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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, Volume 2: 1977-1997, edited by Lisa Turvey.
“I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again” (E. Ruscha, quoted in L. Turvey, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, Volume 1, 1956- 1976, New Haven, CT, 2014, p. 39).
In Everything vs. Nothing, Ed Ruscha’s haunting and evocative painting from 1991, the artist has traded his early rhythmic order and cadenced musicality, for a textual arrangement that evokes a dash of existential mystery. The field that the ubiquitous typeface falls across capitalizes upon the tension between light and dark implied in the lexical composition; a hazy black silhouette of a house sits against a light sky. However, the black dissolves into the white as though the image has been soaked in water, the pervasive color of the composition becomes a silky grey that seems to bind everything into one equivocal gradient. Ruscha’s choice of “vs.” instead of “and” or “everything”, enhances a sense of conflict or tension within the work. Black, the totality of color is posed against white, the absence. Yet in terms of light, white light represents a totality and black shadow, an absence. The murky grey gradation between the two hues serves as a reminder that the world is never simply black and white, that everything and nothing are not so easily defined or contained, that words cannot suffice to express the impossibility of completeness or nothingness. The white text appears crisp and explicit against the foggy backdrop, like headlights cutting through a mist. Despite the polarity implied within the statement, the words collaborate to form the frame of the composition, providing a sense of stricture and balance not found in the unfocused backdrop.
Ed Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956, where he first rose to prominence making collages that were inspired by the pioneering work of Neo-Dada and conceptual artists such as Jasper Johns. This type of artistic production rejected gesture and subjective expression, instead Ruscha began to work in a mode inspired by Pop Art, relying on imagery and references that were “completely premeditated” (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.,” New Yorker, 1 July 2013). Uniting Ruscha's practice is his long-standing fascination and unabashed love of words. Having trained as a sign writer, this formative experience can be seen in his earliest typographical works from 1960. “When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist, painting was the last method, it was an almost obsolete, archaic form of communication. I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words, to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing” (E. Ruscha, quoted in N. Benezra, “Ed Ruscha: Painting and Artistic License,” Ed Ruscha, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 45). He began his famous series of word paintings in the '60s, depicting various views of the Hollywood sign and the logos of studios like 20th Century Fox, but also roadside views like the Standard Oil stations dotting the L.A. freeways. Over time this exploration of the written words as image became more abstracted, juxtaposing ambiguous, free-floating phrases with natural vistas, celestial arrangements, foggy gradients and monochrome backgrounds.
The Los Angeles avant-garde art scene celebrated a breed of conceptualism that responded to the pervasion of the entertainment industry, with a penchant for the cinematic and performative. Ruscha and his Californian contemporaries, artists such as Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari and William Wegman, developed artistic practices dripping with sardonic wit and leaning on a flair for the theatrical. Ruscha, inspired by the iconography that can become associated with a word, allowed his poetic statements to become actors performing in front of static, dreamy sets. “A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words … I have a background, foreground. It’s so simple. And the backgrounds are of no particular character. They’re just meant to support the drama, like the Hollywood sign being held up by sticks” (E. Ruscha, quoted in R. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2003, p. 239). Here, the act of lettering superimposed on these backdrops is both familiar and anonymous, and the artist does not privilege one word or image above another, instead inviting their own connotations to emerge.
Any objective interpretation of Ruscha’s paintings remains elusive. The words are cryptic, and are not bound by any relevance to the imagery they have been paired with. They occur as a moment, a line spoken out of context, conveying an indefinite sensation that has long appealed to Ruscha. “Paradox and absurdity have just always been really delicious to me” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 2011, p. 288). This ambiguity of meaning, adds especial weight to the particular word choice of the present work. Everything vs. Nothing occurs as a microcosmic statement of the condition of linguistics as a theoretical whole. Symbols only hold meaning because we associate them with something: a sound, a concept, a being. These meanings are instilled and imposed upon a symbol, or word, actively and so inherently they mean nothing, but they have the capacity to mean everything. The notion of individual interpretation so vital to the appreciation of ambiguous contemporary artwork relies on the kind of tabula rasa embodied by the semantic conceptualism of Ed Ruscha.
