A striking example from Ed Ruscha’s acclaimed Silhouette series, Yip Yip from1994 presents a dramatic portrait of a howling coyote whose high-pitched vocalizations of ‘yip yip’ are palpable through his pose. Amidst a hazy grayscale ether, the animal’s silhouetted visage emerges, creating a visual experience that is at once alluring in the viewer’s proximity to the potentially dangerous creature and unsettling in the surreal quality of the impending dusk that surrounds. The diagonal thrust formed by the upward turn of the coyote’s nose calls to mind the same formal compositional device present in many of Ruscha’s most iconic paintings, including his portrayal of the Hollywood sign and Standard Oil stations from the 1960s, while his use of airbrushing ignited a new direction in his continuously innovative artistic vocabulary. Using an airbrush, Ruscha created an atmosphere reminiscent of the chiaroscuro light of film noir and contrived a low, cinematic vantage point that positions the viewer as silent witness to the scene, akin to a spectator peering upwards at a film in a state of awe or vulnerability.
Throughout his six-decade-long career, Ed Ruscha has consistently demonstrated his shrewd wit and technical dexterity, yet the artist has reinvented his artistic language throughout his oeuvre, continually producing new bodies of work that solidify his position as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. In contrast to Ruscha’s earlier ‘cool’ paintings, created to echo the slick language of advertising with a sharply delineated hard-edged approach, the velvety aura present in his Silhouette series started in the mid-1980s arose from the artist’s interest in making paintings without any visible brushstrokes. In his quest to explore the creative possibilities afforded by a spray gun, Ruscha deftly achieved an atmospheric softening of focus, making the familiar outline of a coyote appear strange and frightening in the present work.
"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."
In his Silhouette series, Ruscha also embraced the challenge of eliminating color to work primarily in the nuances of black and white, citing the art historical precedent of Franz Kline, as well as his lifelong interest in film, as inspiration. This body of work encompasses the nebulous silhouettes of imagery including slipper ships, covered wagons, suburban houses, and animals, which collectively refer to America’s history of westward migration and the subsequent mythic fantasy of the American West, as well as broader themes of memory and the passage of time. The coyote portrayed in the present work connects with Ruscha's Oklahoma upbringing, a South Central United States locale he left at the age of nineteen to study at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) and his experiences traversing the open road of desert and prairie habits where coyotes are most commonly spotted while photographing his celebrated gas stations. As a canine known for its characteristics of independence and intelligence, the coyote can also be viewed as a surrogate for the trailblazing artist.
While Ed Rusha’s exploration of the creative possibilities achieved with a spray gun in his Silhouette series served as an extension of his ongoing exploration with innovative media and methods, ranging from caviar to gunpowder to chocolate, the paintings also serve as an evolution of his longstanding engagement with language and sound. As curator and professor Yves Alain Bois noted, in early works, such as Oof and Honk, Ruscha demonstrated a "predilection for monosyllabic, onomatopoeic words" that represent or mimic sounds (Yve-Alain Bois, "Intelligence Generator," in Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings Volume One: 1958-1970, New York 2003, p. 9).
Ed Ruscha’s Silhouette Series Paintings in Institutional Collections
As an evolution and extension from this point, by the mid-1980s, Ruscha found he could also imbue the silent medium of painting with sound without his former reliance on the interminging of text and image to convey an audible effect. In her essay on Ruscha’s wordless paintings for the 2009-2010 traveling exhibition, Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting, Alexandra Schwartz maintained that his paintings without text “present opportunities for formal and conceptual experimentation that his word pictures, which foreground verbal language so emphatically, preclude.” (Alexandra Schwartz, “A History Without Words,” Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery; Munich, Haus der Kunst and Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting, p. 29). In Yip Yip, Rusha evokes a textual narrative with sound implicitly present, both in the title and coyote's gesture, serving as an evolution of the artist’s longstanding exploration of the shape, sound and feeling of words.
"By stepping back from the direct depiction of language itself, Ruscha's Silhouette paintings have entered a territory that is perhaps more ambiguous, though no less semiotically loaded, than his previous work. It is Ruscha's unique achievement to have explored this difficult area with a remarkable combination of deadpan humor and aesthetic sublimity.”
Ed Rusha’s Silhouette series was embraced by the art world at the outset of its creation, serving as a testament to the artist’s perpetual reinvention that defines his artistic legacy. In 1987, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York selected two Silhouette paintings executed the year prior to include in their Biennial and in 1991, the Museum of Modern Art, New York acquired a similar animal painting from the series, an elephant titled Jumbo, for their permanent collection. In addition to early critical acclaim, the enduring importance of this body of work within the artist’s oeuvre is reinforced by the presence of examples from the series in the collections of The Broad, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, among many others.
