| Ed Ruscha is a great American art daddy, such that he has been called "the deadpan laureate of American art," "the great American Pop and Conceptual artist," "one of the most important figures in contemporary art today," and "the visual deus ex machina of what has become the most overscrutinised city on earth." This latter bombastic nugget, from Angeleno crime writer James Ellroy, refers to the inextricable coil that is Ruscha and Los Angeles, which has been home, influence, and subject for the artist since 1956. The art-historical narrative around the artist and his city, a place traditionally downplayed within the canon, has come to equate the two: Ruscha is Los Angeles is America. Aside from being an oversize load for one man to bear, this positions Ruscha as an artist of gargantuan political dimension, since representing America is necessarily snarled up with a concatenation of assumptions and assertions about empire and liberty, attended to by settler colonialism, racism, genocide, slavery, capitalism. Yet, routinely and consistently, the political implications of Ruscha's work have been sanded, softened, and sheened away, often mentioned but rarely, if ever, the point of singular analysis. The proposition of Ruscha and his work as politically engaged, or even radical, is instead neatly diluted by a script coauthored by the artist in which he is a mere observer, a reporter of "facts," as Christophe Cherix describes in a new exhibition catalogue, or an American innocent who is, as Dave Hickey once put it, "standing right beside us, gazing at his findings as quizzically as we are, occasionally glancing over and raising an eyebrow, going, 'Huh? Whadda ya think?'"
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art after debuting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, is the artist's largest retrospective to date, and its comprehensiveness provides a ripe opportunity to reconsider the pervasive mythology of Ruscha as neutral. The commonly used descriptors deadpan and cool are not necessarily incorrect, but they primarily describe affect and not the substance of the work—a real shame for someone as substantial as Ruscha. Eschewing Abstract Expressionism during its prime, Ruscha employed a calm, removed aesthetic as one key tool in his larger project of cracking open an indeterminate space between symbols and their meanings, specifically in the context of America's burgeoning commercial modernity. Questioning the power of words, as he does in the "word paintings" he is most famous for—like the early example Boss (1961), included in NOW THEN—is a bald form of questioning power itself. He extends this inquiry of power into the realm of psychic and physical geography vis-à-vis Los Angeles, a city defined by the friction between its fact—as a tangible, changing, and socially fraught city—and its fantasy as an out-of-time and otherworldly "dream factory." The clearest example of such extension may be his combined use of documentary-style photography and the artist's book. Rendering words, Los Angeles, and books alike into defamiliarized units becomes a portal to infinity that invites the viewer into wide-open emotional landscapes. Such existential and painstakingly constructed spaces of ambiguity deserve to be considered as a radical alternative to a confused American fantasy, where concepts of progress and liberty ceaselessly justify and mask colonialist violence. Ruscha has diligently been carving out such alternatives for decades, albeit safely under cover of his own claim that he has "no social agenda with [his] work." |
