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In a past life, he was an arsonist. A bold accusation, I realize, but nobody makes that many paintings, drawings, and photographs of fire without some buried lust for the real deal. By the time I left “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” an XXL retrospective at MOMA comprising some two hundred works produced between the Eisenhower years and the present, I had lost count of the burning things, which are as lowbrow as a diner and as la-di-da as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title of Ruscha’s 1964 photo series, “Various Small Fires and Milk,” could have been, minus the milk, a reasonable title for the exhibition itself, if he hadn’t painted various large ones, too.
The strangest thing about these fires, other than their quantity, is their calm. There are no people running out of LACMA, and if there were you get the feeling they’d be fine. Tranquillity, often simple but rarely simpleminded, may be Ruscha’s essential quality as an artist. His work—preoccupied with mass media, the mother tongue of the twentieth century—is universal yet cozily regional, a trick he pulls off because the region in question is Los Angeles, where much of the world’s mass media is born. Other postwar artists spoke a similar dialect, but Ruscha’s best work has a coiled concision that makes Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg seem heavy-handed. “Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights” (1962), a half painting, half drawing of the Twentieth Century Fox logo, is as flashy as the film industry but as devil-may-care as a shrug; everything flows from (and back to) the half-assed pencil scrawls in the lower right corner. You’re charmed by something you see straight through.
Like many notable Angelenos, Ruscha (pronounced “rew-shay”) comes from somewhere else: Omaha, in this case, though he spent most of his childhood in Oklahoma City. An acceptance letter from the Chouinard Art Institute brought him West in 1956, when he was a teen-ager. By the sixties, he had assembled the tool kit he still uses today: bright colors, logos recognizable even when fragmented, language that could mean any number of things but is also a thing itself. For a while, he had a job as a sign painter, and it shows: sometimes his early work contains familiar pop-culture artifacts and sometimes it doesn’t, but it always speaks in the booming voice of the billboard. Communication—usually represented by a single, titular word in a monochrome field—is a physical act. Whether the word is bluntly English (“Boss,” 1961) or fancily French (“Metropolitain,” from the same year) or slyly allusive (“Annie,” from 1962, featuring the typeface of the “Little Orphan Annie” comic), the paint is slopped or scratched across the picture plane. Words signify the wrong thing, or nothing in particular. “Annie” is orphaned from the rest of its title. “Boss” presides over an office of zero.
Language, for Ruscha, isn’t sacred; it’s just another glitchy technology. This might explain his tranquillity—if something as simple as the alphabet is prone to error, why expect perfection from anything? What many artists claim, with a big to-do, to “interrogate”—namely, the fact that American consumer culture is a flimsy lie, forever breaking down in big and little ways—Ruscha accepts with a wave of his hand. In “Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire” (1964), the orange-on-white letters of the famous roadside chain smile their endless smile, oblivious of the rather abnormal flames below. Language and, indeed, the entire national order seem perpetually on the verge of collapse, yet never actually collapse. We might as well enjoy them, glitches and all.
If you think you hate conceptual art, see this show. Chances are you hate bad conceptual art. Ruscha made drawings using gunpowder and paintings of maple syrup and beans, but few image-makers have so rarely lapsed into gimmickry, and even fewer have got such consistent laughs. My favorite Ruscha, “America’s Future” (1979), looks like a cheesy, State of the Union-ready metaphor: a painting of a molten sunrise over a sleepy landscape. It’s actually seven or eight cheesy metaphors, with a sprinkling of puns on top. The sunrise might be a sunset, or, California being California and Ruscha being Ruscha, a forest fire. The fire might advertise purity, or excitement (“America’s on fire! ”), or vulgar spectacle—this was the seventies, the golden age of disaster movies. At the center of the picture, the small white letters of “AMERICA’S FUTURE” stare down at the world like the Hollywood sign, or a shining city on a hill. The line isn’t a caption, exactly, nor is it at one with the scenery; it’s awkwardly in-between, a phrase without a country.
I could gnaw on this image, and at least a dozen others on display, all day. Like Magritte, Ruscha delights in posing riddles using the most unpretentious material, daring you to solve them and teasing you for trying. (His opposite in this sense is Johns, whose reputation as a Very Intellectual Artist is partly due to a willingness to make critic-pandering homages to Duchamp, Leonardo, and Picasso.) Ruscha’s photographs—deliberately graceless taxonomies of parking lots, swimming pools, palm trees, and the like—seem thin by comparison, lacking the paintings’ dialectic of innocence and wit. “Royal Road Test” (1967), arguably his most famous photo series, is a kind of forensic investigation into the murder of a typewriter thrown from a car on Interstate 15. Instead of staring out to the mountains or up at the big, glorious sky, Ruscha and his friends look down, searching for fragments of the ruined machine. The great novelist Tom McCarthy would have you believe that the series represents “a ‘primal scene’ of modern writing,” but it strikes me as a dated and largely negative achievement, more interesting for what it rejects—the romance of the West and the shiny new highway—than for what it represents. “On the Road” isn’t the succulent prey that it once was.
Conceptual art has a bad habit of bloating with fame. You can see it in Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Dan Flavin: the showmanship soars but the ideas stagnate. Whatever the flaws in his later work, Ruscha refused to let this happen. He looked like a movie star and dated a few, including Diane Keaton, but he never clouded the viewer’s gaze with charisma. With the obvious exception of “Chocolate Room” (1970)—a candy-coated installation that is the biggest, and worst, piece in this show—he never uses scale as a proxy for importance, either. Language remains a bottomless well of inspiration, keeping the work impressively lean. In recent years, his wordplay has become more enigmatic and less overtly tied to mass media. Still, in the small acrylic painting “Metro, Petro, Neuro, Psycho” (2022), featuring those words superimposed on a grassy view near Ruscha’s studio, you can detect the same sphinxlike intelligence that brought you “Annie” sixty years earlier.
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