ED RUSCHA

“Books”

November 24, 2005 – January 14, 2006

“From the first time we experience language, we develop relationships with certain words. These relationships are constantly evolving, as we layer on more and more experiences, and therefore more associations, with the words in our vocabulary”. (Alannah Weston, 2003).

For Ed Ruscha the relationship between people and words, is a subject that has been explored in his works for the best part of the last 40 years. Making use of a range of media and techniques, including painting, printmaking, drawing, photography and artists’s books, he has tried to investigate the relationship between verbal and visual control.

Ruscha’s name is also closely related to the landscape of the American West. Automobiles, gasoline stations, street “furniture”, palm trees, candy colored billboards and the false glitz of Hollywood, form repeated reference points in the artist’s diverse body of artworks.

From the early sixties, words appear in Ruscha’s paintings and drawings. They are often single words, like “Ruby” or “Trust”, later followed by slogan-like expressions which seem to float in atmospheric space. His design schemes are suggestive of the techniques of graphic design, and therefore representation is given to the viewer through the prism of commercial image-making devices.

In the mid seventies, his drawings involve longer and more elaborate word sequences, done in the manner of sans-serif typography, giving more impact to the word. During that time he also creates two films.  Cinema remains a recurrent fascination in much of his two-dimensional art, and that becomes obvious in his works created during the eighties.

In his latest paintings, words are superimposed over postcard-perfect views, of snowy peaks, and the background is again illustrational and manufactured, acting like a stage set.

Through his drawings, Ruscha edits, selects, and re-presents familiar fragments of language, asking the viewer to see these fragments as objects and as ideas. In this way, spectators can unravel the layers that have wrapped around a word or phrase, which may seem to them at first glance, perfectly ordinary. Words in Ruscha’ s pictures become objects that are inspired from the everyday life of the Californian urban landscape: road signs, noise, sounds. An environment that displays a steady and pervading uniformity, inescapable when seen from the road.   

For Ed Ruscha, it is the particularity of the printed word, of typography and sign writing, that provide fertile ground for experimentation. Placing emphasis on the uniformity of presentation  and on the lack of overt human intervention, the artist represents an ideal means to unite the visual and verbal realms - creating, in his own words, a sense of ‘visual noise’.

Ed Ruscha was born in Nebraska in 1937. He studied graphic design and painting at the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles. Since 1956 he lives and works in Los Angeles.