“I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again” (E. Ruscha, quoted in L. Turvey, Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Works on Paper, Volume 1, 1956- 1976, New Haven, CT, 2014, p. 39).
In Everything vs. Nothing, Ed Ruscha’s haunting and evocative painting from 1991, the artist has traded his early rhythmic order and cadenced musicality, for a textual arrangement that evokes a dash of existential mystery. The field that the ubiquitous typeface falls across capitalizes upon the tension between light and dark implied in the lexical composition; a hazy black silhouette of a house sits against a light sky. However, the black dissolves into the white as though the image has been soaked in water, the pervasive color of the composition becomes a silky grey that seems to bind everything into one equivocal gradient. Ruscha’s choice of “vs.” instead of “and” or “everything”, enhances a sense of conflict or tension within the work. Black, the totality of color is posed against white, the absence. Yet in terms of light, white light represents a totality and black shadow, an absence. The murky grey gradation between the two hues serves as a reminder that the world is never simply black and white, that everything and nothing are not so easily defined or contained, that words cannot suffice to express the impossibility of completeness or nothingness. The white text appears crisp and explicit against the foggy backdrop, like headlights cutting through a mist. Despite the polarity implied within the statement, the words collaborate to form the frame of the composition, providing a sense of stricture and balance not found in the unfocused backdrop.
Ed Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956, where he first rose to prominence making collages that were inspired by the pioneering work of Neo-Dada and conceptual artists such as Jasper Johns. This type of artistic production rejected gesture and subjective expression, instead Ruscha began to work in a mode inspired by Pop Art, relying on imagery and references that were “completely premeditated” (E. Ruscha, quoted in C. Tomkins, “Ed Ruscha’s L.A.,” New Yorker, 1 July 2013). Uniting Ruscha's practice is his long-standing fascination and unabashed love of words. Having trained as a sign writer, this formative experience can be seen in his earliest typographical works from 1960. “When I first became attracted to the idea of being an artist, painting was the last method, it was an almost obsolete, archaic form of communication. I felt newspapers, magazines, books, words, to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing” (E. Ruscha, quoted in N. Benezra, “Ed Ruscha: Painting and Artistic License,” Ed Ruscha, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 45). He began his famous series of word paintings in the '60s, depicting various views of the Hollywood sign and the logos of studios like 20th Century Fox, but also roadside views like the Standard Oil stations dotting the L.A. freeways. Over time this exploration of the written words as image became more abstracted, juxtaposing ambiguous, free-floating phrases with natural vistas, celestial arrangements, foggy gradients and monochrome backgrounds.
The Los Angeles avant-garde art scene celebrated a breed of conceptualism that responded to the pervasion of the entertainment industry, with a penchant for the cinematic and performative. Ruscha and his Californian contemporaries, artists such as Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari and William Wegman, developed artistic practices dripping with sardonic wit and leaning on a flair for the theatrical. Ruscha, inspired by the iconography that can become associated with a word, allowed his poetic statements to become actors performing in front of static, dreamy sets. “A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words … I have a background, foreground. It’s so simple. And the backgrounds are of no particular character. They’re just meant to support the drama, like the Hollywood sign being held up by sticks” (E. Ruscha, quoted in R. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2003, p. 239). Here, the act of lettering superimposed on these backdrops is both familiar and anonymous, and the artist does not privilege one word or image above another, instead inviting their own connotations to emerge.
Any objective interpretation of Ruscha’s paintings remains elusive. The words are cryptic, and are not bound by any relevance to the imagery they have been paired with. They occur as a moment, a line spoken out of context, conveying an indefinite sensation that has long appealed to Ruscha. “Paradox and absurdity have just always been really delicious to me” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 2011, p. 288). This ambiguity of meaning, adds especial weight to the particular word choice of the present work. Everything vs. Nothing occurs as a microcosmic statement of the condition of linguistics as a theoretical whole. Symbols only hold meaning because we associate them with something: a sound, a concept, a being. These meanings are instilled and imposed upon a symbol, or word, actively and so inherently they mean nothing, but they have the capacity to mean everything. The notion of individual interpretation so vital to the appreciation of ambiguous contemporary artwork relies on the kind of tabula rasa embodied by the semantic conceptualism of Ed Ruscha.