Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Chronicler of Tinseltown Edward Ruscha, a leading Southern California artist, has his own non-glitzy view of La-La Land and encourages viewers of his works to exercise their own perspectives as well.
By MARY ANN MARGER
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 29, 2000
TAMPA -- L.A. is a phenomenon and Ed Ruscha is its chronicler. We perceive it as the glitzy capital of the movie industry, home of skinny girls, strong guys, youth, glamor and ambition. Ruscha pierces the hype to behold the mundane: the worn out, the rundown, the in need of a coat of paint.
He has shot dozens of photos of ordinary gas stations; many of them are on view. And he has immortalized them in Standard Station, where a dramatic diagonal nearly bisects the work from corner to corner like a beacon streaking a new movie into the night sky.
Only the word "standard," not Standard Oil, appears on the art, above pristine pumps and pure white walls. The word thus rises beyond modifier status to become a stand-alone noun proclaiming, in glorified fashion, a statement about America's passion for cars.
The show, now at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, is a retrospective of Ruscha's editions, 1959-99. It opened at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1999 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last summer.
Southern California has increasingly challenged New York's dominance of America's (and the world's) art mainstream. Ruscha is an essential part of that trend. His works have appeared in area shows at the Tampa Museum of Art, at the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center and in a show of California art at the Museum of Fine Arts. His piece at the St. Petersburg show was a single word with a double meaning: Currency. It fit the California attitude.
But that was oil on canvas; this show is of his prints, photographs and books. Ruscha, a leading experimenter in printmaking, has worked at top print workshops throughout the country where artists are able to collaborate with master printers to create multiple editions. In 1970 he came to Graphicstudio at USF and collaborated with master printer and artist Theo Wujcik, currently exhibiting in a retrospective at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo.
Ruscha (pronounced rew-shay) is a product of the west, born in Oklahoma in 1937 and living in Los Angeles since 1956 when he arrived to study commercial art.
The show runs chronologically, beginning with the large gallery (temporarily subdivided into three rooms) to the left of the lobby entry.
Ruscha began early to use words for their power as both symbols and images. He is not the first to see them as visual art; Japanese calligraphers have incorporated them for centuries. Nor is he the last; Barbara Kruger (posters) and Jenny Holzer (electronic LED signs) convey, through fine art, phrases normally reserved for advertising.
1984 was created in 1967, back when the numbers referred to George Orwell's futuristic novel of Big Brother's takeover of our lives. The letters are done in computer font.
In the same decade he made words that looked as though they had materialized from liquid dropped on paper, actually a trompe l'oeil effect on the principle that oil and water don't mix.
Insects -- flies, ants and beetles, all hand-drawn -- crawl neatly if randomly across several works. On the largest (40 by 60 inches) he drew 5,693 flies against two barely visible words: "I'M AMAZED."
A single word can intrigue him for years. One of his best known images is Hollywood, repeated in endless variations, dealing not with reality (the actual letters set in the Hollywood Hills are on uneven ground) but with our perception of reality, on the ridge, flaring out toward us. In one version he uses two screens, the top coated with Pepto-Bismol and the bottom with caviar.
USF CAM adopts a practice that exhibits elsewhere have used to enable in-depth study of a show -- partitioning space midway through to serve as a "reading room." But here, the books function as works on view. The artist's book is a category of art. Ruscha's books are an essential part of his oeuvre, and several significant books were created at Graphicstudio (Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Various Small Fires and Some Los Angeles Apartments).
Ruscha's books are of photographs, recalling the style of Walker Evans' candids of everyday life. But while Evans took his photos while walking or riding subways, Ruscha shot his from a car. An accordion-folded book titled Every Building on the Sunset Strip is a shutter-finger exercise.
Sweets, Meats, Sheets is from the "Tropical Fish" screenprint series, 1976, which marks the first time he incorporated actual photographs in his prints. Beyond the challenge of experimentation, it shows his fascination with rhyming words. Close scrutiny reveals that the packaged sheets are California king size; it is hardly coincidental.
In the 1980s, Ruscha moved from sharp, realistic portrayal to softer visual expression, never losing the image or the impulse to innovate. To produce Dog (1995), he gathered grasses and pressed them into wax to create a three-dimensional image that was then transferred to copper plate.
The Ruscha show is just one of the many gems that USF CAM museum director Margaret Miller has been bringing to bay area viewers who are exhilarated by what's happening in art right now. Coming up Feb. 19 through March 17 is William Wegman, who made Weimaraners famous (or is it the other way around?)
Recently, on one of her many scouting trips to New York, Miller mentioned the museum's exhibits to one of those Gothamites who thinks culture ends at the Hudson River. He asked, "You do all those extraordinary shows down there? Why?"
Miller replied, "Why not?"
Art review: "Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999" is at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (USF CAM), 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, through Dec. 23. Admission is free; parking is $2. Call (813) 974-4133; Web site http://www.usfcam.usf.edu.