contemporary monkey

Ed Ruscha: graphic artist, documentarian, surrealist. Or just himself.

Ed Ruscha: Production

Reading too much into art can lead to grim results. You’ll get nowhere, commit yourself to a lifelong habit of babbling, and nobody will believe you in the rare moment when you do make sense. Keep your comments to yourself; you might be the only person listening. Free advice from Contemporary Monkey.

Ed Ruscha, an artist who has been “retrospected” since the early 1980s, is being crowned and dipped in gold once again. This time by way of five decades of paintings, starting from the 1960’s, and hung at London’s Hayward Gallery. Some lonely and forgotten curator that first thought Ruscha was finished in 1982 (San Francisco retrospective) is probably stewing in his own embarrassment that Ed painted twenty years beyond the supposedly summing-up of the old cowboy artist called Ed Ruscha. Cowboys, as we know, don’t die. They blow away into the desert like tumbleweeds, with the disturbing sense that, depending on the wind, and without much difficulty, could find their way back into town.

A compilation of about 8 - 10 lots associated with different styles are floating on the walls at the Hayward, more or less in chronological order. Starting with Ruscha’s interest in typography as art, to short punchy phrases daring you not to take meaning from them, and into the well-known (overused word alert) iconic Standard Station. Along with related surreal landscapes, the journey rambles onward through the 1990s. Like any cowboy, Ruscha can’t be wrangled into a type, style, or -ism.

icon, flamed by its own master

Commenting on a handful of Ruscha paintings which show various images on fire: A Standard Oil station, Norm’s Diner, and a newly constructed Los Angeles County Museum, a critic by the name of Dave Hickey claimed there was a subconscious choice behind the subjects. A “standard” station; a diner called “norm”; as if each was a symbol of the unexceptional life in 1960’s America. Interesting angle. Pop Art at the time had already set itself on fire, and this could easily be another comment on the culture of consumption. That thinking is warped though. That’s Dave Hickey thinking about what he believes about consumerism. Consumption, or the implied, over-consumption, doesn’t need a label. It just is. Let the animal eat itself, and just commit yourself to staying out of its way.

I take these images as Ruscha being a documentarian, taking snapshots of what was American-style progress in the 1960’s. In fact, it was his progress, and his art, and if he wanted to light the scene up with fire, well why not. What kid doesn’t want to take matches to a project just to see if the thing will find its own orbit. That’s the point in making something. If you can’t destroy your own work, well then, who else has the guts to do it? If anything, the joke was on art itself: burn the industry to the ground for taking itself too seriously.

Coming from California, I recognized the wide horizontal spread throughout the desert of the American southwest. The seed of Los Angeles is like Las Vegas, it was never supposed to be there in the first. Both are borne of their own accident. The origin of Los Angeles is one of politics and thievery for the most important and necessary commodity in that part of the world: water. Back then, Los Angeles was today’s Dubai. A sheikdom run by big business and its associated baggage: advertising.

Ruscha’s never-ending horizons are a stark and important difference between ranch-style LA, and cramped, village-centric Europe. The views are bigger, a lot to drink in. Cowboy territory starts in Oklahoma, which is where Ruscha initiated his advance into the final reaches of the States. The end of the Earth, for most people back then. The piece of earth where you either make it big, or you keep walking into the Pacific Ocean, never to be heard of again. Like Neptune beaten.

Attention all aliens from extragalactic nebula outside Earth’s Solar System (third planet from our sun, in the Galaxy called the Milky Way). Consider this a human plea for what was at one time, righteously ours, and to many people, fondly remembered.  We would like to have our Russians back please.  The ones that were on Earth before the black hole of what was known as the Soviet Union, where those of us on the outside were completely blinded by a lack of hard data, while those on the inside were vacuumed up by your molecular-level, cell-parsing tractor beams.  There are 180 million of them - you can’t miss ‘em.

Before the Frost of Irrelevancy: Kandinsky

For those of us Earthlings devoted to the subject of art, and who were forced observers from beyond the Iron Curtain (look it up, it’s too depressing to describe here), there are more than 70 years which cannot be accounted for.  It’s during this massive time void that we suspect you’ve taken our most significant Russians and hoarded them for yourselves.  For this self-serving act, we can’t blame you, but we’d like them back now.

