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拍品專文
An unparalleled figure in American art, Ed Ruscha has established a singularly ingenious oeuvre over the course of his storied career. Existing at the crux of Pop Art and Conceptual thought, his highly specific approach to painting has elicited praise for both its seemingly detached inscrutability as well as its prescient commentary on contemporary life since the 1960s. Bamboo Pole is a striking example of the artist’s ability to lionize the mundane while referencing the history of art and the avant-garde in equal measure.
Known for his dynamic word paintings that combine textual snippets with moody gradients, mountain vistas, and the landscape of California, Ruscha’s interest in establishing meaningful visual juxtapositions extends to solitary objects like the titular pole. “Vital art”, Ruscha has said, “is made out of things that the general population has overlooked. The things that are forgotten and thrown away are the things that eventually come back around and cry for attention. The artist sees possibilities in things that are overlooked. Seeing the electric vibrancy in something that’s so dead. The forgotten things are a source of food” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2001, p. 161). Raising it into the burning red clouds, the artist gives new vibrancy to the quotidian length of wood and asks for a reexamination of the everyday.
Rendered on an extreme horizontal, Bamboo Pole is a large-scale example of a series Ruscha undertook in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each depicting smoldering sunsets from various locales, these panoramic canvases took the open sky as subject with titles like Mexico, Texas Oklahoma, Kansas (1980) and America’s Future (1979). True to form, Ruscha creates an airless quality that tends toward surrealism even while treading the line between coldly conceptual and picturesque. In only a few of the works in this grouping are extraneous objects introduced which push the compositions into more intriguing visual territory. Bamboo Pole is one of these examples, and the gentle arc of a single bamboo shaft splits the glowing clouds like the exhaust trail of a jet across the sky. Curving from the bottom left up to the right corner, the pole floats as if caught in a gravitational field atop a warm gradient that heaves upwards from white to red. The painting is both of the object itself and of the perplexing interaction between the stick and its sublime backdrop. “Usually in my paintings, I'm creating some sort of disorder between the different elements”, Ruscha has said “[...] I like the feeling of an enormous pressure in a painting” (E. Ruscha, quoted in R. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York 2003, p. 241). Pitting simple subjects against the vastness of skyscapes, Ruscha establishes an energetic dichotomy that enchants the viewer while keeping them at arm’s length.
Ruscha was included in the seminal exhibition New Painting of Common Objects that included Pop progenitors like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and was curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. Linked as he was initially to these artists, he remained separate from Pop Art proper and has chosen to focus on the intricacies of language, objects, and the very heart of painting itself in a practice tinged with wry wit and dark humor. The horizontal skyscapes from which the current example hails were painted just a few years before a major retrospective of Ruscha’s work mounted in 1982-83 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bamboo Pole was included in the show as it traveled to Vancouver, New York, Houston, and Los Angeles, and readily highlights Ruscha’s ability to coax both majesty and absurdity from the most humble of subjects.
Known for his dynamic word paintings that combine textual snippets with moody gradients, mountain vistas, and the landscape of California, Ruscha’s interest in establishing meaningful visual juxtapositions extends to solitary objects like the titular pole. “Vital art”, Ruscha has said, “is made out of things that the general population has overlooked. The things that are forgotten and thrown away are the things that eventually come back around and cry for attention. The artist sees possibilities in things that are overlooked. Seeing the electric vibrancy in something that’s so dead. The forgotten things are a source of food” (E. Ruscha, quoted in Ed Ruscha, exh. cat., Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 2001, p. 161). Raising it into the burning red clouds, the artist gives new vibrancy to the quotidian length of wood and asks for a reexamination of the everyday.
Rendered on an extreme horizontal, Bamboo Pole is a large-scale example of a series Ruscha undertook in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each depicting smoldering sunsets from various locales, these panoramic canvases took the open sky as subject with titles like Mexico, Texas Oklahoma, Kansas (1980) and America’s Future (1979). True to form, Ruscha creates an airless quality that tends toward surrealism even while treading the line between coldly conceptual and picturesque. In only a few of the works in this grouping are extraneous objects introduced which push the compositions into more intriguing visual territory. Bamboo Pole is one of these examples, and the gentle arc of a single bamboo shaft splits the glowing clouds like the exhaust trail of a jet across the sky. Curving from the bottom left up to the right corner, the pole floats as if caught in a gravitational field atop a warm gradient that heaves upwards from white to red. The painting is both of the object itself and of the perplexing interaction between the stick and its sublime backdrop. “Usually in my paintings, I'm creating some sort of disorder between the different elements”, Ruscha has said “[...] I like the feeling of an enormous pressure in a painting” (E. Ruscha, quoted in R. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York 2003, p. 241). Pitting simple subjects against the vastness of skyscapes, Ruscha establishes an energetic dichotomy that enchants the viewer while keeping them at arm’s length.
Ruscha was included in the seminal exhibition New Painting of Common Objects that included Pop progenitors like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and was curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. Linked as he was initially to these artists, he remained separate from Pop Art proper and has chosen to focus on the intricacies of language, objects, and the very heart of painting itself in a practice tinged with wry wit and dark humor. The horizontal skyscapes from which the current example hails were painted just a few years before a major retrospective of Ruscha’s work mounted in 1982-83 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bamboo Pole was included in the show as it traveled to Vancouver, New York, Houston, and Los Angeles, and readily highlights Ruscha’s ability to coax both majesty and absurdity from the most humble of subjects.