With Ed Ruscha / Now Then, the Museum of Modern Art presents a career-spanning retrospective of an American art institution. Offering more than 200 works in total, it is the most comprehensive retrospective of the major pop artist and conceptualist ever attempted.
One of the distinctive aspects about the Moma show is that it offers the ability to see Ruscha evolve over time. The lead curator, Christophe Cherix, said he wanted to be comprehensive enough to avoid the fragmentary feel that he believes other large Ruscha shows have had. “The idea of the exhibition was to really try to bring out the work in a different way,” he said. “To me, other exhibitions always felt very medium-specific, very fragmentary. And I felt that Ruscha was sometimes too locked into specific tendencies.”
As Cherix described, Now Then brings a much broader perspective than other museum shows on the artist, which allows audiences to take stock of how Ruscha’s work has developed across the passage of time. It reveals how the artist saw his work as a regular practice, the totality of the exhibit demonstrating how he kept evolving central forms and themes. “The work is really about changing time, changing society,” said Cherix. “This is a side of Ruscha that’s never been given the attention that we are giving it.”
Of course, likely the most central aspect of Ruscha’s work is Los Angeles and many of the signs of the modern American dream that are synonymous with it. With some of his most popular works depicting subjects like Santa Monica Boulevard, the Hollywood sign, backyard swimming pools, and gas stations, Ruscha has been very strongly associated with the iconography of the City of Angels.
The artist’s cheekiness and irrelevance also fit well within a southern Californian perspective. Early works in Now Then show Ruscha playing with dropping extra large versions of words like “OOF” and “HONK” on to canvases, and playfully experimenting with the forms of automobiles. The show also features four of Ruscha’s contributions to the 1962 Pasadena Art Museum show New Painting of Common Objects, often cited as the first group exhibition of American pop art. These early works have the feel of an artist trying on various ideas for size while wearing his surrealist heart on his sleeve, and they show the beginnings of the methodical, slowly incrementing style that would carry Ruscha through the decades.
Themes and obsessions begin to emerge around the time of the famed Standard Station and its similarities with Ruscha’s many iterations of the 20th Century Fox logo, as well as the release of the first of his many bizarre art books, Twentysix Gasoline Stations. The latter, inexplicably, showed nothing more than what the title promised. As Cherix suggested, literalist books like Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Every Building on the Sunset Strip may have been a way for Ruscha to undermine the traditional structures of art and do something where he could have a more direct, and more multiple, connection with his audience.
“Books started as a way for him to control the distribution of his art,” Cherix said. “They would bypass galleries or dealers or museums – books can exist in the world on their own, and very much outside the art world. They could get scattered around the world to people who might not be interested in the art world. That idea resonated very much for a generation of artists in the 60s and 70s, that you work can exist outside the boundaries of the gallery and directly address the people around you.”
Now Then also unites for the first time in decades two versions of Standard Station, as well as a photo of the gas station in Amarillo, Texas, that inspired the famed works. The juxtaposition of the two versions allows audiences to suss out the tweaks and changes that ended up establishing Standard Station as possibly his most iconic work. “We wanted to give a sense of what the working method was,” Cherix said. “I think any person who loves art is like, ‘What goes in an artist’s brain as he goes from one painting to the next?’”
Another major piece is Ruscha’s dadaist Chocolate Room, which offers a room that is tiled with sheets of paper printed with chocolate. Originally installed for the Venice Biennale in 1970, Ruscha’s first Chocolate Room quickly began melting, and it was besieged by hungry ants, not to mention more than a few audience members. Over time the work has transitioned from intangible ephemera to institutionalized concept, with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles acquiring the right to re-create the room, complete with Ruscha’s secret recipe for printable chocolate.
For Now Then, Moma had to build up an entire assembly line to bring the Chocolate Room back to life. For Cherix, the process was magical.
“What became so interesting to me was of course the result but also the process behind it,” he said. “You can’t ship it, it has to be made here, so we brought a printer into the exhibition space and turned it into a print shop for two weeks. It became this thing that really asked the institution to rethink things – the exhibition space became a place where something was happening, you’re producing something. That’ll really stay with me.”
Now Then is a massive show that is impressive in its comprehensiveness, offering a rare chance to trace out the evolution of one of America’s major 20th-century artists. It is also a show over which one should linger, in spite of the probable rush to get through everything. Many of Ruscha’s works will likely come off as confounding and impenetrable at first, only slowly revealing their charm and warmth. According to Cherix, it was important to strike a balance between explaining and letting the work speak for itself.
“We explain to people why we think a given work is important,” he said, “but we also want the work to exist for the pleasure it can deliver. Ed said he’s not so keen to have explanatory texts in the show, he wanted the work to be open to a range of interpretations and questions. We felt it important that the work exist on its own. I really look forward to seeing how the work will be perceived in the exhibition.”
And if it’s perceived as mute and imponderable? That’s all to the point, according to Cherix. Giving viewers an encounter with something that may not mean anything at all, or be a concept that is so overdetermined as to be impermeable, these are parts of art too – parts that Ruscha excels at like few others.
“He’s always interested by the rote power of things that have no meaning,” Cherix said. “How do you deal with it as a viewer, not having words for it, not being able to explain it? For me, that’s what’s fascinating. That’s where I think the work is so powerful.”
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Ed Ruscha / Now Then is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 13 January
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