Prior to our Western Earth Year of 1917, our collection of gifted Russian artists included Kandinsky, Chagall, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and more.  Now we’re left with the heap that’s thrashing about the walls inside the London art gallery, Calvert22.  Gutov, Khanyutin, Zakharov, are all speaking visual gibberish to us with no claim on story-telling.  These androids seem to be using your indecipherable language on us, and have yet to master the ability to communicate with what we call “Homo Sapiens” or “man”.  Maybe you can make sense of this twisted jabbering, but they might as well be speaking Martian to us (ref: Mars, the fourth planet in our solar system, with no life form…the reference to Martian language is a obviously a glib remark, because, oh forget it).  Let’s make it a straight swap: you give us our soulful, complex, but engaging Russian artists back, and in return you can have what ever’s inside Calvert22.

Video seems to be their choice of parlay with us, possibly because of your presumption that all human beings drink a form of electricity through reflected-light screens and energy-emitting monitors.  Only some of us, e.g. Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson and Peaches Geldof, are able to accomplish such a feat, but assume that most of us cannot.  What’s more, your Russian replicants seem to enjoy duplicating each other’s work by using our black and white video format to shed light on their bleak, cheerless, barren land, with a life short on human emotion.  If that is indeed the point of their art, they had me at ten seconds of the first video.  The rest of the works were simply superfluous.  Next time, have your automatons draw straws and send down a single humanoid, armed with just one of his human videos, limited to 15 seconds in length (preferably shorter).  Oh, and can you beam down the latest human that resembles Kandinsky, or Malevich so we can remember what Russian artistic talent was like, before your photon-separating magneto-pulse device chemically reduced our Russians to their component parts.  You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you can’t put them back together.

Jean Tinguely

Do you ever wonder what artists were like when they were young; when they were a mere five paintbrushes high?  I had a visit to Tate Liverpool this past week, where an exhibit for Jean Tinguely had been in place for a few months.  Tinguely is the perfect artist for men, or as women would say, for boys.  In the 1940s and 50s, Tinguely constructed kinetic sculptures made from bits of metal, electric motors, and some cardboard.  His machines revolved, turned, pivoted, spun, rolled, drew, and even painted, for no other reason than just to move or make marks.  Tinguely was young at heart, and interested in amusing himself first.  His concepts had no other purpose, no bigger reason, than just to exist.  In a 1960’s filming of the construction of one of his mechanized events, a television interviewer asked him what he was trying to express.  Tinguely refused to be caught up in meaning, and said he did it only to express himself.  More artists should be so forthright about the real purpose of their work.  If nothing else, it keeps the curator-speak at bay.

Although difficult to prove, I can imagine Jean Tinguely must have spent tireless hours constructing robotic mechanisms from Meccano (Erector Set in America).  Mecanno was invented in Liverpool during Victorian times, and the city is also the site of a recent James May video which documented the making of a Meccano-built bridge over a canal.  The historical centre of the universe for mechanized rigs seems to be focussed at Liverpool’s Albert Dock these days.

The mechanized artist for the 1950's

Most of the Tinguely’s machines at Tate Liverpool couldn’t be turned on, which was a great shame.  Restoration goes on for a great many oil-based masterpieces; why can’t someone replace a motor, or strengthen a steel joint?  Still, if you have an active imagination, the guts of the machines are visible enough for recreating the motion in your head.  Which is exactly what I did, and enjoyed the show produced in the theatre of my mind.  Those pieces that did work reminded me of watching a factory; like one of those industrial films where cars are snapped together on assembly lines.  This was the real stuff of boys.

Supposedly Tinguely built his mechanisms with the possibility that part of it might not work as predicted.  This bit of predisposed, random chance provided the machine with its own unsupervised form of life, eliminating the artist to at least some extent.  Tinguely didn’t mind this, and in fact knew it would upset the hierarchy in art-dom at the time (1950s).  In this way, he’s the Everyman’s hero.

a mechanized artist - one that can swim

Expressing himself was Tinguely’s main concern, which, in many respects, is what we humans do every day.  For me, Tinguely formalized what art is all about.  It’s something that any one of us does, nearly every day of the week.  If anyone asks what you do for a living, you could always say you’re an artist, and you wouldn’t be lying.