Edward Ruscha

Ace Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1994

This work is in very good condition overall. The surface is clean and the canvas is well-stretched. There are no apparent condition problems with this work. There is no evidence of restoration visible under UV light inspection.
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Ed Ruscha once quipped, "I don't have any Seine River like Monet. I just have U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles."[1] Over the years, the experience and imagery of Ruscha's many road trips along this fabled route would have a profound and indelible effect on the look and feel of his art. As much as Los Angeles, the myth and ethos of the American West preoccupied Ruscha early on, as evinced by text-based works such as Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963), West (1969) and Western, with Two Marbles (1969). In the present work, Yip Yip, Ruscha continues his canny play on language and text, albeit obliquely. As Yves Alain Bois points out, in early works, such as Oof and Honk, Ruscha demonstrated a "predilection for monosyllabic, onomatopoeic words"[2] that represent or mimic sounds.  Though Ruscha's hallmark use of text is conspicuously absent from Yip Yip and the earlier silhouette paintings which serve as its clear precedent, sound is implicitly present in both the title and in the coyote's gesture, serving as a wry nod to Ruscha's signature practice.

 

Like the cowboy, the coyote serves as the quintessential emblem of the romantic, heroicized world of the American West and embodies the spirit of freedom and boundlessness that similarly characterized Ruscha's experiences on the open road as he criss-crossed the vast expanses of desert and highway documenting his celebrated gas stations. In drawing a parallel between Ruscha's art and the writings of Jack Kerouac, Jaleh Mansoor invokes a line from On the Road in which one of the characters muses about " that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain until you see their specks dispersing."[3]  The latter serves as an apt preface for contemplating Yip Yip in which Ruscha's subject appears to us as a vague, mysterious object on the horizon on the brink of being enveloped by distance and the encroaching darkness.

 

Conceived in 1994, Yip Yip shares a clear affinity with the ambitious Denver Public Library Commission which Ruscha undertook in the same year. The project, which Ruscha described as "a rolling historical landscape of the West," consisted of seventy epic panel paintings depicting western themes that the artist rendered with the same vague outlines and shadowy forms employed in his silhouette series of the mid-1980's. Forsaking the hard edged geometry that characterized much of his early work, Ruscha began to explore the aesthetic possibilities achieved with a spray gun and the loose, evocative edges it yielded. Also of interest to Ruscha was the opportunity to work in black and white, a mode which recalls not only the practice of Franz Kline, whom Ruscha deeply regarded, but which also suggested the look and aura of cinema. Ruscha states, "I remember this notion I had in school about Franz Kline, thinking how great it was that this man only worked with black and white. I thought at some point in my life I would also work in black and white—and here it is."[4] In Yip Yip, Ruscha exploits the binary oppositions of black and white and the modulated half- tones in between to dramatic effect, varying the saturation of the paint to generate a sense of atmosphere and impending dusk. The result is seductive and cinematic, and speaks to Ruscha's parallel interest in film at a time when the artist was concurrently pursuing the look of "movies in a state of deterioration"[5] through paintings like Scratches on Film.

 

Over the years, Ruscha would revisit the coyote in multiple works. Aside from its pure visual allure and power as an image, the coyote resonates with Ruscha's roots in Oklahoma, his professed love for the wide open spaces of the desert, and as the embodiment of a rogue, restless spirit, can be viewed as a surrogate for the artist himself.

Evasive and difficult to pin down, the diffuse outlines of Yip Yip in many ways, serve as the quintessential metaphor for Ruscha's art.

 

 

[1] Ed Ruscha, "A Conversation Between Walter Hopps and Ed Ruscha" in Romance with Liquids: Paintings 1966-69, New York,1992, p. 100
[2] Yve-Alain Bois, "Intelligence Generator," in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume One: 1958-1970, New York, 2003, p. 9
[3] Jaleh Mansoor, "Ed Ruscha's One-Way Street," October, Winter 2005, p. 128
[4] Ed Ruscha quoted in Fred Fehlau, "Ed Ruscha", Flash Art, January/February 1988, p. 70-72
[5] Ed Ruscha quoted in Mary Voelz Chandler, "Art Museum, Library to Feature 'Word' According to Ed Ruscha," Denver Rocky Mountain News, September 10, 1995, sec. F. p. 82A