Messages in the Media, Art Review

For Ed Ruscha, the experience of America is written in the landscape. What’s fascinating is how he translates it, says Bettina von Hase.

Ed Ruscha comes down to meet me in the lobby of his hotel in Washington DC. He's just been to the White House, and now it's my turn before he dines at the State Department. I recognize him immediately: the chiselled Mount Rushmore face, steady blue gaze, casual clothes. He looks like an elegant cowboy among the pin-striped businessmen powerbroking in the plush surroundings. Ruscha, 65, is officially in the US capital to be thanked for donating a lithograph to the Art in Embassies programme, which displays art in US embassies abroad; but actually the visit underlines the undeniable fact that his star is riding high. He's reluctant about pressing the flesh, and can't wait to get back to his studio in Los Angeles, whose landscape he has immortalized in his work. “The idea of going to the White House, you know, that I could meet Laura Bush — it didn't excite me that greatly,” he says.

But everyone is excited about him. Ruschas are sky-rocketing in the art market — his were the fastest-rising works last year, up 623 per cent at auction — and he is also being recognized as one of America's great artists by a wider public. “He was undervalued and under- appreciated, and now he has broken the $1 million mark,” says Lisa Dennison, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum. "Here is an artist who continues to invent himself. It's not like he is in his declining years, but he's not mid- career. He's a mature artist who is creating mature work that is brand new, looks incredibly fresh, speaks to a younger generation and returns us to painting, which I think is a place that people, especially collectors, are really desirous to go."

I am here to discuss Ruscha's latest exhibition, “The Drawn Word”, at the Gallery at Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida, an independent art space that concentrates on showcasing photography and works on paper. It’s a coup to get Ruscha, who uses both media in his exploration language and landscape. The focus of his art is the word. Words, with their unique visual, graphic and phonetic characteristics, have been the subject matter of his paintings and drawings since the 1960s, often single words like “Punk“, “Hey“, “Kooks“ or “Fats”, later followed by juxtapositions of words or small sentences, sometimes in the form of puns. Using the urban landscape of California as a point of departure, Ruscha's work embodies late 20th-century America. Always seen as a quintessentially Californian artist, he surprisingly admits to also being influenced by “imagery that I saw as a kid in movies about New York... The big city, the skyscrapers, the diminishing perspective that have influenced all artists, that comes from the New York skyscrapers.”

“Every word has its own life, and when you put a couple together, the combinations become profound”

America's billboards and signs are just as much a part of highway scenery as the mountains or deserts, with the pioneer spirit encased in cars rather than on horseback. The car is central to the aesthetic development of Ruscha's work. His love of driving around LA, where he has lived and worked since 1956, gave him, in the words of critic Richard D Marshall, "a visual perspective defined by the windshield, driver's side window and the curb". The diagonal perspective, suggesting speed, motion, and also echoing the panoramic widescreen of the movies, is visible in this show, for example in LA County Museum on Fire. Curated by Olivier Berggruen and a foretaste of the Whitney retrospective of works on paper in July, there are 35 classic drawings from the artist's early career up to the most recent, Regal, made in 2001. Using gunpowder instead of graphite to draw ribbon-like structures that emphasize the word as object, works such as Room, Self, or the seminal Hollywood (after the Hollywood sign) have a sense of completion beyond that of studies or sketches.

"My early drawings are things unto themselves," he says. “I don’t necessarily use drawing as a step to paintings. I had this ribbon idea, ribbons were almost like streets to me, a road would go like that (he moves his hand), and a ribbon would wind the same way. Writing words with ribbons, it's kind of a fantasy world.” Other artists use language and letters for narrative purposes, whereas Ruscha uses words as objects which hover on the canvas or on paper, removed, isolated and decontextualized. waiting for us to peel away the layers of meaning. "Every word has its own life, and when you put a couple together, these combinations have revealing properties that become profound. Poets I'm sure feel that way," he says. There is also the graphic element, the horizontal pattern which reminds him of landscapes. “Landscapes and words are all the same, I just respond to them intuitively.”

