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Lot Essay
"You know, its just cotton puffs, Q-Tips, smoke and mirrors." - Ed Ruscha
A gracefully unfurling ribbon of paper meanders around the greater part of the sheet, its contours conveyed via the careful contrast of the porcelain white of the rag paper and the faintly undulating textured grisaille coating the sheet’s background. This ribbon slowly coalesces into an S-shape, formulating the first letter of the delicately articulated word Skytown, the title of Ed Ruscha’s masterpiece gunpowder drawing from his first series experimenting with this new medium in 1967.
While the S ribbon is presented to the viewer at a yielding perspective, the rest of the word inhabits the converse perspective, appearing perpendicular to the leftward ribbon in two rightly wound bundles mimicking cursive script: “ky” and “town.” Juxtaposing the planar relationship between these two forms, Ruscha postulates the ironic relationship between the seemingly three-dimensional spatiality of the word against the immutable flat and abstract field which his gunpowder pigmentation forms upon the paper.
Ruscha’s oeuvre constantly challenges the Abstract Expressionists, with the artist stating that “they wanted to collapse the whole art process into one act; I wanted to break it into stages” (op. cit., p. 7). Skytown elegantly expresses these stages which Ruscha imbues into his work: once the viewer discerns the presence and power of the word depicted, they are then wowed by the draughtsman’s illusionistic powers and compelled to study his technique. Upon close examination, the viewer then realizes the rich materiality of the work and then begins to consider Ruscha’s presentation of his motif—the stylized, carefully considered arrangement of the constituent letters in Skytown formed from sinuous ribbon. The viewer then ponders the work’s potential meaning, leading to the concluding stage—appreciation. As identified by art historian Lisa Turvey, the work’s metaphysical meaning follows similar staging: Skytown is a work of paper on paper, a two dimensional depiction made to look three dimensional—illusionistic images of items (paper ribbons forming words) that appear ordinary and lifelike yet bear no external referent.
The stages in which Ruscha envisioned Skytown’s reception and comprehension form an analogue to the artist’s working process with this work. Ruscha does not recall how he first came to his ribbon-script words, saying “I was trying to get away from established typefaces, that’s all I remember” (M. Rowell, op. cit., p. 17). Inspired by his experimentations with photography, wherein he could realize from the lens a completely flat subject, Ruscha first created a maquette of paper tapes pinned together to form his first ribbon word. Understanding from this first model the precise perspectival contours demanded by this subject, Ruscha required no further drafting or modeling for the rest of his gunpowder drawings. To make Skytown, Ruscha cut an adhesive stencil forming the ribbon shapes with an X-Acto blade then applied the stencil onto rag paper, masking the borders with tape. He then fastidiously added layer after layer of gunpowder, forcing pigment into minute cavities in the paper grain using cotton swabs, small rags, cotton balls, sponges, and wet wipes, building up gradations in tone like an old master glazing using oil paint. Ruscha embeds the rag paper so thoroughly with his gunpowder medium that it penetrates through the work to create a mirrored composition on the verso. The final result is a work so polished that it is nearly impossible to determine how Ruscha made the drawing.
Ruscha invented this entirely new medium and way of production for this series. He sourced his gunpowder from the Pachmayer Gun Works in downtown Los Angeles to allow for a consistency across the series. The varying density of gunpowder on the sheet creates a velvety enduring depth, almost impossible to achieve with a work on paper. With his gunpowder series, Ruscha productively laid waste to the entire genre of drawing, altering the received history of draftsmanship and the previous emphasis on disegno, the overt display of the artist’s hand. Ruscha’s Gunpowder series holds huge art historical importance through their radical challenge in what signifies a finished drawing, the fullest revelation in the artform since Michelangelo’s highly polished presentation drawings first introduced drawing as a fully-realized art in the sixteenth century. The Gunpowder series is the only one Ruscha fully realized on paper without making any painted versions, indicating the artist’s satisfaction with the works’ artistic power on paper.
Ruscha’s word drawings function like Duchamp’s ready-mades, rescuing diction from an endless stream of information and removing them from a literary to a purely visual context. Randomly choosing words not meant to convey anything of a deeply personal nature, Ruscha says that “it is important to think that the drawing should not reflect the meaning of the words” (quoted in Ed Ruscha the Drawn Word, Windsor Press, 2003, vi). Ruscha chooses words with a poet’s precision, divorcing them from their literal, metaphorical, or figurative meanings in order to suggest other possibilities disconnected from pure denotation. While Ruscha called Oklahoma City, where he spent his adolescence, “skytown” in reference to the city’s flatness, Skytown is unrelated to this specific context, and the work’s emphasis lies on how the word is made into a object.
Skytown is one of the most important examples to come out of this crucially important Gunpowder series. One of sixty-seven works which Ruscha made when he first discovered his gunpowder medium in 1967, Skytown is one of only a few examples where the first letter is capitalized, and is the most prominent example, with the S occupying more than half of the composition. Skytown’s dimensions are even more rare and important: it is only one of two works where Ruscha experiments with the elongated horizontal format, where the height of the paper is around forty percent of the width. Achieving by slicing a standard 23 x 29 inch sheet in half, Ruscha began to favor this format in the next year. By the early 1970s, the artist was almost entirely working in this scale, notably for the famous Hollywood series. Exceptional among all other Gunpowder works, Ruscha places Skytown’s lettering in two contrasting perpendicular perspectives, furthering his intended emphasis on flat space. Skytown represents one of the rarest example, and remains the most influential work on Ruscha’s later oeuvre.
