Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words

ED RUSCHA [V.O.]: I’m gonna play this tune called ‘Goodnight My Love’ and this represents everything that I felt about California when I first came out here…

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Ed Ruscha’s been making work in Los Angeles for the better part of a century.

People often talk about Ed’s work — his paintings, his books, photos or films as being ‘about’ Los Angeles, California, or The West. When they talk about Ed, they describe him as ‘cool’… And yes, he’s cool and yeah, the places he paints or photographs are usually in Los Angeles. He’s lived her for over 60 years after all.

I’m not going to try to explain Ed’s work — we’ve only got a few minutes here but I am gonna show you as much as I can and there’s a lot, so buckle up.

REYNER BANHAM: Ed? What should people see?

ED RUSCHA: Maybe… Gas stations maybe. They're streamlined… Everything about it is streamlined, that's what I like.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: In the early sixties, Ed was making
the thousand-mile drive from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City a lot.

ED RUSCHA: The thing I really noticed were gasoline stations.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: So he took photos of them, and published 26 of them in a little book.

IRVING BLUM: Ed said to me at the time, "it's a diary"…

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: …sold the books at three bucks a pop.

IRVING BLUM: …and I went home and thought about that.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: When he ran out, he printed more.

KIM GORDON: It was kind of a punk move.

JIM GANZER: It looked like anybody could've done that if they had their eyes open.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: One photo in particular stuck with Ed:
a Standard station outside Amarillo, Texas.

He borrowed a composition from the movies. When the Lumière brothers first show this in 1896, audiences jumped out of their seats.

Standard Station's an image Ed revisited many times: Here it is on fire in 1966, burning in '68, with a 10-cent western being torn in half, an olive — an olive?

ED BEGLEY, Jr.: Does that mean 'olive oil'? Whatever the joke is, I love it.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Here's what the buliding looks like today. It's called K&T Automotive Transmission.

He used this format on a few paintings from that time. Here's Norms Diner, also on fire. They tried to tear the building down last year.

ED RUSCHA: You know, architects are into it for it what they can do with a space. I'm into it for something else… I'm still trying to understand what that is

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Apartment buildings caught Ed's attention next.

ED RUSCHA: There weren't that many in Oklahoma at
the time.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: He started photographing them

JIM GANZER: Gee, look at these apartment buildings are just totally square.

KIM GORDON: The buildings have a name…

JIM GANZER: …like it was a car.

KIM GORDON: and then the name is in a font.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: He made another book, then started drawing some of these pictures.

ED RUSCHA: It was like a nervous compulsion

KIM GORDON: I remember growing up thinking how tacky they were, and now they look actually sort of quaint.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: He used a motorized camera to shoot a long picture of the Sunset Strip.

Two and a half miles became a book that folded out for 27 feet.

25 years later, Ed was still painting buildings. He called these five black and white ones his 'Blue Collar' series. 10 years after that, when when Ed was invited to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, he updated those five with five new color ones.

ED MOSES: He looks at them directly, without any beauty or mystery. Although, the paintings are great to look at.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Yeah, they are great to look at.

Maybe we should have started with the word paintings. Let's try that… Word paintings. Ed Ruscha. Go.

BILLY AL BENGSTON: He's more interested in words than he is in architecture.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: You know, it's where Ed started after all: one word knockouts, straight out of school.

IRVING BLUM: Prior to Ruscha, how many of you took the opportunity to consider the word 'Oof'?

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Something about these felt inspired by his childhood love of comics.

These early paintings got Ed his first big break: Walter Hopps included 3 of them in his breakthrough exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, and Ed was the youngest artist included. He also made the poster.

In the next few years, he started tweaking his text

LARRY GAGOSIAN: …claiming it, making it his word.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Pulling it apart, first literally, then in his kerning.

By the late '60s, Ed was making it look like as text was made of maple syrup, jelly, beans, water.

LARRY BELL: He had an enormous amount of skill for a young guy in terms of handling paint.

LARRY GAGOSIAN: …and also, it's funny

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: In the early '70s, Ed started painting with actual foods: chocolate, cilantro, catchup, caviar, hot sauce.

LARRY BELL: Anything that he could use to leave his mark.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Here's Ed with some chewing tobacco.

ED RUSCHA: So, I just picked tobacco just because of the marks it makes.

ED MOSES [V.O.]: How can you get romantic about prune juice? You can taste it, and see it or see the stains… He likes the stains. Who would've ever done something like that? Ed Ruscha — that's what he do.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: He started making drawings using gunpowder a few years prior, and made these prints out a squid ink, daffodils, and axle grease and '69.

JOE GOODE: How's the word 'jelly' look with jelly? Try putting that your hat before you've seen somebody else do it.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: A few years later he made a movie about a car mechanic that goes from grease-covered to pristine

JIM GANZER: The movie that I was in is about a mechanic who forgets that he made a date with a girl. He starts out in a small dirty little garage, ends up in a great big clean garage.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Words were all spoken in this one, save for this great-looking title.

JIM GANZER: I mean, sometimes when you finish a painting you feel clean.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: By the late '70s, he'd worked clouds into the background and in '82, he standardized his type with a font he calls 'Boy Scout Utility Modern'.

ED RUSCHA: It looked like it was done by a lineman for the telephone company and he's asked to make the poster
for the annual picnic.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: In the '80s, the phrases got longer… You could kinda make sense of little stories here and there.

ED BEGLEY, Jr.: You right away, when you hear a phrase like that, you want to know, "Who is she and why did they call her 'Styrene'?"

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: '85 brought about the first of these city lights and the first appearance of censor strips — kind of like redacted government documents.

In 1997, he started painting these majestic mountains.

As much as I like Ed's words, and he's got a few, he's just as good without them: 1997, Picture Without Words. He'd been making sketches of it for over 25 years, you can kind of look at it forever.

LARRY GAGOSIAN: It's a godlike painting.

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: So what's the secret? What makes Ed Ruscha keep painting every day over 50 years later?

ED MOSES: I think he came from a different place. He had a different source, the direct source of reality. Like a person from another planet would come in here and see this stuff directly.

That's it—

OWEN WILSON [V.O.]: Ed Ruscha — amen