OOF. HONK. SMASH.
MoMA’s giant Ed Ruscha retrospective (the first in New York in many decades) announces itself with a rat-tat-tat of punchy monosyllables. Splashed across canvases in bright bold capitals, they proclaim the artist’s desire to thwomp us with his vision of mid-20th-century America and celebrate its vigorous, percussive language.
“Words have temperatures to me,” Ruscha has said, specifying that he likes them toasty but not scalding. “Sometimes I have a dream that if a word gets too hot and too appealing, it will boil apart.”
The show warms the blood then gradually cools, tracking the artist from his early explosive breakthrough through decades of trying to ignite another. Over the years, Ruscha has kept his splendid eye and technical deftness in good working order. His work is always intelligent and often infused with wit — not the hermetic jokiness or goofiness that so often passes for humour in serious art, but a sharp comic irony.
And yet, at 85, Ruscha, who once struck a delicate balance between optimism and gloom, has let himself slide into dourness. It would be nice to report that his late, dark mode comes wrapped in a hard-won richness of expression, that the aggressively joyful exclamations of his youth have unfurled into mature, exhilarating nuance. But life is more complicated than that.
In 1956, an 18-year-old hopeful headed west along Route 66 from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles to study at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). Abstract Expressionism was still in the ascendant then, but Ruscha’s personality was not programmed for spontaneity or muscular gesture. He needed to ponder, reflect and use the ordinariness around him to filter his feelings and clarify his thoughts.
It took a while, but in 1962 he discovered the perfect icon: a tin of processed pork product attached to yet another pummelling locution: Spam. At the centre of the canvas, a life-sized, realistically reproduced can of the stuff whizzes like a comet through a galaxy of scattered blue brushstrokes, a flaming contrail in its wake. The 6ft-high painting is called “Actual Size”, and Ruscha is having fun with scale: at the top, the brand name blares in giant taxi-yellow letters across an azure band, like a banner pulled by an aeroplane.
The generational handover was hard to miss. By sending a mass-produced food item rocketing through a splattered, drippy Ab-Ex atmosphere, he was cheerfully mocking his elders’ cosmic pretensions. The time for emoting had passed. All these decades later, that claim has lost its urgency, but the painting resonates even more loudly, now that “spam” has come to mean an asteroid field of unsolicited communications hurtling through cyberspace.
Ruscha has cited Dada and Jasper Johns as influences; he’s been less candid about Magritte, with whom he once had lunch and briefly shared a dealer. Ruscha in LA and Magritte in Brussels both kept themselves at a distance from the art world’s incandescent core. They also shared a cool sensibility, a facility with visual and verbal quips, and a fondness for trompe-l’oeil trickery.
Ruscha’s translation of “Ceci n’est pas . . . ” is his 1964 negation “Won’t”, which quivers with wry ambiguity. The terse word appears cut out of blue card stock. In the opening beyond, clouds waft picturesquely through a Magrittian sky. We view that enticing blue yonder from inside a cage of text, with the implicit invitation to break through merged with the prediction that we . . . “Won’t”. But is that refusal a curse or a choice, tragedy or possibility?
During this period, Ruscha perfected a kind of double view, with America simultaneously slouching into its century of might and rushing towards decline. He travelled back and forth along Route 66 as it devolved from crucial artery to relic during the birth of the interstate highway system. In Los Angeles, he drove up and down Sunset Boulevard, photographing every address, corner and telephone pole, in an obsessive attempt to capture the precise moment when the sun-bleached California dream slipped below the horizon.
The service station became the equivocal symbol of America’s apex. Robert Frank got there first, treating it as a poetic motif and surrounding it with language, irony and critique. Seeing Frank’s photos, Ruscha wrote, “was like opening a book laced with dynamite”. And so he took his own pictures in the same genre and collected them in the phenomenally deadpan volume Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963).
From these he gleaned one of his most famous paintings, “Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas” (1963), in which he promotes a generic — well, standard — piece of infrastructure to the status of heroic monument. The radically foreshortened canopy dramatises both the speed of travel and the distance to destination. He sets the scene at night; the sky is black and no humans clutter up the vigilant machinery. A cadre of robotic pumps stands at attention, nozzles holstered at their sides, ensuring that the country can keep rolling ceaselessly into darkness.
When Ruscha first arrived in Southern California, he was seduced by the usual complement of palm trees and swimming pools. Eventually, he began to see more decadence, waste and disappointment than he could pack into a traditional canvas. By the start of the 1970s he had “quit painting pictures”, as he put it, experimenting instead with organic and unconventional materials. “Instead of applying a skin of paint to a canvas support I would stain the surface,” he explained. He slathered on baked beans, salmon roe, daffodils and tobacco. He rubbed egg yolk into turquoise moire fabric. To spell out the letters in “Evil” (1973), he smeared red satin with his own blood. “It was another way out of this box I’d painted myself into,” he said.
The MoMA show suggests he’s been banging against the walls of that cell ever since, powered by a persistent laconic despair. In the 1990s, having returned to painting, he produced a black-and-white series of Blue Collar acrylics; one shows a grey factory wall emblazoned with the portmanteau “Tech-Chem” beneath a dense, grim sky. A decade later, he reworked Blue Collar in colour. The corporate name on the building has changed to the atomically resonant “Fat Boy” and now the sky above the roofline is an irradiated, apocalyptic orange.
The exhibition reaches its culminating statement with the painting “Really Old”, from 2016. A pie slice, the same mottled hue as a white man’s skin, balances on its tip, which is marked “brand new”, and expands to old age at the top. As so often in Ruscha, the conical shape has multiple associations, all of them mournful: the emptying half of an hourglass, a megaphone shouting into the void, a straight road stretching towards a vanishing point, an upside-down pyramid marking a future grave. It’s an onslaught of melancholy that prompts a monosyllabic response: oof.
To January 13 2024, moma.org
