Ed Ruscha and the Language That He Used

Abstract

The first images seen by visitors to the Whitney Museum of American Art's recent exhibition Ed Ruscha and Photography were a set of six photographs taken in 1961 and shown for the first time in 2003.1 Each Product Still Life features a single consumer item-Oxydol bleach, Sherwin-Williams turpentine, Wax Seal car polish-on what appears to be a shelf, shot frontally in black and white against a solid backdrop. As exhibited, these works foretold the photographic practice treated in the rest of the small show: Ruscha went on to use such artless viewpoints to picture vernacular subjects, stripped of affect, in artist's books such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965). The books are rightly regarded as beachheads in the genealogy of Conceptual art, but a pair of the single-object photographs evoke instead Ruscha's first allegiance, to Pop.2 (A charter membership in two movements that are in many ways anathema only begins to suggest his art-historical elusiveness.) For two of Ruscha's early photographic subjects, a box of Sun Maid Raisins and a tin of Spam, reappear in paintings executed in tandem with or shortly after the photos, Box Smashed Flat (1960-61) and Actual Size (1962), paintings that established the reputation of Ed-werd Rew-shay, Young Artist as an avatar of West Coast Pop.3 The assessment was sensible enough: with their sign-like vibrance, depiction of mass-produced commercial items, and allusion to the strategies of advertising (picturing a product in its actual size), the paintings feature several of the markers