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The Works of Edward Ruscha: Essays
Shows Ruscha's paintings and drawings of Hollywood and discusses his approach to art
- GenresArt
First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Ed Ruscha
118 books20 followersBorn in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Ruscha was raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where his family moved in 1941. In 1956 he moved to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute, and had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery. In 1973, Ruscha began showing his work with Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. He continues to live and work in Los Angeles, and currently shows with Gagosian Gallery.
Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of his adopted hometown with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and artist's books, Ruscha's work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.
Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives that have traveled internationally, including those organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982; the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2002; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2004; the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004; and the Jeu de Paume in 2006. In 2005, Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include “Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting” (organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2009), “Ed Ruscha: Road Tested” (at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2011), and “On the Road” (organized by the Hammer Museum in 2011). “Reading Ed Ruscha” is currently on view at the Kunsthaus Bregenz until October 14.
Source:
Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of his adopted hometown with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and artist's books, Ruscha's work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily. Ruscha's early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.
Ruscha has been the subject of numerous museum retrospectives that have traveled internationally, including those organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982; the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2000; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2002; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2004; the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004; and the Jeu de Paume in 2006. In 2005, Ruscha was the United States representative at the 51st Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include “Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting” (organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2009), “Ed Ruscha: Road Tested” (at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2011), and “On the Road” (organized by the Hammer Museum in 2011). “Reading Ed Ruscha” is currently on view at the Kunsthaus Bregenz until October 14.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 7, 2010
I've always loved Ruscha. (And his name is pronounced Roo-shay.) His paintings are "cool," and by that I mean that they are generally impenetrable and distant, like a Bergman film, but without the Scandinavian cold (the paintings keep Bergman's opaque sky but lose the withering Freudian relationships). Ruscha's paintings are also "hot," and by that I mean they are full of visual bravado: frozen speed, stilled fire, and atmospherics like sunsets, fog, skylines, and intense weather.
I like Ruscha enough to have made my own 3-D versions of one of his paintings:
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Anyway, I love his paintings of objects even more than I love his famous pictures of gas stations and disembodied words - maybe because I'm used to the words and stations, but am still a little shocked by stuff that doesn't look like "Ed Ruscha."
But I'm writing this because I just bought this book, used, and remembered that I read it years ago when I was studying with Dave Hickey. Dave Hickey wrote Ed Ruscha's catalog essay; I studied with Hickey in Vegas, and I looked at / read this book those many years ago. I remembered something about sexy girls and something about burning norms and standards, but little else. About an hour after I got the book, a friend came in my store, saw the book, got excited, and bought it from me. (I own a used book store.) So I had to convince her to loan it to me; then took it home, put away the other books I'm reading, and sat down on the couch to re-aqaint myself with an old friend. All so I could return my friend's newly bought book tomorrow.
As I flipped through the book, I felt my typical "book store owner's regret" that I was losing yet another book that I would very much like to own. But after spending the last several hours pouring through Ruscha's paintings while occasionally talking to Patricia and listening to WFMU, I sat down and plowed through Dave Hickey's essay, and as usual for him, it's a damn good essay that meanders all over, but with a purpose, a little more jazz riff than rock and roll solo, which ping pongs between Merleau-Ponty, sexy starlets, the opacity of considerate people, and -there it is- Ed Ruscha's burning of norms and standards. See, Ruscha has painted a Standard Oil gas station, Norm's Restaurant, and the LA Museum of Art on fire. It's a bit of a stretch, but it works on a gut level, and then Hickey tightens his claim and says that as Ruscha is burning norms and standards, he's elevating the typical and ordinary, which again, just feels right. Finally, the essay ends with Hickey and Ruscha's pointing out that doing something, while not knowing what you're doing, can often produce something worth calling "art." What is assumed in the doing is that the collected practice and accumulated intellect will burn norms and standards, and will result in something that is that is not just cool and not just hot but is, well... beyond words.
Which is a damn good place to end.
I like Ruscha enough to have made my own 3-D versions of one of his paintings:
[image error]
Anyway, I love his paintings of objects even more than I love his famous pictures of gas stations and disembodied words - maybe because I'm used to the words and stations, but am still a little shocked by stuff that doesn't look like "Ed Ruscha."
But I'm writing this because I just bought this book, used, and remembered that I read it years ago when I was studying with Dave Hickey. Dave Hickey wrote Ed Ruscha's catalog essay; I studied with Hickey in Vegas, and I looked at / read this book those many years ago. I remembered something about sexy girls and something about burning norms and standards, but little else. About an hour after I got the book, a friend came in my store, saw the book, got excited, and bought it from me. (I own a used book store.) So I had to convince her to loan it to me; then took it home, put away the other books I'm reading, and sat down on the couch to re-aqaint myself with an old friend. All so I could return my friend's newly bought book tomorrow.
As I flipped through the book, I felt my typical "book store owner's regret" that I was losing yet another book that I would very much like to own. But after spending the last several hours pouring through Ruscha's paintings while occasionally talking to Patricia and listening to WFMU, I sat down and plowed through Dave Hickey's essay, and as usual for him, it's a damn good essay that meanders all over, but with a purpose, a little more jazz riff than rock and roll solo, which ping pongs between Merleau-Ponty, sexy starlets, the opacity of considerate people, and -there it is- Ed Ruscha's burning of norms and standards. See, Ruscha has painted a Standard Oil gas station, Norm's Restaurant, and the LA Museum of Art on fire. It's a bit of a stretch, but it works on a gut level, and then Hickey tightens his claim and says that as Ruscha is burning norms and standards, he's elevating the typical and ordinary, which again, just feels right. Finally, the essay ends with Hickey and Ruscha's pointing out that doing something, while not knowing what you're doing, can often produce something worth calling "art." What is assumed in the doing is that the collected practice and accumulated intellect will burn norms and standards, and will result in something that is that is not just cool and not just hot but is, well... beyond words.
Which is a damn good place to end.
Displaying 1 of 1 review