The experience of looking becomes a form of visual onomatopoeia. In an early drawing like Pool, where rivulets of water drip off the letters ‘p’ and ‘o’, word, sound and meaning flow into one another. He describes drawings as “intimate little table-top exercises, and you can do them in the comfort of your own home, it’s a different form of art-making”. In conversation he uses words sparingly, their effect heightened by a deadpan quality and a dry sense of humour. My favourite Ruscha phrase – he collects words and phrases he comes across on his travels – is a conversation he overheard between two women: “’It’s your baby. You rock it.’ That just made me want to run for my notebook,” he says. He has no strategy for the words he chooses, other than “sucking up the vapours of the street”. In fact, he admits to opening up “a can of worms” when thinking about being an artist. “I’m totally baffled by this activity that I’m committed to. I seem to know what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis, but the true understanding of it is elusive and very abstract.”

Ruscha’s strength lies in the fact that he defies categorization; he does not belong to any one movement, but bridges some and takes from others, fusing Pop and conceptual art with elements Of Surrealism and Duchamp to invent a vision entirely his own. Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, his parents moved to Oklahoma City in 1941; raised a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant, Bible-belt country “where there was no space for poetry or art”, he felt like an outsider until he moved to LA in 1956 and enrolled at art school. “l think it all issues from something that happened to me a long time ago, from when I was 14 years old. I may not be that different from who I was then.”

“There are things that I haven’t uncovered yet, and that’s what I’m looking for: the unexplained”

His early career is now the stuff of legend; at the Chouinard Art Institute he spent four years learning commercial art, advertising, design and typography. He appreciated Abstract Expressionism but says "it was too emotional, too instinctual for me, this idea of throwing your emotion out into a picture". By the early 1960s he was exhibiting at the influential Ferus Gallery and experimenting with unusual media, such as blackberry juice and egg yolk, collected in his book Stains (1969). In 1972, Ruscha represented America at the Venice Biennale, creating a room filled with chocolate-covered sheets of paper, which the curator Henry Hopkins, now professor emeritus at UCLA, remembers: “The pungency in the heat was incredible, children came in and rubbed their fingers, then the ants came in – [Ruscha] replaced sheet after sheet.”

Ruscha became a master in many media: film, print, photography, bookmaking, the latter two of enormous influence to the nascent conceptual art movement and to the development of documentary photography. "He created a new aesthetic," says Bonnie Clearwater, director of Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art and a friend of Ruscha's. She points to his fascination with facts: "How far, how fast, when they are all added up, they don't measure up to anything. It's the work itself and how you experience it which has the meaning."

The Florida show includes works from Ruscha's series Every Building on the Sunset Strip, photographs of road signs and store fronts. They are part of the famous body of books he made, starting with Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963. For him, these books were not for reading, but for collecting visual information: "My books had a lot to do with the experience of travel. Almost treating myself as if I was a reporter on a mission... they're mission-oriented."

Ruscha says he is in the "dark ages" as far as photography is concerned. "I never thought little of it, and I never thought great of it either," he says. Ironically, his photos have been re-evaluated as a crucial influence on subsequent artists, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher and the post-Becher school of Andreas Gursky and the like, with their grid- like presentation, seriality and repetition.

There’s a bit of that in his private life, too: he married his wife Danna twice, with a 10- year gap in between, during which he lived with a succession of three different women. "Our son Eddie (who is 34) might have been the cementing factor," he says. He also has a daughter called Sonny, who is still at school; his brother Paul, five years younger than Ruscha, helps him in the studio. Ruscha is less pre-occupied with the current heat around him than he is with posterity. He feels he has more to say, "although it's a slippery platform to assume you're an artist and you can just keep going. There are things I haven't uncovered yet, and that's what I'm looking for: the unexplained."

One thing he is sure of is his epitaph: " 'Ed Ruscha, 1937-?, was known to appreciate the astringent qualities of Listerine'. I love that word, 'astringent'. Yeah, I use the stuff, all the time, I'm addicted to it.... I forgot to bring it on this trip."