The Brooklyn Rail

The particular circumstances of two of the paintings in the Los Angeles iteration of this Ed Ruscha retrospective lit the fuse for my wanting to write about it, despite how heavily the exhibition was covered when it was at MoMA in New York. Los Angeles, of course, is Ruscha’s town, but that isn’t much of a story anymore, as much of the rest of the (art) world has had to stop projecting its provincialism onto LA or risk looking and/or sounding quaint. It is that “and/or” between looking and sounding that is fundamental to the success of Ruscha’s endeavors, along with reading, writing and, obviously, making. And also very much destroying.

The first painting in question is a legendary one: Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68). Here, surprisingly, it makes its debut at the museum that is its subject, but only after the specific set of buildings it portrays have been torn down to make way for the Peter Zumthor splat of a building that will not only take its spot, but also ooze its way over Wilshire to the other side of the boulevard. So, yes, it wasn’t a fire after all that destroyed the original museum, but could a slower, entropic decay be starting? Ruscha makes it clear over and over in his work that nothing lasts: materials, histories, memories, etc. Even the earliest work included—Su (1958), its name referencing his then-girlfriend—is comprised of a couple of “abandoned” AbEx brushstrokes (one blue, the other yellow), an irregular yet sort of house-shaped scrap of red and black striped fabric, and the two letters of its name steadily drawn in ink as if ready for the print shop. It’s a stacking of three sets of doubling, each couplet contributing to an overall sense of the incomplete. Given whose work this is, it is also too tempting not to read SU as the beginning of, well, SUPER, or SUCCESS. It’s incomplete, but it has its act together.

Nothing is safe. There’s Insect Eating Paper (1960), with a small drawn bug doing just that; Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963), one of the large classic 1960s paintings that snaps and ruins one of its images and announces the sound in the spotlight lettering also found in other key works; the simultaneous bleakness and iconicity of the images in Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), one of Ruscha’s widely influential artist’s books (a less well-known but right on target portfolio from 1969 is called Stains); Chocolate Room (1970), perpetually remade by spreading its sweet stuff on sheets of paper (smells amazing at first—later, well …). These represent a diversification of materials that led to so many great word works involving things like egg yolk, rose petals, shellac, and tobacco as pigment. But it’s not just about stinky substances.

Jumping ahead to materially straightforward paintings like The Old Tech-Chem Building (2003), which revisits an earlier grisaille painting called Blue Collar Tech-Chem (1992) and re-pictures the structure now renamed FAT BOY in front of a raging fire of an apocalyptic sky, and Psycho Spaghetti Western #7 (2010–11), a literal rendering of the detritus of an artist’s studio dumped in some abandoned site but with a quite pleasant blue sky, we are reminded that the consistency of the vision has been there throughout Ruscha’s career, even in the most meticulous examples of his work. In fact, the painting that most brought this home to me is as clean as it gets. Called Friction and Wear (1983), it’s all about its words: THE STUDY OF FRICTION AND WEAR ON MATING SURFACES. I find myself reminded of something that Roy Lichtenstein said to me when I was working for him at the beginning of the 1990s: you’re lucky to figure out one thing.

In the end, what makes all of Ruscha’s work work is that even the rare cynical moments it might contain are always grounded by the sense of wonder he makes tangible. At the press event, Ruscha told museum director Michael Govan that one of the reasons it took three years to make the LACMA-on-fire painting is because its right side put him to sleep. But here’s the point: he said it with enthusiasm.

This is why the second of the two paintings I began with here stayed with me throughout my journey through this retrospective. It’s also because I remain stunned that it wasn’t in New York or reproduced in the catalogue. And, yes, I get that it was likely included in Los Angeles because LACMA owns it, but still, to my eyes and mind its omission in New York in an otherwise thorough exhibition was a mistake. Santa Monica, Melrose, Beverly, La Brea, Fairfax (1998) is one of a series of paintings from the late 1990s that graphically present various parts of the city’s street grid. Writing about them when they were first shown, I marveled at Ruscha’s ability to get the tiniest specks of black paint to stick on their surfaces. They are subdued, but I still find them exciting. Today, I’d call their bits (enlarged) quantum particles. Back then, they made me want to make-believe they had exploded out of the barrel of a double shotgun.