ed ruscha and the language

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Ed Ruscha and theLanguage That He Used*

LISA PASQUARIELLO

The first images seen by visitors to the Whitney Museum of American Art'srecent exhibition Ed Ruscha and Photographyere a set of six photographs taken in1961 and shown for the first time in 2003.1Each Product tillLifefeatures a single con-sumer item-Oxydol bleach, Sherwin-Williamsturpentine, Wax Seal car polish-onwhat 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 ofthe small show: Ruscha went on to use such artless viewpoints to picture vernacularsubjects, stripped of affect, in artist's books such as TwentysixGasolineStations(1962)and SomeLosAngelesApartments1965). The books are rightly regarded as beachheadsin the genealogy of Conceptual art, but a pair of the single-object photographs evokeinstead Ruscha'sfirst allegiance, to Pop.2 (A charter membership in two movementsthat are in many waysanathema only begins to suggest his art-historicalelusiveness.)For two of Ruscha'searlyphotographic subjects, a box of Sun Maid Raisins and a tinof Spam, reappear in paintings executed in tandem with or shortly after the photos,Box SmashedFlat (1960-61) and Actual Size (1962), paintings that established thereputation of "Ed-werdRew-shay,YoungArtist"as an avatarof WestCoastPop.3The assessment was sensible enough: with their sign-like vibrance, depictionof mass-produced commercial items, and allusion to the strategies of advertising(picturing a product in its "actualsize"), the paintings feature several of the markers* Parts of this essay are taken from a chapter of my dissertation, "'Good Reading': The Workof EdRuscha, 1958-1970" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2004). For her help and insight on that project, Iam indebted to Pamela Lee; thanks as well to Scott Bukatman, Wanda Corn, and Bryan Wolf. I am verygrateful to Yve-AlainBois, Johanna Burton, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss,and Malcolm Turveyfor theircomments and suggestions on this version.1. The Product tillLifeswere first exhibited at the Gagosian Galleryin Los Angeles in spring 2003.2. Ruscha is waryof art-historical abels but does acknowledge his Pop sensibility:"I have more of anaffinity to the Pop artistsand their general attitude than to anything else.... You couldn't call me a card-carrying member of it, but my attitudes were more similar to Pop artists than any other" (Ruscha in JoeGoode,enyMcMillan,EdwardRuscha,exh. cat. [Oklahoma City:Oklahoma CityArtMuseum, 1989], p. 84).3. So read the business cards Ruscha made for himself upon graduating from Chouinard Art Institutein 1960. Box SmashedFlatand Actual Sizewere included in Walter Hopps's NewPainting of CommonObjectsexhibition (Pasadena Art Museum, 1962); BoxSmashedFlat was the first work Ruscha sold and ActualSizethe firstacquired by a museum.

OCTOBER 11, Winter 005, pp. 81-106. ? 2005 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and Massachusettsnstituteof Technology.


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Ed Ruscha.Left:Sun-Maid Raisins. 1961. Right:Spam. 1961.All imagescourtesyhe artist and GagosianGallery.that stylistically characterized Pop in both its early flush and subsequent historiciza-tion. Present too are the parodic rejoinders to Abstract Expressionism that severalcritics saw in Pop (Ruscha, then a recent graduate of Chouinard Art Institute, wastrained to paint in an Abstract Expressionist manner, against his inclinations). Thetitle Box Smashed lat is perhaps the most pithy summary of Greenbergian modernismyet, and the streaky run-off in the lower half of Actual Size so regular it couldhave been applied with a ruler; both paintings testify to the reception ofAbstract Expressionism's once-unencumbered, indexical marks as shopworn andstylized-indeed packaged and packable-by the early 1960s.What is conspicuously not Pop about these paintings, however, is the impor-tance Ruscha accords to the single item and its qualities as an object. The Pop subjectwas typically pictured as uniform and exchangeable, whatever distinguishing proper-ties it might possess eclipsed by the growing power of the mass-cultural sign, and itsmultiplicity reiterated in the Pop artist's imitation or direct use of techniques ofmechanical reproduction. While Pop representations of commercial products usuallyshow exterior packaging (Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann's Coca-Cola bottles,Mel Ramos's Velveeta Cheese boxes), Ruscha shows interior substance, indicatingcrushed raisins with a smeary blot of brown paint below the lid of the Sun Maid box.Pop's most iconic subjects are serial (Warhol's rows of Campbell's Soup and Cokecans), while Ruscha depicts a single item with lavish trompe l'oeil care. And we learnfrom the Product Still Lifes that, unlike Warhol culling his imagery from daily newspa-pers, or James Rosenquist clipping from old magazines, Ruscha based his earlypaintings on actual objects. The sources of his first subjects were a single can ofprocessed meat and a box of raisins he photographed in his studio, and Ruscha'scare-what he calls a "reverence"-for the substance of his subjects, his concern to

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Ed Ruscha and the Language That He Used

?R f',"i Box? Smahe..0

Ruscha.Left:Box Smashed Flat. 1960-61.Right:Actual Size. 1962.

