This is a 1998 interview with Edward Ruscha.

Edward Ruscha

Edward Ruscha first came to prominence in the 1960s on the West Coast of the USA with highly distincive work such as Twenty-six Gasoline Stations. He is one of the first and most important of the Pop artists. His photographs, paintings and books remain highly influential.

Interview

Although you are often associated with Pop Art, your influence is much wider. Do you see yourself as belonging to a particular movement?

I guess I’m part of the Pop Art movement. There’s no denying that I use imagery from popular culture. Even if I didn’t like pop art, I’d still have to admit that I maybe am or was a pop artist.

An example would be Standard Station. The image came from my travels between the state where I came from, Oklahoma, and California. I had taken photographs of gasoline stations along the way that subsequently I made into a book. There was one particular gas station that I was riveted to – one from Amarillo, Texas – and so I began a sort of three-dimensional, architectural study of it. From this I invented a form of painting for myself where I divided a canvas from the lower right corner to the upper left-hand corner. I went on to paint five or six things like this, relating to this type of imagery. I called these my ‘summer paintings’ because I did the first in the summer and then in the next summer I did another, and so on.

You mention your books. These collections of photographs on one simple theme – gasoline stations, parking lots, palm trees – have been described as ‘examples of the finest and most sophisticated book design’. Do you still do them?

Well, I’ve got some books which I think I want to make but I just haven’t got round to it. I really haven’t made a book in maybe fifteen years. But I had a run where I was doing about one a year and I was always considering the fact that the books had a relation to one another and that I was adding to the collection. Occasionally, one would be a little smaller or bigger than the next but it was part of my routine, I guess.

My first edition was of four hundred books. I wanted them to get out to the public, but not a vast public because it’s not that kind of statement. After that I printed, I think, two more editions of the gas station book – three or four thousand copies. But I was definitely engaged in a small-scale production. There were outlets for them – in New York, in Los Angeles, and a couple of places in Europe. The books were just placed in these book stores and they would sell very slowly but that was fine with me. I felt that the books were a pure form of my art. I liked them because I was making art out of something that was really non-art and that appealed to me.

When did you begin to develop your interest in typography?

When I was a student and I studied advertising and sign painting. At that time I thought I wanted to be a sign painter. Then I began to understand typography. I worked for a printer – I had a job as a ‘printer’s devil’ where I learned how to set lead type. It was like a new world for me, discovering some new toy. Words have this linear, horizontal aspect to them and I responded to that, and also in my painting because I had this compulsion to paint in the manner of landscape – something that goes left to right and is horizontal; words are certainly that way and so are my paint strokes.

Many of your works consist of simple words and phrases. How are these chosen?

In Barns and Farms I was placing myself in a commentator’s position where I wanted to make a picture that involved words that suggest, or kick-off, something in the viewer. Barns and Farms is such an awkward combination of words that it appealed to me for that reason.

Asphalt Jungle is rather different and arose from a life-time’s fascination with films. I’ve done a series of paintings like this where the flicker of a projector causes the image to split. I’ve always remembered that – it’s a peculiar phenomenon of films that I like. If someone seventy-five years’ from now looks at this painting they won’t understand it at all. It’s depicting a kind of mechanical defect which will not even be a part of our language.

A critic wrote of your work: ‘Ruscha’s art is always about relationships – between words and pictures, ideas and objects, light and shadow, guilt and innocence, desire and memory, wit and seriousness and, not least of all, about relationships between people.’ Do you agree?

Well, that’s fairly general I think. I think almost any artist’s work is about relationships. In my work I have put words and pictures together, but I don’t necessarily want the relationship between them to prosper, or even to become positive or lovely or beautiful or anything like that. I like the antagonism between one thing and another. I’m not searching for some type of harmony.

In Plants, Pole, for example, I painted a very horizontal picture with a bamboo pole across it – a sort of element that would antagonise the theme in some way or another. I have used bamboo in several of my pictures because it has a kind of ambiguity that I like.

What was your inspiration behind ‘Nothing Landscape’ and ‘Western’?

The first was my way of making an empty landscape, and then I finally decided it should be called Nothing Landscape. I like the emptiness in the central part of the picture. I didn’t intend to evoke fog necessarily but all the paintings that I did like this, I refer to sometimes as ‘foggy’ or ‘strokeless’ paintings. They were made by airbrush – the paintings don’t possess a brushstroke.

I was working on a commission for the Denver Public Library when I came upon the subject matter for Western. While studying the history of Colorado and Denver, I found this imagery. I saw some exhibits of Indian’s drawings – little line drawings done by American Indians – on bark and sometimes wrapping paper that these Indians had got hold of during the Civil War. They were very frightening to me and when I did this painting of tepees I wanted a certain amount of this fright to come out.

You have said: ‘Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.’ Please elaborate on this statement.

I guess I’m a variation on a theme because I find myself doing the same things today that I had done when I was eighteen-years-old.

I like to see history being written with my own work but not too consciously to write my own history. If I’m responsive or excited about a particular image that’s never been in my art before, I have to answer to that. Let that be my history.

What have been the greatest influences on your art?

Certainly people and events of the day have always influenced my art. Mohammed Ali always had a powerful influence on me, kind of inspired me to continue on with what I’m doing. It’s not easy to see why he or his message should do that because it has not much to do with art but more with athletics and all that, but I found him to be a particular influence on me, and also musicians – jazz musicians and people in the music world. Not necessarily people I know but people I might read about and admire. I think ultimately it’s like a cornucopia of everything that influences an artist and I’m no different.