"Ed tuned in to a particularly contemporary kind of consciousness, a mode of thinking that would not really have been possible until the late 1950s or 1960s... This state of mind is comparable to the television viewer's stupor, another semi-meditative state in which words and images float on and off the screen as the words float over the surface of Edward Ruscha's paintings."
Emblazoned in glowing orange, the word “BOSS” thunders from a contrasting expanse of midnight navy in Ed Ruscha’s Securing the Last Letter (Boss) from 1964. The booming clamor of the word here is interrupted only by the industrial C-clamp that squinches and compresses the final letter, warping the image with the full genius of the artist’s semiotic subversion. Merging Pop Art, conceptualism, and a distinct West Coast sensibility with an elemental graphic force, Ruscha’s Text paintings of the 1960s transformed ordinary language into arresting visual statements that launched the artist into the innovative forefront of American contemporary art. Heralding a milestone in his aesthetic evolution, Securing the Last Letter (Boss) is one of only 24 large-scale paintings measuring over fifty inches that Ruscha executed in the seminal period between 1960 and 1965, and it develops from his earlier 1961 painting Boss, now held in the Broad Museum, Los Angeles, by introducing the unexpected image of a C-clamp into the word. Further probing the materiality of language, the present work is thus an exceptionally rare masterpiece from a limited suite of only four large-scale Text paintings with the clamp motif, half of which now belong to prominent institutional collections; notably, the sister painting to the present work, Not Only Securing the Last Letter but Damaging It as Well (Boss) resides in the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, while Hurting the Word Radio #1 is held in the Menil Collection, Houston. Further testifying to its prodigious significance, Securing the Last Letter (Boss) bears exceptional provenance, having only belonged to notable collectors Ed and Audrey Sabol prior to Emily Fisher Landau, who acquired the present work in 1988 through Leo Castelli Gallery.
Theatrical in scale and cinematic in allure, in Securing the Last Letter (Boss), Ruscha spells out with bright, bolded letters a word that aptly parallels the palpable authority of its visual dynamism: “BOSS.” The graphic potency and commanding associations of the titular word strike both the eyes and the mind like a boxer’s punch, a forceful expression of dominance and cool. Any semantic association of authority, however, appears undermined by the metal clamp that clenches onto the orange skin of the final “S,” radically disrupting the presumed flatness of the given text and insisting on its sculptural physicality and symbolic potential instead. The C-clamp—a utilitarian metal device of mechanics and carpentry—introduces a trompe l'oeil that elevates text into object, language into art, colloquialism into critique: as Thomas Crow analyzes, “The accurately depicted clamp, like an illustration from a tool supply catalogue, shouts ‘actual size,’ as it reveals the orange letters to be made of some ostensibly malleable material… It is a C-clamp, its namesake letter parasitically making the nonsensical BOScS out of Boss, deflating the boastful overtones of the word and perhaps marking its having congealed into a commercialized cliché” (Thomas Crow, “Turn It Up: The Sounds of the Young Ed Ruscha” in Exh. Cat., Ed Ruscha: Ace Radio Honk Boss, Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York, 2018-2019, n.p.). As with the very best of Ruscha’s seminal Text paintings, the artist here transfigures the word “BOSS” into a vehicle for his formal and conceptual investigations, a signature interplay of semiotics that has since shaped the cornerstone of his prolific career.
Ed Ruscha’s Text Paintings Featuring The Clamp Motif
"The accurately depicted clamp, like an illustration from a tool supply catalogue, shouts ‘actual size,’ as it reveals the orange letters to be made of some ostensibly malleable material… It is a C-clamp, its namesake letter parasitically making the nonsensical BOScS out of Boss, deflating the boastful overtones of the word and perhaps marking its having congealed into a commercialized cliché.”