A gracefully unfurling ribbon of paper meanders around the greater part of the sheet, its contours conveyed via the careful contrast of the porcelain white of the rag paper and the faintly undulating textured grisaille coating the sheet’s background. This ribbon slowly coalesces into an S-shape, formulating the first letter of the delicately articulated word Skytown, the title of Ed Ruscha’s masterpiece gunpowder drawing from his first series experimenting with this new medium in 1967.
While the S ribbon is presented to the viewer at a yielding perspective, the rest of the word inhabits the converse perspective, appearing perpendicular to the leftward ribbon in two rightly wound bundles mimicking cursive script: “ky” and “town.” Juxtaposing the planar relationship between these two forms, Ruscha postulates the ironic relationship between the seemingly three-dimensional spatiality of the word against the immutable flat and abstract field which his gunpowder pigmentation forms upon the paper.
Ruscha’s oeuvre constantly challenges the Abstract Expressionists, with the artist stating that “they wanted to collapse the whole art process into one act; I wanted to break it into stages” (op. cit., p. 7). Skytown elegantly expresses these stages which Ruscha imbues into his work: once the viewer discerns the presence and power of the word depicted, they are then wowed by the draughtsman’s illusionistic powers and compelled to study his technique. Upon close examination, the viewer then realizes the rich materiality of the work and then begins to consider Ruscha’s presentation of his motif—the stylized, carefully considered arrangement of the constituent letters in Skytown formed from sinuous ribbon. The viewer then ponders the work’s potential meaning, leading to the concluding stage—appreciation. As identified by art historian Lisa Turvey, the work’s metaphysical meaning follows similar staging: Skytown is a work of paper on paper, a two dimensional depiction made to look three dimensional—illusionistic images of items (paper ribbons forming words) that appear ordinary and lifelike yet bear no external referent.
The stages in which Ruscha envisioned Skytown’s reception and comprehension form an analogue to the artist’s working process with this work. Ruscha does not recall how he first came to his ribbon-script words, saying “I was trying to get away from established typefaces, that’s all I remember” (M. Rowell, op. cit., p. 17). Inspired by his experimentations with photography, wherein he could realize from the lens a completely flat subject, Ruscha first created a maquette of paper tapes pinned together to form his first ribbon word. Understanding from this first model the precise perspectival contours demanded by this subject, Ruscha required no further drafting or modeling for the rest of his gunpowder drawings. To make Skytown, Ruscha cut an adhesive stencil forming the ribbon shapes with an X-Acto blade then applied the stencil onto rag paper, masking the borders with tape. He then fastidiously added layer after layer of gunpowder, forcing pigment into minute cavities in the paper grain using cotton swabs, small rags, cotton balls, sponges, and wet wipes, building up gradations in tone like an old master glazing using oil paint. Ruscha embeds the rag paper so thoroughly with his gunpowder medium that it penetrates through the work to create a mirrored composition on the verso. The final result is a work so polished that it is nearly impossible to determine how Ruscha made the drawing.
Ruscha invented this entirely new medium and way of production for this series. He sourced his gunpowder from the Pachmayer Gun Works in downtown Los Angeles to allow for a consistency across the series. The varying density of gunpowder on the sheet creates a velvety enduring depth, almost impossible to achieve with a work on paper. With his gunpowder series, Ruscha productively laid waste to the entire genre of drawing, altering the received history of draftsmanship and the previous emphasis on disegno, the overt display of the artist’s hand. Ruscha’s Gunpowder series holds huge art historical importance through their radical challenge in what signifies a finished drawing, the fullest revelation in the artform since Michelangelo’s highly polished presentation drawings first introduced drawing as a fully-realized art in the sixteenth century. The Gunpowder series is the only one Ruscha fully realized on paper without making any painted versions, indicating the artist’s satisfaction with the works’ artistic power on paper.
Ruscha’s word drawings function like Duchamp’s ready-mades, rescuing diction from an endless stream of information and removing them from a literary to a purely visual context. Randomly choosing words not meant to convey anything of a deeply personal nature, Ruscha says that “it is important to think that the drawing should not reflect the meaning of the words” (quoted in Ed Ruscha the Drawn Word, Windsor Press, 2003, vi). Ruscha chooses words with a poet’s precision, divorcing them from their literal, metaphorical, or figurative meanings in order to suggest other possibilities disconnected from pure denotation. While Ruscha called Oklahoma City, where he spent his adolescence, “skytown” in reference to the city’s flatness, Skytown is unrelated to this specific context, and the work’s emphasis lies on how the word is made into a object.
Skytown is one of the most important examples to come out of this crucially important Gunpowder series. One of sixty-seven works which Ruscha made when he first discovered his gunpowder medium in 1967, Skytown is one of only a few examples where the first letter is capitalized, and is the most prominent example, with the S occupying more than half of the composition. Skytown’s dimensions are even more rare and important: it is only one of two works where Ruscha experiments with the elongated horizontal format, where the height of the paper is around forty percent of the width. Achieving by slicing a standard 23 x 29 inch sheet in half, Ruscha began to favor this format in the next year. By the early 1970s, the artist was almost entirely working in this scale, notably for the famous Hollywood series. Exceptional among all other Gunpowder works, Ruscha places Skytown’s lettering in two contrasting perpendicular perspectives, furthering his intended emphasis on flat space. Skytown represents one of the rarest example, and remains the most influential work on Ruscha’s later oeuvre.