present them as palpable things with tactility, weight, and even velocity, hallmarks hispolymathic practice.4This engagement with materiality can, I would argue, be traced through mostof Ruscha's production of the past forty-five years-in renderings of both wordsand images; in work in painting, drawing, editions; and even in his photographicbooks, thought to augur Conceptual art's antagonism for the work of art as physicalobject. The project of the following is narrower: to use the notion of linguisticopacity-of the word as a nontransparent sign, whose materiality may be tied to itsmeaning-to chart some consistencies in Ruscha's word choices during his firstdecade of work. His notebooks indicate that he depicted more than four hundredwords between 1960 and 1972, and there have been hundreds more since. Yet theacknowledgement of Ruscha as a pacemaker in the use of text in and as image, andhis subsequent influence on any number of artists with language-centered practices,has been unaccompanied by an account of the particular kinds of words he repre-sents. These words are less Pop's transparent signs of something else (mass culture,the popular media, mechanical reproduction) than self-referential, obduratelyphysical matter. Ruscha's practice, perhaps the slowest burn in twentieth-centuryAmerican art history, has long merited a sustained formal reckoning, and to4. Ruscha in Paul Karlstrom, "Interview with Edward Ruscha in His Western Avenue, HollywoodStudio" (1980-81), in Ruscha, LeaveAny Informationat the Signal: Writings,Interviews,Bits, Pages, ed.Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, Mass.:MITPress, 2002), p. 185. Ruscha remarked on the objects in theProductStillLifes:"Theywere not in perfect condition ... they're rattyaround the edges, and they've beenkicked around, and wrinkled. I liked them for that" (Ruschain SylviaWolf,"Nostalgiaand New Editions: AConversation with Ed Ruscha," n Ed Ruschaand Photography,xh. cat. [New York:Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, 2004], p. 263). Compare to LucyLippard's primer PopArt:"Popobjects decidedly forgo theuniqueness acquired by time. They are not yet worn or left over" (NewYork:Praeger, 1966), p. 78.

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Most criticism on Ruschafuses the observation that he turnswords into objectswith the assumption that those words, in turn, relinquish whatever immanent orreferential signifying capacities they might possess; bypassed is the potential of therendered word to be both physical thing and conveyor of meaning, at once pictorialobject and bearer of linguistic resonance and association.7Yet it is the possibility ofpicturing this simultaneity that animates Ruscha'spractice: his material is language,but that language is material, and in giving size to things that "existin a world of no-size,"he tends to portray words as signs that can be motivated and linked to theirmateriality.8He loves words, picks them carefully ("whateverI do now is completelypremeditated"), and often represents text as mimetically as his scrupulous trompel'oeil figures object.9Ruscha'swords thicken and perplex their assumed transparencyby foregrounding their substantive physicalityand by reproducing the look, shape,sound, and meaning of their referents, and it is this refusal of the transparencyattrib-uted to the sign by historians of Pop that unites the various linguistic categoriesrecurrent in his early practice.10

[October 1963], p. 28). Many artists concurred: "Pop seems to be all subject matter," Lichtensteinsaid,"whereas Abstract Expressionism, for example, seems to be all esthetic" (Lichtenstein in G. R.Swenson, "What Is Pop Art?,"Art News[November 1963], p. 26). See RussellFerguson, ed., Hand-PaintedPop:AmericanArt in Transition1955-62, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of ContemporaryArt, 1993), for areconsideration of the formal relationships between AbstractExpressionismand Pop.7. Yve-AlainBois's work on Ruscha is an important exception; he writes that Ruscha "clearlyknowsthat one cannot escape signification. He knows that however empty (that is, noisy) the message he willretrieve from the semiological profusion of social refuse, it will alwaysbounce back full of meaning" (Bois,"Thermometers Should Last Forever," n EdwardRuscha:RomancewithLiquids,Paintings 1966-1969, exh.cat. [NewYork:Gagosian Gallery,1993], p. 20; reprinted in this volume, pp. 60-80).8. Ruscha in Patricia Failing, "EdRuscha,Young Artist: Dead Serious About Being Nonsensical,"ArtNews81, pt. 4 (April 1982), p. 78; reprinted in LeaveAnyInformationt theSignal,pp. 225-37.9. Ibid., p. 77. Ruscha keeps notebooks in which he lists words and phrases that strike him, from con-versations, dreams, music, and books, and he writes these down even while driving. One intervieweraskedabout the inspirations for certain works:"SlobberinDrunkat thePalomino:That's from a FrankZappasong.'MysteriousVoltageDrop:'I read it in an electric manual.' Malibu= SlidingGlassDoors: That whoosh theymake sounds like the ocean.' TalkReal: 'Mykid said that once to me when he was small.' HelloI MustBeGoing: A Groucho Marx quote.' He Busts intoa UnionHall Full of Workersnd YellsOut, 'O.K.,What s It YouGuysWant,Pontiac Catalinas?': t came to me in a dream"(ibid., p. 81).10. To say that language signifies transparentlysuggests that a word's physical features do not affectperception of meaning, that words do not mean byvirtue of their materiality."The wonderful thing aboutlanguage is that it promotes its own oblivion,"wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty:"Myeyes follow the lines onthe paper,and from the moment I am caught up in their meaning, I lose sight of them. The paper, the let-ters on it, my eyes and body are only there as the minimum setting of some invisible operation. Expressionfades before what is expressed, and this is why its mediating role may pass unnoticed" (Merleau-Ponty,ThePhenomenologyfPerception1962], trans. Colin Smith [London: Routledge, 1989], p. 401).Some suggest that Ruscha'sinterest in the materialityof the word maystem, however unconscious-ly, from his Catholic upbringing, from years of catechism classes on how "the Word became flesh."Although Ruscha equated his move to California in 1956 with his abandonment of the church, he hasacknowledged the influence: "I kind of spring from Catholicism .... Some of my work comes out of aquasi-religious thing" (Ruscha in Amei Wallach, "The Restless American: On Ed Ruscha's Royal Road,"NewYorkTimes,une 24, 2001, p. 33). It is easyenough to trace a religious theme in his work,from the sym-bolism suggested by the "birdsand fish"paintings to word choices such as Sin, TheCatholicChurch,DevilorAngel,Miracle,TheChapelWindow,SheSureKnewHerDevotionals, nd Bible.The utility of these connect-the-dots biographic analysesseems limited at best, however,and is at any rate beyond the scope of this essay.

