2017), made following the election of Donald Trump as US president, shows the patriotic symbol in tatters, as if caught mid-explosion. Oddly, it is this work that critics have most quickly dismissed as too obvious a critique. “There’s simply nothing good to say about ‘Our Flag,’” writes Jackson Arn for the New Yorker. “Sometimes a cheesy metaphor is just a cheesy metaphor.” But isn’t redeeming cheesiness part of what Ruscha has been doing all along? The tattered state of the flag is echoed in Psycho Spaghetti Western #7 (2010–11), in which Ruscha brings Popular Western full circle: the comic is shown strewn amid a mountainous pile of garbage that also includes a canvas and a shorn, dried-up palm frond. Are they symbols for Ruscha’s career, or for art and paradise at large? In Bliss Bucket (2014), a grimy mattress has been abandoned on the street, and it bears stains that may or may not actually be the shadow of palm trees. Elegiac and hued with bitterness, these works use realism to show the Western frontier as a more microscopic landscape than ever before. It is minutely specific, dirty, and left behind. Gone are cartographical gestures; the territory has been wasted. It is almost as if Ruscha is finally tired of his own game, maybe even frustrated that the mirage of ambivalence has been so widely and readily absorbed, despite his entire oeuvre being a play on the very idea of taking anything at face value. These paintings feel like he’s finally shrieking that America really blew it this time.
Once labeled a “semiotic Houdini,” Ruscha perhaps performed his greatest trick by evading being pegged as radically, emotionally objecting to the unfolding story of America as a violent, dishonest, dying place. This evasion invites the question: what do you do when an art daddy like Ruscha claims he is not an authority? Ruscha knew the power of the words deadpan and cool, and he used them to conjure a potent ambiguity that suggests our agency in meaning-making is far greater than we allow ourselves to think. Affect does not need to mean substance. The title of this retrospective riffs on the artist’s painting Now Then, As I Was About to Say . . . (1973), as if we might dangle on the edge of his words forever. If we’re really looking, though, we might already find a directive to keep pressing against, or slipping through, the scaffolding of power, coming up with imaginaries to inhabit beyond America’s future. Is this reading too stupid, or too obvious, to be possible? Ruscha might offer that just because something is stupid and obvious doesn’t mean it’s not worth saying.
