Save
Save chapter to my Bookmarks
Cite
Cite this chapter
Print this chapter
Share
Share a link to this chapter
Free
Description: Art & Graphic Design: George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Part II
PublisherYale University Press
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
View chapters with similar subject tags
Part II: Ed Ruscha, Figure of Avoidance
In the very moment when my attention moves from the regular order of the written lines and follows the mobile complexity that no sentence can contain or exhaust, I feel close to understanding that from the other side of the words there is something trying to emerge from silence, to signify through language, as if it were knocking against a prison wall.
Italo Calvino, “The Written World and the Unwritten World,” trans. Margarethe Hagen
Ed Ruscha, now an international icon readily associated with Los Angeles, remains an evasive figure. The labels attached to him—“label” to be understood as well in the sense of a little tag bearing a designation—waver between “Pop Art” and “Conceptual Art,” even “Surrealism.” Of course, Ruscha could also be grouped together with “artists who do books,” as distinguished, in his pair of deadpan pastel drawings from 1976, from “artists who make ‘pieces.’” Ruscha’s books are at once ordinary and so very strange. From Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) to Colored People (1972), they constitute key elements in the early portion of the artist’s career and now seem destined for a second, spectral life.
One has only to glance at Ruscha’s body of work as a whole to discover that it extends far beyond painting or the artist’s book. Photographs, drawings, prints, and graphic design also have a place. All these forms are bound together and echo one another in the playfulness of an art that revels in sowing confusion. As I indicated in the introduction, my concern here is to understand Ruscha’s works through the prism of graphic design, within a transmedia perspective particularly attentive to the circumvention strategies the artist put in place in the 1960s and 1970s.
* * *
Part II: Ed Ruscha, Figure of Avoidance