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Harold Rosenberg, writing in 1964 on the contemporary proliferation of "artbooks,"diagnosed the character of recent reception as marked by a "coalescence ofart and comment."ll The market boom that occurred in lockstep with the burgeon-ing of Pop art precipitated a growing interest in new work on the part of the massmedia that Pop often took as subject, an enhanced cultural standing for the critic,and a rapidly expanding art press. Many did not view these developments assalutary; Rosenberg lamented that painting had "become nothing else than what issaid about it,"and Brian O'Doherty complained that art wasbeing "overinterpreted,overcriticized, and overdocumented in a strangling undergrowth of verbal redun-dancies."12New roles for the word also emerged in the register of production, in avariety of practices that supplanted the Abstract Expressionist focus on the (how-ever unrecognizable) image with an attention to language. This linguistic turn inpractice would reach its apogee in the text-only work, efflorescence of artists' writ-ings, and theoretical apparatusesof Minimalism and Conceptualism, but much Pop,too, featured language prominently: its most iconic works, Warhol'ssoup cans andRoy Lichtenstein's comic frames, contain words, and even the labeling ofRosenquist'swork (usuallydevoid of language) as "billboardpainting" hints at a textbehind the image.

Together with the implosion of medium-specific practices and the dismantlingof "high-low"boundaries in the 1960s, this "eruptionof language into the field of thevisualarts,"as CraigOwens wrote, was "coincident with, if not the definitive index of,the emergence of postmodemism."13Although AbstractExpressionism'sartists andart workswere hardlyas nonverbal as the myths about their moment make them outto be, high modernist practice and criticism had been decidedly antilinguistic, theputative opticality,autonomy, and immediacy of the image privileged over the narra-tive, referentiality,and temporalityspawned by language.14"Allpictures of qualityaskto be looked at rather than read," Clement Greenberg wrote, and he inauguratedthe crusade to establish avant-gardepainting as "dominant"by taking up the mantle11. Harold Rosenberg, "ArtBooks, Book Art, Art,"in his TheAnxious ObjectChicago: University ofChicago Press, 1964), pp. 199-200.12. Ibid., p. 199; Brian O'Doherty, "CriticizingCriticism"(1963), in his Object nd Idea:An Art Critic'sJournal1961-1967 (NewYork:Simon & Schuster,1967), p. 193.13. CraigOwens, "Earthwords,"October0 (Fall 1979), pp. 122, 126.14. As W.J. T. Mitchell notes: "Modern painting ... while it has ostensibly sought to create nothingmore than the 'pure' image-abstract, nonverbal, free of representation, reference, narrative,and eventhe contamination of a verbal title-has in fact become more dependent on an elaborate verbalapologet-ics, the ersatz metaphysics of 'art theory"' (Mitchell, ed., TheLanguageof Images[Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1974], p. 1). And Rosalind Kraussargues: "The messenger who came rushing into the artworld, as into the discipline of art history,some thirty years ago [in the mid-1960s], bringing news of therecent invasion of the 'textual' into the domain of the visual, could have saved his [sic] breath. The visualarts have alwaysbattled the onslaught of a verbal production-from ekphrasis to allegory;from ut picturapoesis o iconography-that modernist art managed, briefly, to stun but never totally to silence" (Krauss,"Welcome to the Cultural Revolution," October 7 [Summer 1996], p. 83). See also Ann Gibson, "AbstractExpressionism'sEvasion of Language,"ArtJournal47, no. 3 (Fall 1988), pp. 208-14.

