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Ed Ruscha makes communication interesting. Hes a story tellerwho dees denition, giving words a lie and language all their own.Tey are abstract orms that have bubbled, bled, crumpled and smoothedout again over the years. Wide boulevards and scenic backdrops, gasstations and illuminated signs: these are all things Ruscha has made hisown. Teyve smelled like chocolate, been stained in blood and drawnin gunpowder. Ruscha is pop, conceptual, surreal and minimal all stuedinto one at sandwich o artistic isms. His work is consciously ambiguouswith no list o priorities or importance. Tere are no hidden messages andno social, economic or political statements to be ound. Instead, Ruschasincredible body o work over the past y years is an honest reection ohis personality: smart, witty and unique. Te man and the art reuse tostand still, they have a constant buzz and possess the power to make artspeak un.

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Marissa CuevasGraphic Design HistoryShane Sullivan8 December 2010

Ed Ruscha, Lisp, 1968, oil on canvas

Ed Ruscha, Te Back of Hollywood, 1977, oil on canvas

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Welcome to the creatively bizarre world o Ed Ruscha,where art is something designed to make you scratch your head.It doesnt need to make sense; it just needs to make you stop andlook. Hes spent the last y years testing boundaries, shiingmediums and materials and constantly reinventing himsel.Hes a painter, photographer, printmaker, bookmaker andlmmaker who cant be pigeonholed into any one style, mediumor sensibility. Ruscha takes it all on, never playing by the rules.Making art is like an involuntary reex, Ruscha says; its sosecond nature to him that it seems hes always a step ahead. Hispieces sell or hundreds o thousands o dollars, yet whether itsa print, photograph or painting he calls everything a picture.Ruscha says, Te word picture has an automatic quaintnessthat I like. Abstract painters would also use that word. Rothko, deKooning and Kline would s ay, Well Im working on a picture. Ilike that. Its not just a painting; its a picture (Clark).

Ruscha is the art worlds version o a celebrity. In the1970s he directed two short lms: the very witty Premiumand Miracle the story about a curious day in the lie o an automechanic. Ruscha has even given acting a shot, playing a radiostation director in the lm Choose Me (Chronology). Movie

industry heavyweights Jack Nicholson, Steve Martin and DennisHopper have Ruscha originals on their walls. Mick Jagger evenhangs out in Eds studio! (Clark).

When people talk about Ed Ruscha, it is not long beorethey are also talking about Los Angeles, Caliornia, the artistsadopted home town. Ruschas iconic paintings, such as theHollywood sign are emblematic o his own ame (Cooke). Itspropped up, paper-like and its aligned in the same respect asmuch o Ruschas work. But the only reason he painted it in therst place is because it was staring at him out the back window.I had to do it because it was there, he quips (Clark). RuschasCaliornia catalogue is extensive and important. His paintingshave mapped, plotted and given perspective to L.A. streets andsections. His numerous photography books about palm trees,swimming pools, parking lots and apartment complexes in LosAngeles established him as a conceptual leader in the industry(Cooke).

Ruscha was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, buthis amily moved to Oklahoma City when he was our. Ruschawatched the psyche o middle-America change drastically duringhis youth (Biography). Tere was some kind o odd successaer WWII. People would leave their garden hoses running.About the time air conditioners were created in cars, peoplewould roll the windows down and leave the air conditionersrunning. It was a strange kind o afuence. At about the ageo twelve it became clear that Ruscha was an artist at heart. Hemade murals or his grammar school class, took painting classesin 6th and 7th grades and could draw Felix the Cat, Bugs Bunnyand all kinds o cartoon characters (Clark). Ruschas mother wassupportive; he went to mass and even had a paper route. I guessI learned good our-square thinking and basic human values inOklahoma, says Ruscha. But a visit to Caliornia as a teenagergave him the itch or something bigger, and at the age o eighteenhe set out or Los Angeles (Cooke).

Hollywood was advanced, experimental and ashionable,and Ed liked it all. He enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute (nowthe Caliornia Institute o the Arts) in 1956 initially takingcommercial art and animation classes, a path that most oen

led to a job at Disney (Biography). But Ruscha developedother artistic interests and simply went with the ow. At rst, hewanted to be a sign painter. Ten, he got into advertising, bookdesign, and even laid out Artorum Magazine or a couple years.o make some extra cash he took a job personalizing thousandso Christmas trinkets or a gi store. All these technical skillshelped orm the oundation o his career and cer tainly explainhis obsession with tape. In college, Ruscha moved on to coursesin painting, drawing and watercolor. His proessors believed thespontaneity o de Kooning, Pollack and abstract expressionismequaled modern art. Ed listened, but admired Marcel Duchamp,Kurt Schwitters, Man Ray and the uturists and clung to the ideathe brave new world that was opening up on the east coast wouldeventually make its presence elt on the west as well (Clark).

Ruscha was thumbing through the pages o a magazinewhen he saw a tiny reprint o Jasper Johns arget With FourFaces. Te painting was premeditated and symmetrical and

Ruscha was oored. It just went counter to everything thatpeople were talking about in school. It was not just a target. Ithad aces. It was something immediately recognizable coupledtogether with something that was totally mysterious. RobertRauschenbergs combine paintings gave Ruscha that same kindo hope. I began to see that there were some artists who weredoing something that perplexed me and moved me towardsa career in ne art. With a newound purpose, Ruscha begansticking abric and parts o comic strips on his canvases (Clark).He also began experimenting with words and painting commonobjects like pencils and school supplies. Te representational shiquickly turned to popular subject matter, and at the age o thirty-ve Ruscha ound himsel riding the initial wave o American popart (Lippard).