The artist’s dramatic and seductive textual compositions of the 1960s are the result of his first road trip to California while on the way to art school from Oklahoma. Ruscha, who worked briefly as a commercial artist, found inspiration in the sudden ubiquity of advertising billboards, which spoke to America’s rising tides of prosperity and consumerism. The colossal billboards of de-contextualized words and a constant barrage of images projecting onto the endless expanse of the mythical West would become a major influence on his visual vernacular and resulted in a career-long obsession with text and image. Intrigued by Jasper Johns’ use of readymade images as supports for abstraction, Ruscha began to consider how he could employ graphics to expose painting’s dual identity as both object and illusion, using words in his paintings as visual constructs. "I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again” says Ruscha, “I see myself working with two things that don't even ask to understand each other" (the artist quoted in Thomas Beller, “Ed Ruscha” (1989), in Alexandra Schwartz, Ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, Cambridge, 2002, p. 282)
By blurring the taut boundaries between language, text, and visual object, Ruscha’s legendary Text paintings of the 1960s succinctly distilled the spirit of American consumerism and the explosion of mass media into the groundbreaking advent of Pop Art. Like Andy Warhol, who foregrounded brand names in his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles, Ruscha adopted as his subject matter an eclectic vocabulary of common words sourced from his everyday surroundings. "There are things that I'm constantly looking at that I feel should be elevated to greater status, almost to philosophical status or to a religious status,” the artist has said. “That's why taking things out of context is a useful tool to an artist. It's the concept of taking something that's not subject matter and making it subject matter" (the artist quoted in Richard D. Marshall and Ed Ruscha, Ed Ruscha, 2005, p. 133). Indeed, by 1962, Ruscha would expand his Text paintings on a larger scale, abandoning the painterly brushwork of his earlier works for a near-mechanical graphic precision that filled vast expanses with more emphatic and monosyllabic words—such as the word “BOSS,” booming across the indigo canvas of the present work. Aggrandized and isolated, the words of Ruscha’s paintings are stripped of context, forcing the viewer to reckon with the transcendent power of language.
In 1961, “Boss of the Bay” had been the self-awarded title and promotional catch phrase for the rock-and-pop hit radio station KYA in San Francisco, later shortened to and advertised as “Boss Radio” throughout Los Angeles, where Ruscha was living at the time. In Securing the Last Letter (Boss), the artist may have adopted his source word from listening to the radio, a theory underlined by the central word in the C-clamp sister paintings Hurting the Word Radio #1 and #2. Regardless, text in Ruscha’s canvases functions just as importantly as abstract ciphers that revel in their own ambiguity. “Isolated as a single term, ‘boss’ hovers between noun and adjective, or that move between parts of speech effecting a transition from common language to specialized slang signifying something superlatively good, admirable, or impressive” Thomas Crow writes (Thomas Crow, Ibid., n.p). Befitting of this term, Ruscha opts for a bold typography that mimics the lettering seen in movie posters, further accentuating the assertive drama of their graphic austerity in the searing contrast between the depthless, blue background and blazing orange text.
Squeezed to reverberate with Ruscha’s acerbic wit and whimsy, Securing the Last Letter (Boss) refuses a straightforward reading, instead interplaying motifs of “high” and “low” culture with an aesthetic irony that has become synonymous the artist’s enduring legacy. “Paradox and absurdity have just always been really delicious to me,” he has tellingly proclaimed (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, 2011, p. 288). The present work is an early paragon of Ruscha’s iconic output from the early 1960s, a critical turning point in art history during which the tradition of painting intersected with a new contemporary culture of advertising and mass media. As Jeffrey Deitch pointed out, "Ed tuned in to a particularly contemporary kind of consciousness, a mode of thinking that would not really have been possible until the late 1950s or 1960s... This state of mind is comparable to the television viewer's stupor, another semi-meditative state in which words and images float on and off the screen as the words float over the surface of Edward Ruscha's paintings" (Jeffrey Deitch, Exh. Cat., New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Edward Ruscha: Early Paintings, 1988, n.p.). With his masterful manipulation of text and imagery, the brilliant onset of which Securing the Last Letter (Boss) boldly embodies, Ruscha has pioneered a signature mode of painting that combined the tradition’s expressive, imaginative freedom with the regimented and commercial world of printed matter.