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of G. E. Lessing's 1766 attack on ut picturapoesis.15Abstraction, Greenberg main-tained, would best demarcate and purify the limits of the medium, best serve themodernist painter's crucible of eliminating "from the specific effects of each art anyand every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of anyother art."16Foremost among the worst of such borrowings were the "effects" ofwords, and the flat picture plane's renunciation of perspectival illusionism meantthat the avant-gardepainter could get "rid of imitation-and with it, 'literature.'"17Although the early reception of Pop art was mixed, its critics split as towhether the new work signaled a treacherous overthrow of the AbstractExpressionist ethos or the next logical stage in the organically successive march ofart history, most concurred that Pop artists were (in contrast to their New YorkSchool predecessors) "eminentlywrite-able about,"as Thomas Hess put it, responsi-ble for ushering in what BarbaraRose called a "verbal east"for criticism.18This newcare for language about art did not extend, however, to the very words depicted inPop; early critics remained largely uninterested in what the signs of "signart" actu-ally said or meant, and instead effectively viewed text in Pop as more or less purepictorial matter.19 "Most of them have nothing at all to say," charged Peter Selzabout the works.20Except for the interpretations that representing a mass-produceditem with techniques often cribbed from industrial production foregrounded theforce of postwarAmerican consumerism, and that such representations begged thequestion of the extent to which the work of art itself had become a commodity, theextent to which its meaning was its commodity status, analyses of Pop mainly grewout of assumptions that its words and images were possessed bywhat Roland Bartheswould later call "the obtuse and matte stubbornness of a fact."21Barthes's reflectionson what he termed Pop's "facticity"-how its subjects are "stripped of any symbol"and "signifythat they signify nothing," how the work itself denies that "itpossesses aprofound or proximate space through which its appearance can propagate vibrations15. Clement Greenberg, BarnettNewman:FirstRetrospectivexhibition(Bennington, Vt.: BenningtonCollege, 1958), n.p.16. Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1960), in ClementGreenberg: he Collected ssaysandCriticism,ol. 4, Modernismwith a Vengeance,957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1986), p. 86.17. Clement Greenberg, "Towardsa Newer Laocoon" (1940), in ClementGreenberg:he Collected ssaysand Criticism,ol. 1, PerceptionsndJudgments, 939-1944, ed.John O'Brian (Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1986), p. 34.18. Thomas Hess, "NewRealists,"ArtNews(Summer 1963), p. 41; BarbaraRose, "Pop in Perspective,"Encounter25,no. 2 (August 1965), p. 63.19. Johanna Drucker is one of few scholars to note this omission: "With the advent of Pop art, theuse of language as a visual form resurfaces in the visual arts, but the challenge to the boundaries of sig-nifying practice are overwhelmed by other issues in its consideration" (Drucker, The Visible Word:ExperimentalTypographynd ModernArt [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], p. 227). An impor-tant recent exception is Michael Lobel's careful attention to the words in Lichtenstein's comic bubbles;see his ImageDuplicator:RoyLichtenstein nd theEmergencef Pop Art (New Haven: Yale University Press,2002), esp. chaps. 1, 3, 5.20. Peter Selz, "The FlaccidArt,"PartisanReview Summer 1963), p. 313.21. Roland Barthes, "That Old Thing, Art . ."(1980), in PopArt:A CriticalHistory, d. Steven HenryMadoff (Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1997), p. 372.

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of meaning"-are elegant, but we need not look only to poststructuralismfor suchappraisals.22Gene Swenson wrote much the same thing in an earlyreview ("animagefrom a sign ... is stripped of its original signification"),and Dore Ashton accused thePop artist of having decided to "banishmetaphor."23Such disavowalsof Pop's intrinsic signifying power indicate how long the criti-cal hangover of high modernist formalism lasted; Michael Fried, for example, in a1962 reviewof Robert Indiana'swork, wrote, "Paintingssuch as these could workonlyif the words could be bled dry, if they could be deprived of all their force as bearersof meaning."24Critics of Ruscha's first decade of work, while mainly laudatory, notonly avoid analysesof his particularword choices but seem to want to ignore his useof language altogether. "No matter how much one tries not to see it, these slick andundulating surfaces are spelling out words,"Robert Pincus-Wittenwrote in 1968; "it sdifficult to get through them because the meaning of the words gets in the way."25David Bourdon stated that Ruscha was not "making literaryor intellectual allusions"and even that "aknowledge of the English language is not a prerequisite to the enjoy-ment of Ruscha's work."26Ruscha's association with an emergent group of LosAngeles-based "finishfetish" artists only amplified such interpretations: from LarryBell's mirror-coatedglass cubes to Robert Irwin'sopalescent white discs, from BillyAlBengston's glossyspray paint to CraigKauffman'sPlexiglas,"objectsculpture"stressedthe qualityand specificityof material and surface to the exclusion of what those prop-erties might signify.27Apprehending Ruscha'swordsas so many "L.A.Look"objects inspace necessitated the mutual exclusion of physicalityand linguistic resonance: "Hisdeceptively bland and succulent pastel surfaces can trick one into taking him as anaberrant formalist-but then there is his perverselyexplicit literarycontent."28

(The tenable objection to be raised here is that Ruscha's words elicit less aPop framework than a Conceptual one. But this context is also flawed,and not simplybecause much of the work treated in the following predates the coalescence ofConceptual art in 1965-66. Although Ruscha's depiction of words without accom-panying imagery might seem to realize the Conceptualist proposal that language,and language alone, could be the matter and subject of an art work, this realization22. Ibid.23. G. R. Swenson, "The New American 'Sign Painters,"' Art News (September 1962), p. 46; DoreAshton in "Symposiumon Pop Art,"p. 38. Ashton acknowledges that such a decision is "delusive":"Not anovercoat, not a bottle dryer,not a Coca-Cola bottle can resist the onslaught of the imagination. Metaphoris as natural to the imagination as saliva to the tongue" (ibid.).24. Michael Fried, "NewYorkLetter,"ArtInternational, no. 9 (November 25, 1962), p. 55.25. Robert Pincus-Witten, "Ed Ruscha,"Artforum February 1968), p. 49. "Ed Ruscha is either a veryserious young man or has an excellent sense of humor,"wrote another early critic. "Let us hope the latteris more likelyand that it is only the critics who ponder his productions with grim determination, probingfor Significance, trying to bare an Existentialismor intricate systemof semantics beneath the external real-ity of his canvases"(Judith Applegate, "GalerieAlexandre Iolas,"Art International 4 [May20, 1970], p. 67).26. DavidBourdon, "AHeap of WordsAbout Ed Ruscha,"ArtInternational0 (November 1971), p. 26.27. On Bengston's work, for example, Philip Leider wrote: "Itwarns the viewer awayfrom seeking inthis work the kind of ambiguous, murky,but meaning-charged 'sign' for which the AbstractExpressionistsso diligently searched" (Leider,"The Cool School,"Artforum, no. 12 [Summer 1964], p. 47).28. Elizabeth C. Baker,"LosAngeles, 1971,"ArtNews70, no. 5 (September 1971), p. 33.

