Ed Ruscha lights up LACMA with hotly anticipated retrospective NOW THEN

From 1965 to 1968, the American artist Ed Ruscha painted Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire. In the monumental canvas, flames and smoke burst from the concrete shell of the museum’s famous ‘floating campus’ designed by William Pereira. As in many of Ruscha’s mordant works, the artist renders an iconic cultural symbol in a searing graphic composition with hard edges that nevertheless permit the incursion of the surreal. Nearly 60 years later, the painting, on loan from Washington DC’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, will be exhibited at LACMA for the first time as part of ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, opening on 7 April.

‘This show features six decades of work. It’s really a culmination of everything that Ruscha has done,’ says Rebecca Morse, Curator in LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and one of the curators of the ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN. ‘We wanted to show the abundance of his life’s work.’

The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work to date, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN features more than 250 works. Highlighting the artist’s remarkable cross-media practice, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist books and one installation. The show debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to rave reviews last fall, marking the culmination of a 10-year collaboration between MoMA and LACMA with the artist. The LACMA leg of the retrospective, supported in part by Christie’s, is a homecoming for Ruscha, who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1956.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire is ‘positioned in the show so that it faces Wilshire Boulevard’ as the original complex did, Morse explains. The painting is just one example of the artist’s longstanding engagement with the urban and cultural environment of Los Angeles.

Morse notes the artist’s many exhibitions throughout the LA area over the course of his career, having shown at every major institution in the metro area, including LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum, the Getty Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Pasadena Art Museum — where in 1963 Ruscha participated in New Painting of Common Objects, widely considered the first museum survey of Pop art.

Ruscha’s particular connection with LACMA predates his incendiary portrait of the museum. In 1963, the institution became the first to acquire a work by the artist when it added Actual Size to its collection. In that 1962 painting, the massive letterforms of the Spam logo float above a view of the canned meat hurtling through a speckled ground like a rocket or a shooting star. It’s one of the most iconic of Ruscha’s early works that manipulate graphic design from popular culture. LACMA currently holds more than 500 works by Ruscha in its collection, including many works on paper by the prolific printmaker, who has ‘worked with every print shop in town’ says Morse.

Ruscha first came out West from his native Oklahoma to attend Chouinard Art Institute — then the leading art school in Los Angeles, now part of CalArts. According to Morse, Chouinard was one of the few art schools in the country to teach photography at that time. For Ruscha, the camera became an important tool in his practice across various media.

Considered by many to be the first contemporary artist book, Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) comprised matter-of-fact photographs of gas stations the artist documented on a trip from LA to Oklahoma. ‘Early on Ruscha used a medium-format camera,’ says Morse. ‘Looking through the viewfinder, the dimensional world becomes a flat plane. He used photography to translate the world into these flat images.’

One of the photos from Twentysix Gasoline Stations — that of a Standard station in Amarillo, Texas — became the basis for a series of paintings and prints showing the humble structure in dramatic hard-edged compositions. Visitors to NOW THEN will be treated to Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964), a well-known entry in the series where a ripped pulp Western magazine sits atop the expanse of sky. It’s one Ruscha’s signature trompe l’oeil effects, playing with the flatness of the picture plane.

Another of Ruscha’s famous photographic art books, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), found the artist strapping a 35mm camera to a pickup truck to document this 1.5-mile section of the city. The original 25-foot accordion-style book is spread out for viewers to explore in full in the exhibition.

After its publication, Ruscha continued to document Los Angeles storefronts from his truck for over 45 years in an ambitious project that long preceded Google Street View. This systematic method of image-making is something NOW THEN highlights throughout Ruscha’s oeuvre. According to Morse, the show tracks ‘how Ruscha takes iconic images — or images that he has made iconic — and changes them over time, using them in different media.’ The artist’s extensive archive of photographs of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard from 1965–2010 was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2012.

In its intermedial framing, the retrospective complicates the reading of Ruscha as a Pop artist, Minimalist or Conceptualist. Instead, what comes to the fore is his revolutionary approach to text and image. ‘The way that he works with type is so unusual,’ says Morse, ‘specifically, his interest in typography and signage, exploring the sculptural quality of type — making it big, making it small, making it dimensional — and also the sonic quality of words like OOF or BOSS or ACE that have this unique resonance.’

Finding poetry in the language and iconography of the everyday, from parking lots and gas stations to onomatopoeic exclamations, Ruscha has long tapped into the mimetic qualities of words and symbols — how they circulate and accrue meaning culturally and over time. ‘There’s a room in the exhibition filled with works on paper he’s made that contain phrases he has heard or read or imagined,’ Morse describes. ‘It’s like a really big, fast conversation.’ The show as whole could be described as a massive dialogue between present and past, now and then. ‘We’re so excited to see how audiences respond to it,’ she says.

Main image, clockwise from top left: Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire, 1965–1968, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; gift of Joseph Helman, 1972. © Ed Ruscha, photo credit: Paul Ruscha; Ed Ruscha, Actual Size, 1962, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, anonymous gift through the Contemporary Art Council. © Ed Ruscha, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA; Ed Ruscha, People Getting Ready to Do Things, 1974, Collection Edward Ruscha V. © Ed Ruscha, photo courtesy of the artist; Ed Ruscha, Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, Whitney Museum of American Art. © Ed Ruscha, photo credit: Paul Ruscha