"I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again…I see myself working with two things that don't even ask to understand each other."
E ncapsulating Ed Ruscha's career-long exploration of semiotics and text, Life from 1984 embodies the conceptual rigor and signature style that have come to define the artist’s highly acclaimed practice. Held in the personal collection of Emily Fisher Landau for nearly 40 years, the work boasts an illustrious exhibition history, having been exhibited at the Fisher Landau Center for Art extensively from 1985 to 2017. Further attesting to the work’s importance, the painting was reproduced in a promotional poster for the Venice Art Walk by the Venice Family Clinic in 1988. Ed Ruscha is currently the focus of a long-awaited retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, open through January 2024, the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work ever staged, and his first solo exhibition at the museum.
Emerging from a magnificent dusk sky, the titular word, “LIFE” boldly confronts the viewer in a theatrical crescendo of text and image. Perhaps an ode to the iconic LIFE magazine, the present work appears to utilize the magazine’s bold white typeface, though enlarged, pressed, and refitted within the composition for his own investigations. Hazily rendered, the word floats like clouds on a chromatic plane, echoing the opening credits to a film or a fleeting glimpse of a roadside billboard designed to captivate in an instant. Significantly, Life reflects the first time the artist used an an airbrush technique to render the text which achieves a resounding effect as the canvas reverberates with an atmospheric glow. The bright, fluorescent white letters burst forth from the canvas, pulling themselves out from the dimming twilight with an energetic bravado. Prickling with electricity, “LIFE” comes in a flash, mimicking the blinding effect of oncoming headlights of a car speeding past on the highway.
"A word on a page, which is also a word painted on a plane, which is also the representation of a word in a picture, becomes a sign, a symbol, and an image, on a ground which is simultaneously a page, a place, and a picture. Even if you start by looking at Edward Ruscha's first collages with their juxtaposed words and images, even if you ask yourself what the late Roland Barthes considered to be the first question, "What is happening here?"
Indeed, Ruscha’s dramatic and seductive textual compositions trace back to his first road trip to California in 1956, as he made his way across the country to begin art school at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from his home in 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 the 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 in order to expose painting’s dual identity as both object and illusion, using words in his paintings as visual constructs. The appropriation of the commonplace chimes with Pop Art's greatest ambassadors such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Barbara Kruger, who worked simultaneously with Ruscha throughout much of the late Twentieth Century to deepen the artistic exploration of commercial culture.
Marking a departure from his earliest works which made reference to American urbanscapes such as highways, gas stations, buildings, and signs in their backgrounds, Ruscha’s later corpus of work from this decade takes the natural world as its subject, recycling images of theatrical sunsets, wheat fields, and in this case, night skies. Shifting from a rich navy blue at the upper register into strokes of darker mauves and purples across the center of the canvas, and finishing with warm yellow and verdant green along the bottom edge of the work, Ruscha deftly captures the natural rhythms of color in a post-sunset sky much like the graduated surfaces of Mark Rothko’s epochal color field paintings. Ruscha’s landscapes, whether manmade or natural, are as trite as movie backdrops. Defunct of function, they serve merely as stages for the drama of Ruscha’s words. As Ruscha points out, “words are pattern-like, and in their horizontality, they answer my investigation into landscape. They’re almost not words – they’re objects that become words” (Richard D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 106). There is no apparent relationship between text and image, no implied narrative, no suggested purpose. It is in this deliberate distance between text and image that reveal the profound and thought provoking nature of Ruscha’s canvases.
RIGHT: Ed Ruscha, Faster Than A Speeding Beanstalk, 1986. MoCA, Los Angeles
Life holds particular importance within Ruscha’s oeuvre with its revolutionary presentation of two new innovations in Ruscha’s practice: the use of an airbrush technique for paint application and the inclusion of ‘censor strips.’ Unlike the mechanical precision applied to text in his earlier works, Ruscha’s adoption of the airbrush in Life results in a singular typeface entirely of Ruscha’s own making. Far from the crisp computerized fonts he uses in other text paintings of this period, the airbrushed letters in Life are elusive, fleeting symbols that seem to evaporate in the twilight zone. The airbrush would go on to dominate Ruscha’s future creative output, immediately taking center stage in his next series City Lights in 1986.
Beyond its revolutionary use of airbrush, the present work also includes an early use of the ‘censor strip’ in Ruscha’s oeuvre. The ‘censor strip’ paintings feature white or black boxes in places where Ruscha might have previously included words, suggesting either the concealment of a censor or blank space waiting to be filled in by the viewer. In the present work, the ‘censor strip’ appears as the stout white horizontal band quietly traversing the upper half of the letter “L.” Created by reverse stenciling, the box is precisely rendered, sharply contrasting the loosely defined, airbrush quality of the letters.
Showcasing Ruscha’s inaugural incorporation of two significant motifs, Life endures as a seminal painting directly connected to the evolution of the artist’s impressive creative practice. Drawing a visual parallel to such Surrealist iconography as the floating objects of Rene Magritte or the metaphysical landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, Ruscha elevates his iconography from a string of discordant letters to a body of poetic resonance. Through this fusion of text and image, Ruscha explores the liminal space of the imagination in which something as quotidian as text ceases to bear meaning. Unlike his Surrealist forebears, however, Ruscha pulls his texts not from the realm of dreams or the subconscious, but from his everyday world, as in the work of his idol Marcel Duchamp. As Anne Livet notes: "Ruscha's relationship with the Surrealists is more fraternal than filial. Both artistic strategies derive from the Symbolist tradition, but whereas the iconography of the Surrealists derives from the language of the subconscious, Ruscha's iconography arises from the intersection of cultural and autobiographical metaphor" (Exh. Cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Works of Ed Ruscha, 1982, p. 17). By placing text in such dreamlike landscapes as seen in the present work, Ruscha treats text as creating an optical effect that teeters between specificity and abstraction; the recognizable and the thrillingly elusive.
Constituting the beginning of a new chapter in his career-long investigation of semiotics, Life was created during one of the artist’s most meaningful decades of rising critical and commercial acclaim in which he was the subject of two acclaimed solo retrospectives – his very first at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1982, and another at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1989. Boldly examining the complex and symbiotic relationship between text and image, Life encapsulates the subtle interplay of aesthetic and conceptual concerns that exemplify the very best of Ruscha’s work.