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took place in Ruscha's work on canvas, in painting; he developed a language-centered practice in the very medium rejected by many Conceptualists. ["I stillremain a conservative easel painter."] Furthermore, Ruscha does not, as inBenjamin Buchloh's formulation of Conceptual art, "replace the object of spatialand perceptual experience by linguistic definition alone"; his method is more oneof conjunction than replacement, his words eminently spatial.29 Conceptualismprized words as neutral and unambiguous, able to communicate independently oftheir aural or visual manifestations; the linguistic sensibility driving Ruscha's work isopposite the Conceptualist idea of language as described by Joseph Kosuth: "veryneuter... as a medium it becomes invisible.")30The linguistic turn taken by the discipline of art history in the late 1970s alsofailed to provide an adequate scaffold for understanding Ruscha's particular wordchoices: the project of treating the image, like other arenas of social practice, as atext proved unsuited to images that were (mostly) texts. Structuralism, followingSaussure, posits an arbitrary relation between words and their referents, betweenthings and names, and thereby marginalizes motivated signifiers. Linguistic meaningis, in Saussure's account, the product of a system (langue) of "contrastive, opposi-tional, and negative" relationships between signifiers-language a "form, and not asubstance"31-and the Saussurean theoretical legacy is ill equipped to evaluate theword choices of an artist who declares, "what I'm interested in is illustrating ideas."32(On one of his wordless black-and-white "silhouette paintings" from the late 1980s,Ruscha offered, "It's like a painting of an idea about a ship," and on a recent seriesof photorealist mountainscapes, "They are paintings of ideas of mountains.")33 Thepoststructuralist radicalization of Saussurean tenets proved an equally inadequatemethod for assessing Ruscha's selections; meaning (as the product of unstableoppositional relationships) remains elusive and inapproximate, and within every actof signification inheres the potential for communicative failure. Critics writingabout Ruscha in the 1980s and '90s, maintaining that his word works epitomizedsuch failures, rehearsed deconstruction's most general claims-that a speaker orwriter is always at a remove (if not totally absent) from his own meanings, that notext is ever determinate, no message final. As if taking a cue from the title of his1977 painting No End to the Things Made out of Human Talk, reviewers wrote thatRuscha's word pictures figured "the inadequacy of language and the faulty progressof human communication," bespoke "the drifting order of open signification" in29. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration tothe Critique of Institutions," October5 (Winter 1990), p. 107. Several Conceptual artists later acknowl-edged what Ruscha's work had demonstrated since the early 1960s: that language alwayshas a physicalaspect, and that parsing words from their visual, aural, or referential components is difficult if notimpossible. Mel Bochner's declaration was especially direct: "Languageis not transparent."30. Kosuth in LawrenceWeinerLondon: Phaidon, 1998), p. 98.31. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course n GeneralLinguistics(1907-11; Peru, Ill.: Open Court Trade andAcademic Books, 1972), pp. 117,120.32. Ruscha in EdwardRuscha,exh. cat. (Buffalo:Albright Knox Gallery,1976), p. 4.33. Ruscha in Jan Estep, "Devil Coming Down the Road: An Interview with Ed Ruscha," New ArtExaminer28,pt. 6 (March 2001), p. 39.

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which "closurein meaning does not occur."34Ruscha'sproject is "to liquidate signifi-cation,"Donald Kuspitwent so far as to say:In Ruscha'spictures, words have become comatose, vegetated, as thoughfrom some horrific accidental encounter with reality, which left thembrain-damaged,"mindless": ne feels him in the wings, waiting to pull thelast life-support systemof signification from them. They are at best memo-ry traces,signaling a kind of glorious meaning that has been lost forever.35

