Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s painting ‘HONEY….I TWISTED THROUGH MORE DAMNED TRAFFIC TO GET HERE’ (1984) uses white text against horizontal shades of blue to capture a favourite Los Angeleno conversation topic: traffic. This is just one example of Ruscha’s disorienting and open-ended oeuvre of everyday text and imagery that emphasises the banality of urban life in the film capital of the world. Taking cues from the advertising and film industries, Ruscha exposes in his paintings, prints and photographs the everyday, unglamorous LA. 

Ruscha, born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska but was raised in Oklahoma City, left for LA in 1956 to pursue a career as a sign painter. He attended the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) where he encountered his greatest influence: Jasper Johns via a reproduction photograph of ‘Target with Four Faces’ (1955). Johns’ technique of defamiliarization through slightly altering universally known images provoked Ruscha’s interest in abstraction facilitated by the readymade image. 

Before his career as an artist, Ruscha worked in advertising where he learned about colour, scale, viewpoint, design and typography. Ruscha later invented his own font, ‘Boy Scout Utility Modern’, which now characterises his iconic text-based images.

Since his first word painting in 1959, ‘Ed Ruscha’, Ruscha has used concise text derived from literature and everyday speech. Always armed with a notebook, Ruscha jots down overheard speech, from the loudspeaker at supermarkets to strangers’ conversations. He harnesses writing devices including onomatopoeia, puns, alliteration and contrasting meanings to construct his text and give it a deadpan, detached sense of humour. 

Particularly notable is his 1970s ‘Catch-phrase’ series in which expressive phrases like the one in ‘SOME PRETTY EYES AND SOME ELECTRIC BILLS’ (1976) are set against pastel backdrops. Without images, the text becomes the visual element of the work. Speaking of the series, Ruscha said ‘I like the idea of a word becoming a picture’. Effectively, this is not a series of pictures of words but of words as visual constructs.

Still, images play crucial roles in his oeuvre. From the Hollywood sign to Norms diner, Ruscha’s images are like movie sets, carefully curated to reveal only selected details. Ruscha’s most famous image-based work is ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ (1962), his first artist book. Taken during his trip down the iconic Route 66 highway between LA and Oklahoma City, the photographs are characteristically devoid of people. Ruscha’s ‘collection of readymades’ uses limited text and photographs of empty petrol stations to suggest a narrative.

Everyday life in LA is not just petrol stations; it is intertwined with Hollywood. Ruscha nods to its presence through image and process, working in widescreen format as in ‘Trademark #5’ (1962) and rendering his text like movie credits. These hints at facilitators of American popular culture are carried into his choice of materials, particularly in his 1970s portfolio ‘Stains’. His pigments were organic materials such as salad dressing, caviar, bourbon, gunpowder, egg yolk and even his own blood, further symbols of popular culture. 

In expressing the frustrations of traffic, the glowing signs of Hollywood, the tragedies of fires and the banality of petrol stations, Ruscha’s work is a cinematic and colourful history of the LA often hidden from the silver screen. By joining cinematic techniques with a focus on banality, LA, in image and in character, emerges as the lens through which Ruscha represents American life and culture at large.