Edward Ruscha

Ed Ruscha has incorporated popular imagery and text into his paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books, and films since beginning his career in the early 1960s. These methods have aligned him with Pop and Conceptual art, yet his body of work frustrates easy categorization. For Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, Ruscha amplified the 20th Century Fox film studio trademark to monumental proportions, rendering it, in his words, “Hollywoodized.” Most familiar as part of the pre-title sequence that gives way to a motion picture, the trademark here takes a starring role; the spotlights noted in the work’s title likewise emphasize the importance of branding in popular entertainment. At just over eleven feet long, the painting has a sharp diagonal momentum that provides what Ruscha describes as a “comic comment on the idea of speed and motion in a picture.” His dry sense of humor also underscores Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas. The photograph was created for the artist’s book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), a collection of twenty-six images that is purposefully banal and seemingly useless—“a product,” the artist explained, “for a non-existent audience.” The lackluster company name, “Standard Oil,” and the generic quality of the stations’ architecture receive their complement in Ruscha’s prosaic approach. More interested in information than aesthetics, he described himself as “doing photographs without being a photographer.” Ironically, Ruscha’s snapshot aesthetic later became the “standard” for many Conceptual artists.

Lion in Oil displays the artist’s ongoing fascination with language’s potential to both clarify and confuse. The juxtaposition of the mirrored letters of its title—a palindrome—with the image of an impossibly symmetrical mountain range becomes increasingly strange with prolonged viewing. Ruscha painted the phrase in an invented typeface he calls “Boy Scout Utility Modern,” designed so that its style “doesn’t say anything.” The signpost-like lettering is extremely legible, but the words add up to nonsense, presenting the viewer with an odd combination of precision and obscurity. The highly detailed but ultimately fictional mountain range plays a similar role, providing what Ruscha calls an “anonymous backdrop for the drama of words.” The enduring ambiguity in Ruscha’s work is fitting for an artist who from the beginning has opined: “art has to be something that makes you scratch your head.”