Ed Ruscha describes his paintings as ‘information age art’: a label that seems fitting the moment you walk into this retrospective. The first room is full of paintings of single words blown up against a block-colour background. The words are mostly taken from commonplace, transient sources like adverts or comic strips. Such intense focus on the words of pop culture out of context (the 1962 ‘OOF’ Acanvas, for example) makes them seem comically removed from language, to the extent that they become purely visual objects. In ‘The Back of Hollywood’ (1977), Ruscha continues the idea of words-as-objects using a real life example. By painting the iconic Hollywood sign from an unexpected angle, he confronts us with its dual existence as a word and a material thing, and the consequent absurdity of placing a huge word in a physical landscape.
This painting also marks a transition in Ruscha’s work from the brashness of the early word-images, stencilled on in full Technicolor, to the complexity of urban landscapes centred on LA, Ruscha’s home. These later compositions retain the bold approach and large scale of his earlier work; gas stations, museum complexes, cinema screens are sliced up by dramatic and razor-sharp diagonal lines which seem at times parodically grandiose. There is a challengingly American sensibility to all of this; the large areas of block colour suggest huge areas of flat space, wide vistas interrupted only occasionally by buildings or signage.
But Ruscha’s images do not convey contentment with this vast expanse of the American West. He interrupts the geometric rigidity of compositions like ‘Standard Gas Station’ (1966) with unexpected elements like fire; the clean division of building against sky is interrupted by vicious-looking flames. The buildings he depicts seem antagonistic both to their natural landscape and to the humans implicit in their construction. In fact, people are pretty scarce in these compositions. Walking around the exhibition is actually a rather bleak experience; Ruscha’s information age is too swept up in its own arch-urbanity to have time for human beings.
This frustration of his with modernized America remains a central preoccupation of the Hayward’s vast and comprehensively curated exhibition. Perhaps the most nuanced expression of this is found right at the end, in the pair of monumental canvases ‘Azteca’ and ‘Azteca in Decline’ (2007). The former is an exact replica of a colourful street mural the artist found in New Mexico, complete with cracks in the concrete wall and some graffiti. The second painting suggests the continued effects of time on this mural, but includes trompe l’oeil to a surreal extent; the mural image has been torn and folded, crumpling from its grey background. Ruscha emphasizes on a monumental scale that even the grandest image is not infallible, and that any record, verbal or pictorial, will eventually be eroded. Even if our age is saturated with information, we can’t be fooled into thinking that any of its records are permanent.
Three stars
‘Ed Ruscha – Fifty Years of Painting’ is on at the Hayward Gallery, London until 10th January.
Admission for students is £6. Full-price tickets are £10. There is a 2-for-1 offer on tickets on Fridays. See Hayward Gallery website for further details.
