Edward Ruscha

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Edwin Jans, Los Angeles
Anthony d'Offay, London
Private Collection, London

Painted in 1967, the year that Ed Ruscha's New York debut was staged at the Alexander Iolas Gallery, Jelly is one of the earliest examples of his now infamous series of 'Liquid Text' paintings, which the artist made between 1966 and 1969. Included in the Hirshhorn Museum's travelling retrospective of the artist's work in 2000, Jelly is a keystone in the development of Ruscha's oeuvre and emblematic of his seminal influence on the evolution of Pop Art. A pioneer in employing pre-packaged imagery and language drawn from the media, Ruscha was the youngest of the eight radical artists - including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein - selected by Walter Hopps for the landmark exhibition New Painting of Common Objects shown at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, often acknowledged as the birth of Pop Art. Yet as Jelly demonstrates, there is a degree of intellectual gamesmanship in Ruscha's appropriation of text that separates him from his Pop peers and has gone on to influence subsequent generations of text-based artists, among them Richard Prince and Christopher Wool.

Jelly is the first work in the standard 20 by 24inch format to render the text in trompe l'oeil effect as if written in fluid. Like a visual onomatopoeia, the word is spelt out across the canvas in a gelatinous liquid that holds its form only momentarily, soon to disperse. Rendered with exquisite illusionism, the viscous fluid seems to sit on the surface of the canvas. Ruscha shows painstaking attention to the membranous quality of the liquid, capturing the diffused highlights of white on black set against a warm stratosphere of softly gradated colour. Tiny drips add to the painterly illusionism, the whole thing seemingly quivering in an echo of the word's meaning. While in previous works the uniformly spaced text sits squarely and stoically in the centre of the canvas, in Jelly there is a sense of spontaneity or serendipity in the word's formation which is at odds with the painstaking process of painting.  

Defining the West Coast Pop sensibility, Ruscha was among the stable of the legendary Ferus Gallery, founded by Hopps and Edward Kienholz in the late 1950s and run by Irving Blum through the early 1960s, the gallery that staged Warhol's breakthrough show of Campbell's Soup Cans in 1962. In this explosive creative environment, Ruscha fashioned an independent voice and line of pictorial enquiry that revolved around text. This fascination for words derived both from formative personal experience and a knowledge of art history. Growing up in Oklahoma, Ruscha saw very little fine art in the flesh and was much more influenced by the immediacy of vernacular imagery: comic strips, typography, book design and vivid commercial advertising. When he first moved to LA in 1956, he worked as a sign painter and graphic designer, as well as hand-setting type and working the presses for art book publishers. While concomitantly studying at the Chouinard Art Institute, however, he encountered the work of Marcel Duchamp whose cool, anti-art stance provided the necessary foil to the prevalent Abstract Expressionist tendencies of contemporary art practice. On the one hand Ruscha's experiences as a commercial illustrator fostered an interest in the aesthetics of text, its manifold typologies and the formalism of letters as pure shapes worthy of artistic study, on the other hand the blueprint provided by Duchamp's word games stimulated an intellectual curiosity in found words - linguistic ready-mades - which continues in Ruscha's work to this day. Ruscha met Duchamp at his retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 and said of the older statesman of Dada: "[Duchamp] made me aware that there was another way to think about things. Finally, the ultimate mystery about his work is its value." (the artist cited in Elizabeth Armstrong, 'Interview with Ed Ruscha' in October 70, Fall 1994, p. 55).

Isolating his textual ready-mades against an empty horizon line, Ruscha exposes the strangeness of the word and forces a semantic re-examination of its meaning. It is this spirit of Duchampian intellectual inquiry which is the hallmark of his best work and which distinguishes him from the pop tendencies of his peers. This inquiry is nonetheless embedded in his vernacular culture. The motif of words floating in emptiness is grounded in his personal experience, recalling the road journey west from his home town to LA along Route 66, a trip Ruscha later made frequently in both directions to visit his family. Along that road, the endlessly flat, featureless horizon line, so beautifully evoked in the rusty hues of the present work, is only occasionally punctuated by the huge billboards which start as specs on the horizon and gradually get bigger until they slide past the window, contemporary signposts of modern America set against the limitless sky and setting sun of the mythical landscape of the Wild West. Engendering the liberal highway counter-society epitomised by Jack Kerouac's narrator in On the Road, Ruscha's iconography taps into a West Coast sensibility endemic to his immediate environment.