Johns and Rauschenberg broke the ground, but Ruscha,alongside his New York contemporaries Andy Warhol and RoyLichtenstein, set the pop art trend (Lippard). Teir art gavecredence to previously unappreciated objects like Campbellssoup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, or in Ruschas case, CrackerJack boxes and Spam containers. Te art these men produced inthe 1960s spoke volumes about consumption and appealed to the

masses.Te composition o these shots is simple and not

manipulated in any way. I took pictures o dierent things,mostly gasoline stations, and various kinds o serial imagery thatI was more interested in making into books than I was seeingphotographs o. I mean the photography was almost incidentalto the book. So I was looking at them as the book is the product,not the photograph (Clark). It was a highly inventive approachthat earned respect. While the pictures look like they could havebeen shot by anybody, putting them in this art context changedthe aesthetics o what a good photograph is. Te books themselvesbecame three-dimensional works o art and architecture. From1963 to 1978, Ruscha produced seventeen books, most o whichportrayed the landscape o Los Angeles. He called them the mostpowerul statements Ive done (Cooke).

Far-etched ideas are part o his legacy, but to the laymanRuscha will always be known or his trademark: words. Tatsbecause no artist has ever succeede d at using written words quitelike Ed Ruscha. Language is, and always has been, his avorite

Ed Ruscha, Quit, 1967, gunpowerder and colored pencil on paper

Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, 1966, oil on canvas

Ed Ruscha, Large rademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, oil on canvasEd Ruscha, Pay Nothing Untill April, 2003, oil on canvas

Ed Ruscha, Te Study of Friction and Wear on Mating Surfaces, 1983, oil on canvas

Ed Ruscha, Boy Scout Utility Modern ypea

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landscape. For y years hes made words dr amatic, romantic,powerul and unny. Words have temperatures to me, Ruschasays (Clark). Eventually, Ruscha transitioned rom words intophrases and created his own ont, which he calls Boy scout utilitymodern (Lippard). Its a style that rather plainly announces an

observation, rather than shouting something else. SAND INHE VASELINE, ANOHER HOLLYWOOD DREAM BUBBLEPOPPED, even SCREAMING IN SPANISH look like simplestatements, nothing more. Read into them what you want.

In his quest to make his work as deep as its message,Ruscha spent several years experimenting with stains. He smearedrose petals and spinach around words like Satin and A BLVD.CALLED SUNSE. He turned everything rom coee, squid ink,crushed baked beans and vials o his own blood into art (Lippard).

Ruscha also invented the art o gunpowder. Feeling thatgraphite was too streaky Ruscha went searching or somethingnew. He ound that soaking pellets in water washes away the saltand leaves a charcoal-like powder behind. Te sulur added awarm color and yet another dimension to his work (Lippard).As or his subject matter: Teres no guideline or rule as to whatwould make me want to s elect a partic ular word, Ruscha says.His ideas have come rom casual conversation, talk radio, even

reading the dictionary. Im still mystied by it and Im glad. Everyso oen something just bangs! I see it and I just eel like I have tohammer this in stone and make a picture out o it (Clark).

Ruschas pictures are powerul statements that turnto portraits when you trace the common thread woven throughthe decades o his work. From the mythical glitz and glamouro Hollywood to the barren landscape along Route 66 andhis original study o the English language, Ruscha has alwaysbeen painting a giant portrait o America. He has documentedconsumption, change and the consciousness o our culture.Hes shown us the c ountrys soul and its armpit without passingjudgment. His artistic language is commentary on the basic valuesand commercial outgrowth that this society produces: I do eelparticularly American in this respect, Ruscha says. Some artistscan eel universal and that their work might t well in Paris orRome or wherever, but I eel like all the history o America hassort o been unneled into my view o the entire world (Clark).

For nearly 50 years, Ed Ruscha has been reinventing the way an artist canmake a mark. Hes never done things by the book, choosing instead tomake his own. Los Angeles Museum o Contemporary Art Curator PaulSchimmel puts it perectly: Tere are artists who are great specialists. TeGolden Age o Holland in the 17th Century had still lie and architecturespecialists. Ten there were artists who took it all on, like a Rembrandt.Eds one o the guys who will be measured by taki ng it all on. Its not alittle career, its huge (Cooke). Art books reerring to his association tomovements, materials and isms will be conusing students or centuriesto come. But what really matters about Ed Ruscha is that hes always stayedtrue to his own vision and has never been araid to explore just how deepit goes.

Work Cited

Biography. Ed Ruscha. Web. 19 Oct. 2010 . .

Chronology. Ed Ruscha. Web. 19 Oct. 2010. .

Clark, Erin. ED RUSCHA. Artworks Magazine. 17 Oct. 2009. Web. 19 Oct. 2010. .

Cooke, Rachel. Ed Ruscha: Teres Room or Saying Tings in Bright Shiny Colours | Art andDesign | Te Observer. Te Observer. 12 Sept. 2010. Web. 19 Oct. 2010. .

Lippard, Lucy R. Pop Art. New York: Praeger, 1966. Print.

Ed Ruscha, End, 1983, oil on canvas