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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Edward Ruscha Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, vol. 3, edited by Robert Dean and Erin Wright, pp. 172-73, no. P1986.03 (illustrated).
"Words have these abstract shapes, they live in a world of no size. You can make them any size. You can make them any size, and what's the real size? Nobody knows."
E. Ruscha cited in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2005, p. 106
For the past four decades Ed Ruscha has made words the focus of his work, concentrating on the intersection between the literal and the pictorial. By painting and drawing words in a variety of mediums, he combines two types of signs--the arbitrary verbal and the descriptive visual--to expand our understanding about the nature and limits of communication. Stating "it is difficult to unravel art from language", he merges the two, resulting in works that are not easily decoded, either as linguistic signifiers or as aesthetic images. Dynamo captures the essence of Ruscha's practice: rendered in monumental scale, D-y-n-a-m-o acquires a visual appearance that aligns with its verbal import. As a word, it no longer remains in the conceptual realm of language but transitions into the decorative the realm of painting.
Dynamo's bold typography is set against a stylized Californian topography this work reveals the heart of Ruscha's inspiration. Emblazoned across an expansive blue sky with its letters decreasing in size from left to right, Dynamo is apprehended in the painting in the same manner that a billboard would be apprehended from the "window of a moving car". In fact, Dynamo yields the tangible evocation of speeding past a gigantic billboard with the wind in one's hair. It brims with the sense of liberation and youthful promise associated with the quintessential American road trip that is at once vitally present but stretches back in time to the sixties and even further to the epic nineteenth-century Westward migrations. Indeed, in as much as Dynamo encapsulates the journey of every pioneer in search of himself or his fortune, it is a painting that is rife with overtones of Manifest Destiny.
The relationship of Ruscha's oeuvre with nineteenth-century rhetoric and the kind of art that it materialized is evident in the orientation, scale and figure-ground tensions of Dynamo. As rooted as it is in the sources and formal language of contemporaneous advertising, Dynamo is very much a modern take on landscape painting of the American West. For instance, the work's horizontality-- a necessary outcome of words in general but particularly emphasized in the wide spaces between D-y-n-a-m-o--reinforces the horizontal nature of landscape painting while its monumental scale references the particular nineteenth-century American incarnation of this genre. This renders Dynamo the inherent contradiction of being simultaneously read with the graphic flatness of language and the illusionistic depth of landscape. As Kerry Brougher notes, "Ruscha's words hover between the flat, transversal surfaces of the graphic artist and the longitudinal, deep-space world of landscape painting" (K. Brougher, exh. cat., Ed Ruscha, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 161). It is an inherent contradiction that Ruscha brings to his oeuvre by presenting words as both linguistic signifiers and aesthetic images.
Occupying both these realms, Dynamo seems to engender a new system of communication in which the visual appearance of words enhance their verbal import. Isolated and enlarged against an endless backdrop with long-standing associations of grandness and possibility, Dynamo forces renewed contemplation of its meaning.
"Words have these abstract shapes, they live in a world of no size. You can make them any size. You can make them any size, and what's the real size? Nobody knows."
E. Ruscha cited in R. D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York, 2005, p. 106
For the past four decades Ed Ruscha has made words the focus of his work, concentrating on the intersection between the literal and the pictorial. By painting and drawing words in a variety of mediums, he combines two types of signs--the arbitrary verbal and the descriptive visual--to expand our understanding about the nature and limits of communication. Stating "it is difficult to unravel art from language", he merges the two, resulting in works that are not easily decoded, either as linguistic signifiers or as aesthetic images. Dynamo captures the essence of Ruscha's practice: rendered in monumental scale, D-y-n-a-m-o acquires a visual appearance that aligns with its verbal import. As a word, it no longer remains in the conceptual realm of language but transitions into the decorative the realm of painting.
Dynamo's bold typography is set against a stylized Californian topography this work reveals the heart of Ruscha's inspiration. Emblazoned across an expansive blue sky with its letters decreasing in size from left to right, Dynamo is apprehended in the painting in the same manner that a billboard would be apprehended from the "window of a moving car". In fact, Dynamo yields the tangible evocation of speeding past a gigantic billboard with the wind in one's hair. It brims with the sense of liberation and youthful promise associated with the quintessential American road trip that is at once vitally present but stretches back in time to the sixties and even further to the epic nineteenth-century Westward migrations. Indeed, in as much as Dynamo encapsulates the journey of every pioneer in search of himself or his fortune, it is a painting that is rife with overtones of Manifest Destiny.
The relationship of Ruscha's oeuvre with nineteenth-century rhetoric and the kind of art that it materialized is evident in the orientation, scale and figure-ground tensions of Dynamo. As rooted as it is in the sources and formal language of contemporaneous advertising, Dynamo is very much a modern take on landscape painting of the American West. For instance, the work's horizontality-- a necessary outcome of words in general but particularly emphasized in the wide spaces between D-y-n-a-m-o--reinforces the horizontal nature of landscape painting while its monumental scale references the particular nineteenth-century American incarnation of this genre. This renders Dynamo the inherent contradiction of being simultaneously read with the graphic flatness of language and the illusionistic depth of landscape. As Kerry Brougher notes, "Ruscha's words hover between the flat, transversal surfaces of the graphic artist and the longitudinal, deep-space world of landscape painting" (K. Brougher, exh. cat., Ed Ruscha, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 161). It is an inherent contradiction that Ruscha brings to his oeuvre by presenting words as both linguistic signifiers and aesthetic images.
Occupying both these realms, Dynamo seems to engender a new system of communication in which the visual appearance of words enhance their verbal import. Isolated and enlarged against an endless backdrop with long-standing associations of grandness and possibility, Dynamo forces renewed contemplation of its meaning.