Ed Ruscha

During the production of his second short film Miracle, for the first time Ruscha used photography as the basis for prints: the incongruously titled Tropical Fish Series (1975) presents banal tabletop still lifes against lustrous fabrics, from the bicycle pump, seltzer bottle, and Satan statuette of Air, Water, Fire to the chocolates, raw cuts, and bedsheets of Sweets, Meats, Sheets. These were propped up horizontally and photographed, then rotated during the silkscreening process to produce a vertical stack of plastic-wrapped subjects—an analog stunt that presaged digital magic. In a series of four works made at Tamarind Lithography Workshop the same year, he applied sprays of tusche ink to the lithographic plates to create background textures, atmospheres of dematerialized particles that coalesce into clichés—“THERE’S NO JOB TOO SMALL”; “YOU KNOW THE OLD STORY”; “THANKS FOR BEING WITH US.”

Final, Precise, and That is Right (1989) combines faint text with fleeting impressions of light filtered through window frames. In recent, richly colored lithographs, catchy yet meaningless terms, such as “WALL ROCKET” and “JET BABY,” are set against dramatic mountainscapes in scenic conflations of linguistic and visual appropriation; unique color trial proofs are presented side by side to show the evolutive process by which Ruscha decides for a final image.

Ruscha’s early photographs also provided foundations for his broader artistic practice. Isolating overlooked quotidian subjects, he used the camera to “flatten” the images he intended to draw and paint, from apartment buildings to comestibles and commodities such as raisins and bottles of turpentine. Exercises in the ambiguity of scale, such as Untitled (Newspaper Sculpture) (1959–60, printed in 2005) and Dodgers Stadium (1967, printed in 2013) reveal a common abstraction in small objects and large-scale architecture, while Joyce Wallace’s Automatic Table Arrangement (1962, printed in 2005) shows his compositional mind at work. Images of gas stations along Route 66 were collected in Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), the first of sixteen artist’s books produced between 1963 and 1978. Roof Top Views (1961) pictures local suburban streets from a high vantage point, while Roof Top Views 50 Years Later (2003) returns to the same locations to reveal neighborhoods only subtly changed by the sluggish pace of time, economy, and demographics.

Ruscha’s deadpan representations of archetypal signs and symbols distill the imagery of popular culture into cinematic and typographical codes that are as accessible as they are profound. His wry and sometimes obtuse choice of words and phrases draws upon the moments of incidental ambiguity implicit in the interplay between language and image. Although his inspirations are undeniably rooted in his close observation of the American vernacular, his elegantly laconic prints, photographs, drawings, and paintings speak to more complex and widespread issues regarding the appearance, feel, and function of the world and our tenuous and transient place within it.

Ruscha’s first public art commission in New York, Honey, I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today, was unveiled at the High Line on May 6, 2014, and will be on view through May 2015.