Ed Ruscha (1937–)

Business, 1970

Pastel and gunpowder on paper

11½ x 29 inches

Acquisition Fund Purchase, Drawings USA 1971, 71.05.36

Essay by Siri Engberg
Walker Art Center    

            A major voice to emerge in American art in the early 1960s, Ed Ruscha was a pioneer in the development of a West Coast brand of pop art and an early practitioner of conceptual art.  Moving to Los Angeles from Oklahoma to pursue a career in commercial art, Ruscha enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute in 1956 to study graphic design, but soon felt the draw of the fine art world.  He first gained attention for paintings that contained single words, rendered in varying typefaces on neutral grounds and often referencing the worlds of commercial culture and cinema (such as “Boss” and “Annie”).  During this period he also made his first books, small volumes of deadpan black-and-white photographs depicting ordinary locations, buildings, or objects that were labeled with matter-of-fact text.  These are now considered groundbreaking works, not only in the history of contemporary artists’ books but also in the evolution of conceptual photography.

            By the mid-1960s, Ruscha began to incorporate drawing into his artistic vocabulary more regularly, working primarily in pastel.  He often also used gunpowder, a material he preferred to graphite—and perhaps one that also appealed to him as a maverick substance akin to the caviar, axle grease, and blueberries he sometimes used in paintings at that time.  His drawings of the late 1960s and early 1970s often featured single words—curious non-sequiturs culled from daily life, books, films, and sometimes dreams—hovering on shadowy or sumptuously-hued backgrounds.  Their placement front and center on the paper allowed him to embrace his abiding interest in typography and to invoke stylistic conventions such as logos, film titles, book covers, and other graphic emblems of contemporary life.  When asked in 1973 why he was attracted to particular words, Ruscha responded:  “Because I love the language.  Words have temperatures to me.  When they reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal to me.  ‘Synthetic’ is a very hot word … Usually I catch them before they get too hot.”[1]

             Business, a pastel and gunpowder drawing from 1970, is one of a group of works on paper in which Ruscha rendered his letterforms as if they had been fashioned in three dimensions from folded strips of paper.  Several years earlier, he had begun a series of paintings and prints featuring Los Angeles’s HOLLYWOOD sign, perhaps the most famous three-dimensional letters in the American vernacular.  In Business, the text takes on an additional free-associative element (as is always Ruscha’s intention), where the trompe l’oeil letters seem to have been unfurled from a spool of adding machine tape.  Here, floating on a background evoking a burnt-orange, Technicolor sunset, they cast dramatic shadows, as if illuminated by a photographer’s raking light.  Like much of Ruscha’s work from this period, the format of the drawing is aggressively horizontal, recalling both the proportions of a cinema screen and the notion of the landscape.  The somewhat aerial perspective also suggests a downward gaze onto a tabletop—a hungry customer at a diner making absent-minded constructions from drinking straw wrappers.

            The use of paper as imagery was perhaps influenced by Ruscha’s own bookmaking projects, such as his 1966 Every Building on the Sunset Strip—a photographic representation of this storied Los Angeles boulevard assembled as a fan of folded paper that could extend to twenty-six feet in length, then collapse into the book’s covers, accordion-style, to fit neatly on the shelf again at just over seven by five inches (fig. 1).

            It is significant to note that the folded paper imagery existed primarily in Ruscha’s drawings, and only appeared in his paintings on a few occasions.  While the artist created a paper maquette for his first experiment with drawing the “paper words” in this mode, the remainder of the works in the series were executed freehand.[2] Of this body of imagery, Ruscha once commented:  “All I was after was that store-front plane.  It’s like a Western town in a way.  A store-front plane of a Western town is just paper, and everything behind it is just nothing.[3]