Ruscha acknowledges that he is "workingwith two things that don't even ask tounderstand each other,"but to say that one intends to "illustrate ideas"36s to workagainst, not exemplify, the position that, in Foucault's phrase, "word and objectdo not tend to constitute a single figure"; a career spent giving language weight,texture, and body does not square with the poststructuralistdismissalof the plenarysign as illusory or with its certainty that language is bound to fall short in approxi-mating reality or mediating any nonlinguistic object.37Ruscha remains cannily guarded about his intentions vis-a-vislinguistic signi-fication: "Whether or not the work communicates anything to anyone is notimportant to me."38When asked directly, "What was more important to you whenyou were painting words: the way it looked or what it meant?"he responds that hiswork is "aflip-flop between those two things."39Those who maintain that Ruscha'swords picture the potholes of signifying need only turn for support to interviewsin which he discusses how words can lose meaning or fail to mean: "Sometimes Idon't care about the definition of the word,"he has said, and "sometimes you canstudy a word, like the word 'the,' and looking at that word long enough, it justbegins to lose its meaning."40But his description of his method as one of "wasteretrieval" discloses an intent to lay claim to meaning before its dispersal into poly-valence. Certain words attract him, he says,34. Eleanor Heartney,"EdRuscha at Robert Miller and Castelli,"Artin AmericaFebruary1988), p. 137;Dan Cameron, "Love in Ruins,"in EdwardRuscha,Paintings/Schilderijen,xh. cat. (Rotterdam: MuseumBoymans-van Beuningen, 1990), pp. 17, 14. These deconstruction-inflected analyses persist: PeterSchjeldahl concluded a recent reviewby mentioning "the prevalence of our failures to communicate,"andLynne Cooke writes that in Ruscha'swork, "meaning is more often suspended than dissected, filleted, andlaid open to forensic scrutiny. In denying closure, deferral sustains desire" (Schjeldahl, "Seeing andReading: Ed Ruscha at the Whitney,"TheNew Yorker0, no. 20 [uly 26, 2004], p. 95; Cooke, "Washingtonand Chicago:Ed Ruscha,"BurlingtonMagazine142, no. 1172 [November 2000], p. 722).35. Donald Kuspit, "Signs in Suspense: Ed Ruscha's Liquidation of Meaning," Arts65, pt. 8 (April1991), p. 58.36. Ruscha in BernardBlistene, "Conversation with Ed Ruscha," n EdwardRuschaPaintings/Schilderijen,p. 130;reprinted in LeaveAnyInformation t theSignal,pp. 300-08.37. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (1973), trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley:University ofCaliforniaPress, 1983), p. 42.38. Ruscha in Jana Sterbak, "Premeditated:An Interview with Ed Ruscha" (1985); reprinted in LeaveAny Information t theSignal,pp. 252-56.39. Ruscha in Thomas Beller, "EdRuscha,"(1989); reprinted in LeaveAnyInformation t theSignal, pp.281-85.40. Ruscha in Karlstrom,"Interviewwith EdwardRuscha,"p. 192; and Joan Quinn, "L.A.R.T.:EdwardRuscha," nterviewMarch 1984), p. 81; reprinted in LeaveAnyInformationt theSignal,pp. 247-49.

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Because I love the language. Words have temperatures to me. Whenthey reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal tome.... Sometimes I have a dream that if a word gets too hot and tooappealing, it will boil apart, and I won't be able to read or think of it.Usually I catch them before they get too hot.41

To be unable "to read or think of" a word would mean that the word had lost itspurchase on reality or meaning. It may be, as Yve-Alain Bois's essay on the entropyof the "liquid word" paintings suggests, that meaning is sensed most potently at themoment of linguistic decay or dissolution-yet this is a moment Ruscha attempts toforestall, not create or prolong.42 "When I see a word or phrase, or hear one (on theradio or in the street), I have to capture it immediately," he explains. "Otherwise itwill slip away from me, disappear."43 His sense of language as something one can"catch" or "capture" betrays a conception of words as tangible matter, matter thatmight indeed signify in concert with meaning: "I'm not trying to divorce what theword means from what I use it as visually."44

Perhaps the most succinct statement of Ruscha's project comes from a line inShakespeare's Hamlet he has depicted multiple times: "Words without thoughtsnever to heaven go." The guilty King Claudius mutters this while praying; Hamlet,secretly observing, decides not to kill him, fearing he will go to heaven. But Claudiusknows his prayers are ingenuous ("without thoughts"), for he is remorseless and hasno plans to relinquish the effects of murdering Hamlet's father (crown and queen).The implication for Claudius, and for Ruscha too, is that "words without thoughts"do not matter, have no efficacy, that unless they connect to an idea or object beyondthe words-to, in Ruscha's phrase, "the thought behind them"-they will, asClaudius laments, "fly up."45 Ruscha attempts to conjoin, not sever, semantic senseand physical form, and we can trace these attempts in his renderings of single wordsand objects and in his sustained attraction to those linguistic categories (ono-matopoeia, rhymes, puns) that challenge the independence of meaning from itsmaterial representation.

41. Ruscha in Howardena Pindell, "Words with Ruscha," Print Collector'sNewsletter 3, no. 6(January-February1973), p. 126;reprinted in LeaveAnyInformation at theSignal,pp. 55-63.42. See Bois, "Thermometers Should LastForever,"his volume, pp. 60-80.43. Ruscha in MargitRowell, "CottonPuffs, Q-Tips,Smoke and Mirrors:The Drawingsof Ed Ruscha,"in CottonPuffs, Q-Tips,Smoke nd Mirrors:TheDrawingsofEdRuscha,exh. cat. (New York:Whitney Museumof American Art, 2004), p. 15.44. Ruscha in Karlstrom,"Interviewwith EdwardRuscha,"p. 153.45. Ruscha explains his choice: "That quote was from Shakespeare's Hamlet.It was in Act 3, Scene 3:'My words fly out [sic], my thoughts remain below. Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go.'There's a base of profundity to that-the idea of words without thoughts. I might be engaged in theact of making words without thoughts ... but in the strict, public sense this phrase, 'words withoutthoughts never to heaven go,' is a way of saying words are important, and they're never gonna go toheaven without thoughts, without the thought behind them" (Ruscha in Estep, "Devil Coming Downthe Road," p. 42).

