'I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.' —Ed Ruscha  Featuring a single, untethered word that appears to be floating off into a smoky-grey expanse, Spots is an especially significant example of Los Angeles-based Ed Ruscha’s examination of language and its decontextulisation and his transformation of words into images. Strangely onomatopoeic, and visually self-referential with its repetition of looping, rounded forms, with the word ‘spots’ Ruscha playfully explores the unique spatiality of words and the tension between text and image, while the drawing itself also records his innovative approach to media and techniques during this highly productive period. 

 

Words and Image

 

Often described as Ruscha’s preferred medium, words and phrases have occupied the artist throughout his sixty year career, first appearing in his work as early as 1959 and evolving across a remarkable variety of scripts and styles. Born in Nebraska in 1937, Ruscha’s artistic beginnings were rooted in commercial art and 1960s Pop. Tellingly, Ruscha pinpoints an early encounter with magazine reproductions of Jasper Johns’ Target with Four Faces and one of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines as the moment that he decided that he wanted to pursue a career as an artist himself, and the present work dramatises a synthesis of certain aesthetic trends in the earlier decades of the twentieth century towards a purely abstract visual language on the one hand, and a fascination with the material of the everyday life on the other. 

With everyday vernacular as his raw material, Ruscha blurred the boundaries between advertising, graphic design and fine art, drawing inspiration from comic strips, the sharp interplay of word and image set to work in advertising, and even the omnipresent Hollywood sign floating in the hills above the city.  

 

The iconic white Hollywood sign featured heavily in Ruscha’s drawing and printmaking in the late 1960s and - alongside gas station signs billboards - represented an important conceptual precursor to the more abstract treatment of free-floating words as images seen in Spots. The arrangement of letters as if seen at an angle from below and the extreme horizontal format used to such dynamic effect in the present work draws on this real-world proliferation of text as much as on the cinematic widescreen experience and is a defining feature of Ruscha’s drawing from this period. 

While the influence of Roy Lichtenstein’s brand of highly graphic Pop and the increasingly sophisticated visual languages of advertising and consumerism is evident here, Spots also recalls the Surrealist juxtaposition of word and image most famously explored in a series of works by 20th century Belgian artist René Magritte. 

 

While not as bluntly presented as in Magritte’s work, in Spots Ruscha playfully engages with the equivalence between verbal and visual sign, probing the extent to which both text and image stand in for the same, shared concept. Neither solid nor liquid, ‘spots’ sit in an indeterminate order of matter alongside ‘stains’ or ‘rot’, particularly privileged terms in Ruscha’s lexicon. Recording a transitory status as they pass from one state into another, this group of words seems to capture a sense of the mobile qualities of language itself, emphasised by the equivalences established between word and image here: not only do the shape and spatial relationship of the letters themselves seem to visually reference the idea of ‘spots’, but the mottled grey background is itself executed as a field of spots and speckles. 

 

Material Realities

 

As part of a generation of West Coast artists who redefined the boundaries of drawing in the 1960s, Ruscha’s contribution to the genre was decisive and far-reaching, especially in his approach to materials and erasure of the hand of the artist. Executed in 1972, the present work belongs to a period of intensive activity for the artist. Setting aside painting, Ruscha became especially absorbed with drawing and printmaking in the early 1970s, his practice from these years marked by a deeply experimental approach to non-traditional materials including egg yolk, turpentine and tape. Unsatisfied with the effects of graphite or oil paint, Ruscha stumbled across a new material while experimenting with his so-called ribbon drawings in 1967. With its distinctive colour, mutable qualities and ability to conceal process to some degree, gunpowder quickly took prominence in the artist’s repertoire, which he applied to the surfaces of his compositions with cotton buds and a variety of other, non-traditional tools. 
'He had a canister of gunpowder pellets at his studio, and found that the salt in them separated out when the granules were soaked in water, leaving a powder of charcoal and sulphur that not only permitted a warmer span of tones than graphite, but was easier to manipulate and correct.' —Lisa Turvey Considered as a group, the gunpowder drawings are recognised as a highly significant body of work in Ruscha’s oeuvre, Margit Rowell identifying them as ‘quintessential examples of Ruscha's singular manner of seeing’.ⁱ Hugely influential, Ruscha’s innovative approach to materials can be traced in the focus on the elevation of everyday ‘Harlem dirt’ to valuable artist’s material in contemporary artist David Hammon’s basketball drawings or gunpowder’s experimental treatment in the work of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. 

 

With comparable gunpowder works held in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the increased focus on Ruscha’s drawings in the wake of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2004 exhibition, the gunpowder drawings remain especially compelling examples of Ruscha’s sustained examination of the materiality of language and spatial logic and his idiosyncratic blend of Conceptualism and Pop Art. 

 

Ed Ruscha, ‘The Tension of Words and Images’, Tate Shorts, Ed Ruscha explains why he is drawn to words and how he uses stencils and backgrounds

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    Based in L.A., Ed Ruscha’s career spans over 50 years across a variety of mediums and has become representative of a kind of American idealism. 

 

•    Of his drawings, his gunpowder pieces are particularly sought-after, with a comparable work recently achieving well above its estimate at auction with Phillips. 

 

•    Alongside an exhibition of new drawings with Gagosian this summer, Ruscha recently enjoyed his first solo show in his home state at the Oklahoma Contemporary, which ran until the end of July 2021. 

ⁱ Margit Rowell, Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors. The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, (exh. cat.), New York, 2004-05, p. 17.