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.