12.20.23 — Dripping with Irony
New Yorkers know irony. Detachment, not so much.
We have irony in the very air we breathe, with or without haze from Canadian wildfires. We value a quick mind, even as we know that everything we know is wrong. We know the city’s pace and passion, too, and Ed Ruscha opened to members at the Museum of Modern Art right after Labor Day, the same day as the Armory Show. He has the entire top floor, through January 12, and yet no artist speaks so deeply of and to LA. When he paints maple syrup or screen-prints chocolate onto all four walls, he is dripping with irony. As for detachment, you bet. 
I have climbed the Pepsi sign in Long Island City, because a New Yorker takes nothing for granted as just part of the neighborhood. Ruscha paints both sides of the Hollywood sign, front and back, as if each were equally iconic, and perhaps it is. He photographs Every Building on the Sunset Strip, for an artist’s book. Where a New Yorker would look around to cherish small differences and to remember the haunts that fate has left behind, he loves their collective anonymity, or does he? A retrospective teases out what drew him to California and what he fears for today. It asks where he enters the work and when he vanishes—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.
That first accordion book, from 1966, folds out impressively, to almost twenty-five feet. The Strip runs just a mile and a half, but the act of photographing was impressive, too. Ruscha shot from a flat-bed truck. Was he erasing differences or asking one to discover them for oneself? He is not saying, but he returned to the medium to photograph LA apartment complexes and their architecture. He also paints a popular restaurant, on La Cienega south of Sunset Boulevard, as if it were on fire.
He paints LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also up in flames. Is he mocking its status, fearing its demise, or celebrating a city on fire? He could be deriding its pretension, soon after its construction in 1965, but not its art, right? Was he himself still making art? Hostile critics were asking that about an entire generation, and he was among its instigators. He seems to place everything in quotes, and the quotes are not just his alone.
Still, this is Hollywood, and so is 20th Century Fox. Ruscha paints it in 1963 as The Big Picture, and it is another breakthrough—clean, clear, bright, and big as its name. He shows the film studio’s logo with projection beams behind it, crossing one another against a dark sky. The text in text painting has grown and entered three dimensions. Its overall shape tapers off behind the logo, facing front at left. Hollywood is myth-making, and so is he, while claiming the myth for himself.
The curators, Christophe Cherix with Ana Torok and Kiko Aebi, present his career in sequence, but every step brings a change in theme. Ruscha does not give up a single motif. He just revisits it askance and afresh. Norm’s restaurant, LACMA, and the very sky are on fire, a word that enters text painting as well. A C-clamp tugs at the text of another painting, while other text takes on the illusion of muck and goo. He backs off painting entirely for a few years, with such media as tobacco stain, blood (his own), whisky, and gunpowder.
I prefer the deadpan optimism that brought him halfway across the country from Oklahoma City to the Sunset Strip. (He took the same highway to revisit family now and then.) It infiltrates even his chocolate room from 1970. Its wall covering, printed on paper, does not so much as stink. A New Yorker’s hopes may lie elsewhere, and so may many a history of postwar art. Still, most of all in the 1960s, he keeps you guessing as he carries Pop into conceptual art.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.