The Williams-Ruscha story is no secret; writer Erik Bluhm recounted it most recently in the May-June, 2006 issue of artUS magazine. It is notable because it encapsulates something about the U.S. in that time period—about a wide-open land in which wit and wonder still commingled, promising unexpected possibilities. It also says something about Ruscha's distinctive approach to art, which Las Vegans can sample through a selection of prints from various periods of his career at G-C Arts Downtown.
Ruscha and Williams remain friends, and over the years they've played off one another. In 1969, for instance, Ruscha published a book of photographs, Crackers, documenting himself carrying out the instructions listed in the Williams short story, "How to Derive Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers"—it involves a bed full of food, a beautiful date and a failure to, uh, communicate. This impish taste for irony runs throughout Ruscha's career, starting with his early rejection of abstract painting and an appreciation for the proto-pop works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
It also led him to exploit the visual properties of words—the images they conjure, the way they appear in script or type, and the collisions of these two properties. Bluhm noted in his artUS article that Ruscha once told an interviewer: "I felt newspapers, magazines, books—words—to be more meaningful than what some damn oil painter was doing."
A 1973 lithograph, "Vanish," offers an example. In a mid-range gray field, Ruscha spells the title word in water drops, complete with highlighted edges. It's a simple joke, the idea of impermanence written with water, but the word persists in the print precisely because it is an illusion. The associations you can pull from this churn endlessly, as with the paired 1988 aquatints, "Heaven" and "Hell." In each, slightly arched swaths grow increasingly diluted as they rise from dense pools of color, and the title word appears in negative space toward the top of the vertical composition. Each notion, of course, is only as "real" as you care for it to be, and the word for each appears as a void in a dissolving emanation.
At the center of all this is a basic postmodern conceit, that our representations of reality are more real than their subjects. At the same time, though, Ruscha is capable of calling into question that very idea, in representing an image by way of a ghostly silhouette. The 1988 aquatint/etching "Rooster" intimates this, as the shadowy bird seems to dissolve into the air. But what exactly is insubstantial here: the object, or its representation? Or our idea of it?
You can track these conundrums through the labyrinths of the mind, but eventually Ruscha will return your attention to simple visual facts. Among his most celebrated works was the 1963 book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, which collected his photographs of fuel stops between Oklahoma and California. He has said that the words of the title played in his head while making that journey, which he did frequently in the early days, and that he eventually realized he had to make a project of them. And so again another tortuous path of thought unwinds, teasing chicken-and-egg questions about words and objects. But the matter-of-fact image of an iconic American setting is what persists, in the basic pop project of presenting the everyday as noteworthy.
Ruscha is often considered typically West Coast in sensibility, but the West in general informs his work, especially his landscapes. In print series from the late 1970s and early 1980s, he created shallow, horizontal views of the Western landscape, low-horizoned and richly toned sunsets, with silhouetted utility poles receding into the distance, or the shapes of a distant homestead in the center. The land continues to fascinate him, as in his 2001 photogravures titled "Country Cityscapes."
The G-C Arts show spans most of Ruscha's career. He has been known for paintings, photography and books, but he has also made some splendid print series over the years. It might be the ideal medium for his mix of simple play and textured concept, of "here it is" and "what about it?"