Joan E. Bauer: The Vernacular Landscape

Artists have to do things for themselves.
The audience is another thing…

—Ed Ruscha, painter, photographer, printmaker

~

Known for ‘dry sincerity’ & the coolest gaze
Ruscha traveled from Oklahoma to LA to study art.

At first, cartoons inspired him, then the Dadaism
& Surrealism he discovered in libraries.

In college, he worked on an underground newspaper
learning typography & design.

He tried abstract art, then a different path:
words & objects in the picture,

his ‘Boy Scout Utility Modern’ typeface
& the landscape of apartment buildings, gas stations,

aerial shots of parking lots, the iconic Hollywood sign,
Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966)

filmed from a tripod-mounted camera on a pickup.
Published as an accordion fold-out

it made him almost famous. For decades, a studio
on Electric in Venice, until the city wanted space

for a parking lot. So Ruscha moved to Culver City.
I love how he values words & waits until they grow

hot in his imagination, then OOF FLASH SPAM
Exploring LA with his laconic style,

Ruscha can create with anything:
chocolate blood egg yolk gunpowder

Honored a lot these days, he always shows up
wearing that same black bolo tie.

Copyright 2024 Joan E. Bauer

Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream and Chiron Review. She divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

“The single word, its guttural monosyllabic pronunciation, that’s what I was passionate about,” Ruscha has said of his early work. “Loud words, like slam, smash, honk.” The comic-book quality of these words reflects the Pop artists’ fascination with popular culture. Lettered in clear typography rather than handwriting, the words are definite and impersonal in shape; unlike the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and ’50s, Ruscha had no interest in letting a painting emerge through an introspective process: “I began to see that the only thing to do would be a preconceived image. It was an enormous freedom to be premeditated about my art.”

Like OOF, many of his paintings have “a certain comedic value,” Ruscha has said, and their humor is underlined by the paradox of their appearance in the silent medium of paint, with neither an image nor a sentence to help them evoke the sounds they denote. OOF is particularly paradoxical, as a word describing a wordless grunt. In Ruscha’s hands, its double Os also punned on recent American paintings—the Targets of Jasper Johns and the Circles of Kenneth Noland.

~

Excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019).