Ed Ruscha's Poetry of the American Experience

Born in Omaha, Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City before heading to Los Angeles just as it was about to blossom into a credible alternative to New York’s art scene thanks to the efforts of the Ferus Gallery, where Ruscha had his solo debut in 1963.

His work was initially received as a Left Coast variant of Pop Art, but this wasn’t precisely accurate. Influenced by Jasper Johns and René Magritte’s iconic work La trahison des images [Ceci n'est pas une pipe], Ruscha focused on the relationship between words and meaning and how both are rendered abstract by graphic design. Compositions such as Oof (1962) spell out their eponymous subjects in various typefaces familiar from advertising and magazines, setting up a tension between word-as-signifier and word-as-object. In this sense, Ruscha was as much of a conceptualist as he was a Pop Artist.

But pop-cultural referents weren’t entirely absent: Annie (1962), for example, features the title of the comic strip starring the curly-haired, redheaded orphan of the same name, while Trademark with Eight Spotlights (also 1962) reprises the famed emblem for the 20th Century Fox movie studio.

Actual Size (1962) pictures the brand for the potted-meat staple Spam writ large while depicting the product in its real-life dimensions, an example of the kind of trompe-l’oeil that was also Ruscha’s stock in trade. In a 2013 New Yorker profile, Ruscha noted that he “like[d] the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again,” and the same applies to how tromp l’oeil (the optical illusion that tricks the viewer into thinking a painted object is real) transforms objects—a process deconstructed in Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963) where the titular elements are pushed to the edges of the canvas. Ruscha continued to employ trompe l’oeil in another series of works featuring words portrayed in liquidy materials such as Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup (1966), recasting his earlier Annie in brown goo.

Ruscha frequently travelled between Los Angeles and his hometown, Oklahoma City, with paintings like two images of a Standard Oil gas station—all sharply receding orthogonal lines and flattened shapes—inspired by these peregrinations. Both also employ a panoramic format that would become another Ruscha hallmark.

Los Angeles remained his great theme, starring in such efforts as Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). One of several cheaply printed photography books created by Ruscha, it reproduces the entire length of the celebrated street as an accordion foldout stretching to 25 feet. Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68), meanwhile, offers an apocalyptic, Day-Of-The-Locust type view of the then newly opened institution consumed by flames.

A similar sense of declinism informed Ruscha’s Course Of Empire exhibit at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Re-installed here, the project, titled after Thomas Cole’s 1834–36 meditation on the collapse of civilizations, comprises before-and-after views of blue-collar trade schools that have devolved into post-industrial malaise. Barely registering as minimalist boxes, the buildings have their fates marked by changes in signage: One, The Old Tech-Chem Building (2003) has had its name replaced by “FAT BOY,” a portmanteau of the two atom bombs—Fat Man and Little Boy—dropped on Japan.

There are too many other pieces to mention, though one canvas near the end of the show, Psycho Spaghetti Western #7 (2010–2011), displays the sort of late-career poetry that only great artists can muster. It’s a scene of highway trash that includes the same Western pulp novel from Ruscha’s work a half-century before: A contemplation of death, perhaps, but also a metaphor for the American experience as a road trip where dreams are often abandoned along the way.