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The balloon lettering of Ruscha's Annie (1962) is instantly familiar as cartoonistHarold Gray's 1924 title for the "Little Orphan Annie" comic strip, a few frames ofwhich Ruscha had already incorporated into his collage Dublin (1959) and thenpainted in a pendant work of the same name the following year. The absence ofimage in this work seems to exemplify the surpassing of the object by the sign in Pop,whereby the substance of the commodity item was of secondary importance to itsname, and those particular names, in turn, less consequential than the products' sta-tus as tokens of a pervasive mass culture, one disseminated by the technical andindustrial processes used or imitated in Pop. "In Andy Warhol," Max Kozloff wrote in1963, "the subject is not the Campbell's soup can-which doesn't exist-but ratherthe commercial technique for representing it."46But however much Ruscha's meticu-lously copied typeface here seems to have displaced the images its logo mightconjure, the physical particularity of his Annie painting is impossible to disregard,not least of all due to its 72-by-67-inch size. Close looking reveals not a strokeless,gleaming Pop surface devoid of traces of the artist's hand, but fastidious brush-work, swirling, heavily wrought layers of primary paint, and small patches ofexposed canvas: Annie ultimately evokes less processes of mechanical reproductionor the easy exchangeability of the pop cultural artifact than the comic strip's originin a hand-lettered drawing and its own crafted, man-made singularity.47Swenson commented in 1962 on the significance of the Pop subject's immedi-ate recognizability: "Our awareness is not so much of a Coca-Cola billboard as of the46. MaxKozloff,"ALetter to the Editor,"ArtInternationalune 1963), p. 93.47. Thanks to Scott Bukatman for his thoughts on this work. A 1966 rendering of Annieis even moreemphaticallymaterial:this one is "pouredfrom maple syrup."

Ruscha. Annie. 1962.

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shrunken size of the world we occupy."48 Ruscha's choice to render the Standard Oilfilling station has been interpreted accordingly, as a clever acknowledgment of theconsumer product as standardized and standardizing in a culturally "shrunken,"increasingly homogeneous postwar United States. Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas(1963) derives from a photo in Ruscha'sfirst artist'sbook. The artistclaims he chosethe snapshots in TwentysixGasolineStations rom a crop of fifty or sixty photos takenwhile driving between L.A. and Oklahoma City, and that "the eccentric ones werethe first ones I threw out."49 In assimilating Ruscha's books to the critiques ofConceptual art, critics write that they "explore the uniformity of our late capitalistage" and propose that "we learn nothing more from twenty-sixgasoline stations...than from one,"50 failing to attend to the subtle variation in the photographedstations: no two are identical, even those of the same franchise, and the book recordsa range of gasoline pumps and building types, canopies and signage.51Even if Ruschais to be believed that he selected the most commonplace stations, they are not (yet)uniform or conventional-standard-and nor is Ruscha'spainting, however schema-tized it first appears. He has dramatized the perspectival angle of the photo,depicted the midnight skybehind in thick expressionistic whorls, and hand letteredthe tallies (all different amounts) on the pumps. And what would prove to be a fertilecomponent of Ruscha's production, printmaking, began with an invitation from acollector to make a print based on StandardStation.The choice seems fitting: whatbetter subject for an edition than one already"standard"?Yetin diffusing the imageacrossmultiple formats, Ruscha consistently subjects it to idiosyncraticpermutation,usually indicated in the screenprints' titles: Double Standard [Minus White], MochaStandard, CheeseMold Standard with Olive. Though the painting's plunging upper-left-to-lower-right diagonal is reprised, each iteration is markedly distinct, and Ruschasays, furthermore, that his favorite aspects of printmaking are those irruptions ofmateriality-technical mistakes, color irregularities, unanticipated effects-that48. Swenson, "The New American 'Sign Painters,"'p. 46.49. Ruscha in Douglas M. Davis, "From Common Scenes, Mr. Ruscha Evokes Art" (1969), in LeaveAnyInformationt theSignal,p. 28.50. Bois, "Thermometers Should Last Forever," his volume, p. 67; Phyllis Rosenzweig, "Sixteen (andCounting): Ed Ruscha'sBooks," n Ed Ruscha,exh. cat. (Washington,D.C.:Smithsonian Institution, 2000),p. 185.51. Ruscha includes several photographs of mom-and-pop gas stations, then well on their way toextinction-Bob's Service in L.A., Whiting Brothers near Ludlow, California, and Beeline Gas nearHolbrook, Arizona. The larger commercial stations, furthermore, rarelyresemble one another: the Mobilstation in Williams, Arizona is called "Mobilgas,"while the one in Shamrock, Texas, bears an updated"Mobil"sign. One Texaco station stands alone, while another is combined with a restaurant, and oneConoco sign is attached to a building, while another is freestanding. A few critics have suggested that thelast photograph in the book, of a Fina station in Groom, Texas, is a self-referentialpun about its conclu-sion. Given Ruscha'sproclivityfor visual and auralwordplay, he placement of Fina as final was likelyinten-tional, but few have remarked on the importance of a second sign in this image: "SayFina. Exactlyas goodas the best!"This is the language of commodity standardization in the early 1960s, as consumer productsbecame increasingly exchangeable: one "asgood as"another, each as good as "the best,"and all subsum-able under the sign of the brand name. The subtle but insistent materialityof, and differences between,Ruscha'sgasoline stations (or swimming pools, or apartment buildings), betray an ambivalence toward-not an example of-the standardizationof the commodity in postwarAmerica.

