Artists & Works

STYLE: 70s PRINTMAKING,
TOTAL ART

Edward Ruscha, known as the father of American book art, grew up in Oklahoma and moved to California where he studied both commercial typesetting and printing and fine art at Chouinard Art Institute, now Cal Arts. Ruscha was quickly disenchanted with gestural painting and, following in the footsteps of artists like Jasper Johns, decided to explore the world of popular culture in his art-making. Commercial art, with its careful planning and precision, provided Ruscha with the means to extend the boundaries of painting by forcing it into a dialogue with diverse aspects of culture including linguistics. His images of Standard gas stations and other commercial logos made him a leader of West Coast pop art in the 1960s. Ruscha was fascinated with words and did pioneering work using language and mass culture. In his books, he eschewed the exquisite handmade artists’ books of the European tradition and instead mass-produced inexpensive books of photographs such as Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965). In addition to signs and logos, Ruscha is interested in maps and grids. Recent works focus on Los Angeles streets and intersections.

Ruscha made prints at all the Tamarind, Gemini and Cirrus workshops in the late sixties and early seventies. The prints usually consisted of single words placed in monochromatic or abstract backgrounds. Letterforms ranged from straightforward typeface to words seemingly constructed from ribbons to letters apparently made from pools of liquid. Ruscha utilized foodstuffs and organic materials such as cherry pie filling, daffodils, chocolate syrup, and axle grease in the series News, Mews, Brews, Stews & Dues (1970) in place of traditional printing inks.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Peter Plagans, Artforum,Summer/00
“In Southern California (where, legend has it, young Ed drove immediately after high-school graduation in 1956 with fellow Oklahoman Mason Williams--anybody remember "Classical Gas"?), Ruscha donned a sly faux ennui to mask his intense industriousness. His pose may have been that of the first slacker artist avant le 7-Eleven, but his real talent lay in his eye for everyday oddness. In the 60s, he meticulously painted stupid things thought unfit to be the subject of fine art: simple words writ large, Standard Oil stations, pills (yielding works with wonderful titles like Painkillers, Tranquilizers, Olive, 1969), and more words (configured in 'spilled' liquids). Ruscha became the poster boy for California Pop partly because the competition--with the exception of his good friend Joe Goode--wasn't all that formidable. Such painters as G. Ray Kerciu (emblems), Jack Stuck (bathrooms), Robert O'Dowd (postage stamps), and Phillip Hefferton (money), while decent artists all, weren't in Ruscha's irony league or facility class. In fact, Ruscha was so manually deft he was perceived within the local art world as being part of the "LA Look," along with the likes of DeWain Valentine (who cast the abstract sublime in resin), Billy Al Bengston (who spray-painted motorcycle iconography on crinkled metal panels), and Larry Bell (who levitated mirrored boxes onto Plexiglas plinths).”