Lot Essay
"My paintings do come out of an American sensibility, out of urban frustrations which are characteristic of where I live... . My work has no connection to Europe." (Edward Ruscha quoted in: Ex. Cat. Centre Cultural de la Fundacio Caixa de Pensions, A Conversation with Edward Ruscha, Barcelona 1990, pp. 36-8).
Edward Ruscha is the quintessential West Coast artist. Trained as an advertising sign painter, he was artistically equipped from an early age to reflect upon a society that the critic Robert Hughes has defined as "an Empire of Signs". Inspired early in his career by the work of the Dadaists and in particular that of Kurt Schwitters, Ruscha's world is an off-beat reflection of the society he lives in, in much the same way as David Lynch's films are a curious reflection of the perculiarities of the Americaness of American life. "Artists always want to do things that are forbidden," Ruscha said, "they want to be tough, they want to break the rules, they want to bring on this absurdity and when it is done right, it can be truly beautiful." (op.cit.)
Much of Ruscha's work is concerned with the enigmatic quality of words drawn intuitively or at random from everyday life. "There is no reality when it comes to a word," the artist has said, "and that is why I feel it's a real comfortable zone for me to work in... . I am not forced to register particular sizes." Instead, Ruscha works with proportion and, in particular, the horizontal line which he sees as a landscape or perhaps vice versa. "I am the victim of the horizontal line...and the landscape...which is almost one and the same to me. So I've eliminated a lot of unnecessary sky and unnecessary ground. I try to focus on where the sky meets the ground so that you have a stretched-out version, something panoramic...a panavision format...I find myself always coming back to this horizontal idea." (ibid).
So It Is The Amazing Earth is a particularly strong example of Ruscha's work from the 1980s in that not only is it a powerful representation of the horizontal sky motif that obsessed him at this time, but also it is one of the rare examples in his work where the artist deliberately plays with the words of the text to form a typically ambigious phrase that can be read in many ways. The correct title of the work could be "It Is So Amazing The Earth" or "Is It So Amazing The Earth" or a hundred and one other variations depending on how you read it and that is partly the point of his work; the sign, the word and the work of art are only given a functionality by the spectator, however, there can be beauty without meaning.
In this respect, So It Is The Amazing Earth is a particularly poignant work in that here the seeming randomness of the words appear to add up to a statement that like the atmosphere of the painted sky seems to suggest the inherent beauty of the imperceptibility of life. As the artist once remarked, "I've always had a deep respect for things that are odd, for things which cannot be explained. Explanations seem to me to sort of finish things off." (ibid.)
Edward Ruscha is the quintessential West Coast artist. Trained as an advertising sign painter, he was artistically equipped from an early age to reflect upon a society that the critic Robert Hughes has defined as "an Empire of Signs". Inspired early in his career by the work of the Dadaists and in particular that of Kurt Schwitters, Ruscha's world is an off-beat reflection of the society he lives in, in much the same way as David Lynch's films are a curious reflection of the perculiarities of the Americaness of American life. "Artists always want to do things that are forbidden," Ruscha said, "they want to be tough, they want to break the rules, they want to bring on this absurdity and when it is done right, it can be truly beautiful." (op.cit.)
Much of Ruscha's work is concerned with the enigmatic quality of words drawn intuitively or at random from everyday life. "There is no reality when it comes to a word," the artist has said, "and that is why I feel it's a real comfortable zone for me to work in... . I am not forced to register particular sizes." Instead, Ruscha works with proportion and, in particular, the horizontal line which he sees as a landscape or perhaps vice versa. "I am the victim of the horizontal line...and the landscape...which is almost one and the same to me. So I've eliminated a lot of unnecessary sky and unnecessary ground. I try to focus on where the sky meets the ground so that you have a stretched-out version, something panoramic...a panavision format...I find myself always coming back to this horizontal idea." (ibid).
So It Is The Amazing Earth is a particularly strong example of Ruscha's work from the 1980s in that not only is it a powerful representation of the horizontal sky motif that obsessed him at this time, but also it is one of the rare examples in his work where the artist deliberately plays with the words of the text to form a typically ambigious phrase that can be read in many ways. The correct title of the work could be "It Is So Amazing The Earth" or "Is It So Amazing The Earth" or a hundred and one other variations depending on how you read it and that is partly the point of his work; the sign, the word and the work of art are only given a functionality by the spectator, however, there can be beauty without meaning.
In this respect, So It Is The Amazing Earth is a particularly poignant work in that here the seeming randomness of the words appear to add up to a statement that like the atmosphere of the painted sky seems to suggest the inherent beauty of the imperceptibility of life. As the artist once remarked, "I've always had a deep respect for things that are odd, for things which cannot be explained. Explanations seem to me to sort of finish things off." (ibid.)