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Lot Essay
‘Late twentieth-century America has provided [Ruscha] with the substance of his nightmares, just as Spanish culture did Goya. The slippage between knowledge and meaning, the chasm between sense and sensibility, create a modern disease that will not be put to rest by being labelled the good life (gone bad).’
– Kay Larson
‘A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words. In a way, they’re words in front of an old Paramount Studios mountain. You don’t have to have a mountain back there - you could have a landscape, a farm. 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.’
– Edward Ruscha
Against a blustery sky of moody grey, a single sign leans precariously within the ghostly landscape of Edward Ruscha’s Old Sign, 1989. The light is soft yet striking, the last calm moment before the billowing clouds of a dust storm swell and heave. Using an airbrush, Ruscha has created an atmospheric expanse reminiscent of the chiaroscuro light of film noir, and Old Sign is particularly cinematic, a film still cleaved from the reel. Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City, but is now considered the quintessential Los Angeles artist; his career has been occupied with the visual language of the American west, a capacious concept, rooted in the architecture, billboards, signs, and advertisements he saw while crisscrossing the country during the mid-1950s. Indeed, Ruscha was always drawn to odd shapes, unpolished lettering, the corrosion wrought by time and weather, and the ‘things that weren’t corporate, things that were done by hand’ of the signs he saw along the road (E. Ruscha quoted in K. Miller, ‘Artist Ed Ruscha on His Greatest Influence’, Details, May 1, 2011).
In the 1980s, Ruscha embarked upon a series of disparate works that purposefully absented language, and for an artist whose career was long defined by the coalescing of text and image, these works present a radical departure. Contemporaneous to his Signs, he began the Silhouettes, a series of easily identifiable images rendered in grisaille. These works look back to Pictorialism, James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s Nocturnes, and the black and white movies of the artist’s childhood to convey a sense of a hazy disenchantment, reinforced through the placement of slim rectangles resembling the marks used to black out censored documents. In Old Sign, the shadowy, inscrutability of the scene is underscored by the stark blankness of the sign. Created to communicate, Ruscha has instead made a sign without a purpose and, in doing so, points to the mechanics of meaning and the manifold ways in which language functions. In so many of his canvases, Ruscha strips words of significance by transforming them into images; in Old Sign, however, the image becomes a text for the viewer to translate, a pun about words, a matrix for deciphering the vernacular world.
– Kay Larson
‘A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words. In a way, they’re words in front of an old Paramount Studios mountain. You don’t have to have a mountain back there - you could have a landscape, a farm. 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.’
– Edward Ruscha
Against a blustery sky of moody grey, a single sign leans precariously within the ghostly landscape of Edward Ruscha’s Old Sign, 1989. The light is soft yet striking, the last calm moment before the billowing clouds of a dust storm swell and heave. Using an airbrush, Ruscha has created an atmospheric expanse reminiscent of the chiaroscuro light of film noir, and Old Sign is particularly cinematic, a film still cleaved from the reel. Ruscha grew up in Oklahoma City, but is now considered the quintessential Los Angeles artist; his career has been occupied with the visual language of the American west, a capacious concept, rooted in the architecture, billboards, signs, and advertisements he saw while crisscrossing the country during the mid-1950s. Indeed, Ruscha was always drawn to odd shapes, unpolished lettering, the corrosion wrought by time and weather, and the ‘things that weren’t corporate, things that were done by hand’ of the signs he saw along the road (E. Ruscha quoted in K. Miller, ‘Artist Ed Ruscha on His Greatest Influence’, Details, May 1, 2011).
In the 1980s, Ruscha embarked upon a series of disparate works that purposefully absented language, and for an artist whose career was long defined by the coalescing of text and image, these works present a radical departure. Contemporaneous to his Signs, he began the Silhouettes, a series of easily identifiable images rendered in grisaille. These works look back to Pictorialism, James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s Nocturnes, and the black and white movies of the artist’s childhood to convey a sense of a hazy disenchantment, reinforced through the placement of slim rectangles resembling the marks used to black out censored documents. In Old Sign, the shadowy, inscrutability of the scene is underscored by the stark blankness of the sign. Created to communicate, Ruscha has instead made a sign without a purpose and, in doing so, points to the mechanics of meaning and the manifold ways in which language functions. In so many of his canvases, Ruscha strips words of significance by transforming them into images; in Old Sign, however, the image becomes a text for the viewer to translate, a pun about words, a matrix for deciphering the vernacular world.