ED RUSCHA — NOW THEN

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

By Yann Perreau

At the core of Ruscha’s early work is a dilemma: how can words and objects exist on their own, beyond the meanings and functions traditionally assigned to them. — Christophe Cherix*

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN is the best exhibition I have seen about one of the most respected figures of contemporary art in Los Angeles. Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this is the first cross-media survey of the artist’s work in more than twenty years. Featuring paintings, photographs, works on paper, and artist’s books, the show’s guiding principle is Ruscha’s interpretation of a culture and landscape (Southern California) in flux—a state of instability.

Ruscha’s story is known to many. In 1956, at eighteen, he left Oklahoma City to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles’s Westlake district. (The school later merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to become CalArts.) Taking classes in both commercial art and fine art, Ruscha merged the two approaches and—often putting tracing paper to great use—invented his style, a groundbreaking way of organizing images, text, and found material on canvas, in books, and in sculptures. Always one step ahead of any trend, his first paintings were seminal works of Pop Art (see his take on mass media and consumer culture, depicting ads, cars, supermarkets, etc. in ironical, sometimes melancholic sunset atmospheres) as much as of Abstract Expressionism—the gesture and spontaneity of his brush, still proclaimed as a relevant way to create.

Signage and architecture are also nurturing his first period, as well as his interest in language for its material forms, sonic qualities, and cultural references, as demonstrated in brilliant and humorous paintings such as Oof and Ace. In the 1960’s, Ruscha set up a photography apparatus on the bed of his pickup truck so he could systematically document the streets and buildings of the city. The exhibition dedicates large vitrines to his famous artists books such as Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) or A Few Palm Trees (1971). As one of the artist’s friends said, Ruscha created Google Maps avant la lettre.

Here is Back of Hollywood (1977) on a sunset sky, the sign seen in reverse from behind. Here too is Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–1968), its emerging flames reminding us of the political turmoil of the Sixties. Brave Men Run in My Family (1988) came about while Ruscha was watching the 1948 comedy-western Pale Face. In this film, Bob Hope turns to Jane Russell as they are under attack and exclaims, “Brave men run in my family,” and promptly turns to flee the scene. Ruscha runs this text over the “heroic” image of a great, listing tall ship, which is itself running before the wind. The most recent piece in the show, Our Flag— with its flying, torn pieces of fabric flying wild —was made in 2017, and depicts a concept of flayed democracy at an inflection point of catastrophic stress.

In its most unusual offering, LACMA presents the artist’s Chocolate Room— with its walls of cacao — reconstituted as it was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1973. You can, as the phrase goes, “exit through the gift shop.” You can also look, smell, absorb (but don’t touch) this minimalist yet overwhelming environment, which might be John Pawson’s idea of a chocolaterie.

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN will be at LACMA through the beginning of October. See info and links below for details.

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

Through October 6

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles

lacma.org/art/exhibition/ed-ruscha-now-then

*Christophe Cherix, from Ed Ruscha / Now Then, edited by Cherix with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi, texts by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Donna De Salvo and Linda Norden, Michael Govan, Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Tobias, Andrew Perchuk, Jeffrey Weiss, and Cherix (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2023).

moma.org/products/ed-ruscha-now-then-a-retrospective

Also see Jennifer Quick, Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).

yale.edu/book/back-to-the-drawing-board

Ed Ruscha, from top: Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 1964, Sid R. Bass, private collection, photo courtesy of the artist; People Getting Ready to Do Things, 1974, collection Edward Ruscha V, photo courtesy of the artist; Actual Size, 1962, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, anonymous gift through the Contemporary Art Council, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA; Hollywood Study, 1968, Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the artist, photo © Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Robert Gerhardt; Santa Monica, Melrose, Beverly, La Brea, Fairfax, 1998, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Paul and Dorothy Toeppen, Alice and Nahum Lainer, Betty and Brack Duker, Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., Susan and David Gersh, Elyse and Stanley Grinstein, Terri and Michael Smooke, and others, through the 1999 Collectors Committee and the Modern and Contemporary Art Council, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire, 1965–1968, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., gift of Joseph Helman, 1972, photo by Paul Ruscha; Sin / Without, 1990, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Modern and Contemporary Art Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA; Ed Ruscha, Our Flag, 2017, Jimmy Iovine Revocable Trust, collection Jimmy Iovine, photo by Paul Ruscha.