"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."
Emerging from the canvas plane in shrouds of black and red, No Go by Ed Ruscha embodies the conceptual rigour and signature style that have come to define his highly acclaimed practice. Exploring the duality of text as a legible word and an image, Ruscha has remained fascinated with the material and connotative possibilities of words throughout his career. Executed in 2010, No Go illustrates his continued examination of semiotics and text, and their identity as “abstract shapes” that “live in a world of no size” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Ed Ruscha/ Now Then, 2023, p. 163). In the present example, the two words “No” and “Go” float in an indeterminate space, the soft haze of black and red creating a gentle drifting motion to opposite corners of the canvas, which evokes an elusive distance between the two words. At once alienating and yet familiar, the words become artistic devices in which the viewer is left to contemplate the act of reading and looking.
“To try to step back and explain it, that's almost like searching for bones in ice cream. Probably is not gonna happen. You just have to step back and look at things, not to think too much about what they mean."
Ruscha’s dramatic textual compositions can be traced 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. The colossal billboards of decontextualised words and the ubiquity of advertising became a source of inspiration for Ruscha, and the constant barrage of images projected onto the endless expanse of the American West formed a major influence on his visual vernacular that resulted in a career-long obsession with text and image.
Echoing Jasper Johns’s use of readymade images as supports for abstraction, Ruscha began to consider ways of employing graphics as a method of examining the duality of painting, both as an object and an illusion. Ruscha abandoned the academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism and instead looked to tropes of advertising and brought words as form, symbol, and material. In this vein, Ruscha’s works also resonate with late twentieth-century American Pop Art and the appropriation of commercial and popular culture seen in the works of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and his contemporary, Barbara Kruger.
While the use of text and graphics has remained at the forefront for Ruscha stylistically and conceptually, his practice has continued to evolve in distinctive and dynamic ways throughout his career, from the early references to American urbanscapes to the transition into the hyper-realistic depictions of the natural world. In the present work, the words “No” and “Go” are set adrift on an empty surface, the soft cloud of red and black creating spatial ambiguity on the canvas. The juxtaposition between the crisp, computerised fonts and the soft, airbrush-like dispersion of the red and black, the monosyllabic rhyme of the two words, and the space between them create relationships not only between their visual qualities but also their rhythmic qualities, resulting in a poetic interplay. The blankness of the background further heightens the focus on the formal qualities, such as colour, shape, texture, and composition of the letters themselves, to dramatise and emphasise the relationship between text and image.
As language, the words belong to a common culture that is public, private, institutional, and commercial. As images, they are isolated and relocated to a place apart where they acquire new form, estranged in their physical identity, elusive and pliable. No Go exemplifies this deliberate distance between text and image, revealing the profound and thought-provoking nature of Ruscha’s celebrated canvases.