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disturb the uniformity of mechanical reproduction. Though America's highway gasstations were, by the mid-1960s, well on their way to becoming the strip mall look-alikes of the present, Ruscha'sselection of the Standard brand name verges on thewry,not the literal:taken together, his stations are preciselynot standard.Much recent scholarship on Pop emphasizes what its first reviewers did-thetechniques of representing the mass-cultural commodity, and the relation of suchtechniques to the mounting commodification of the work of art itself-rather thanthe possible specificity of the Pop subject. By picturing commercial products in mul-tiple, and showing package and surface rather than matter and interior, Pop'sbest-known images thematize the almost imperceptible elision between name andthing that characterizesa successful brand. "The more we live in an 'age of advertise-ment and publicity,"' Lawrence Alloway wrote, "the more chances there are tobecome aware of the deceptiveness of signs and the solidity of symbols that obscuretheir original referents."52Marketersand admen in the early 1960s aimed to developbrands indistinguishable from the substance of their products by unhinginglanguage and image from expected contexts and recombining them in ways thatoften had little to do with the actual item being advertised, systematically"manipu-lating brand personalities divorced from the material attributes of products,"as onerecent semiotic analysisof American advertising notes.53Ruscha'ssingular paintingsof mass-produced commercial items operate differently, by distinguishing the nameof the product from the actual product and by picturing specific and tangible tiesbetween word and thing. The splatter of paint indicating crushed raisins in BoxSmashed Flat is a particularly visceral instance, but Falling But Frozenand Actual Size(both 1962) also show product alongside product name. The growing force of thebrand is implied by the outsizing of a small tire and can of meat substitute by thewords "Fisk"and "Spam,"but the full eclipse of the commodity by the commodityname that was coming to characterize postwarAmerican consumerism and advertis-ing is not depicted; although these words have no significance apart from theproducts they name, the paintings' distinction between name and thing underscoresthe brand'sbasisin an actualmaterial object.Ruscha in fact borrows from the rhetoric of branding in discussing his placeof residence since 1956: "'Hollywood' is like a verb to me. It's something you can doto any subject or any thing. You can take something in Grand Rapids, Michigan,and Hollywoodize it."54As he knows, the word "Hollywood"possesses considerable52. LawrenceAlloway,AmericanPopArt(NewYork:Collier Books, 1974), p. 47.53. Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Sign Wars:The ClutteredLandscape f AdvertisingNew York:GuilfordPress, 1996), p. 22.54. Ruscha quoted in L.A. SuggestedytheArtofEdwardRuscha,produced and directed by GaryConklin(MysticFire Video, 1981); transcript reprinted in LeaveAnyInformation t theSignal,pp. 220-24. Ruscha'sremark about mutating "Hollywood"'sgrammatical function proposes the word-turned from noun toverb-as a shifter,those words that, because their meaning is contingent on use by interlocutors in specificlinguistic situations, possess some measure of semiotic motivation. In a 1970 drawing Ruscha in fact pic-tures two shifters named by C. S. Peirce in his definition of the term, Thisand That,and the pronominaland temporal ambiguities of several works from the 1970s (Now ThenAs I WasAbout oSay;We'reThisandWe're hat,Aren'tWe;SheDidn'tHave todo iHAT)evoke the logic of the shifter.

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Ruscha.Falling But Frozen. 1962.connotative vigor: it is the sign for the town and the name of the neighborhood, butalso summons cultures of film, power, and glamour with inexplicable machinations.55("It can be understood, too, but only dimly and in flashes," F. Scott Fitzgerald'sCecilia Brady muses about Hollywood in The Last Tycoon, and Thomas Pynchon'sfictional suburb in The Crying of Lot 49, "like many named places in L.A.," is "less anidentifiable city than a grouping of concepts.")56 Ruscha's multiple renderings of theHollywood sign do call up these larger-than-life associations in their Technicolor-spectrum backgrounds and impossible vistas (the sign's letters appear perched onthe crest of Mount Lee rather than set within it). But his Hollywoods do not somuch encourage contemplation of the fabular quality of the place or promptreflections on Tinseltown as they foreground the material stuff of their letters.Ruscha was initially interested in the landmark as a barometric object: the WesternAvenue studio he moved to in 1965 afforded a view of it, and he predicted a day'sweather based on how visible the sign was through the smog. And though he talksabout the city as "full of illusions" and remembers that in deciding to move westfrom Oklahoma he was "attracted to the concept of Hollywood," Ruscha's variousdepictions of the sign emphasize the substance behind the concept.57 In one 1968study, the letters are cut out and collaged onto the surface, braced by bold pencil55. As one historian writes about the sign: "Constitutedonly of air,light, barren earth, and the name ofa desire, it has come to represent not a subdivision nor even an industry but an idea, and for that reasonpeople want to touch it, as if to touch the essence of L.A."(William Alexander McClung, Landscapes JDesire:AngloMythologiesfLosAngeles Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 2000], p. 184).56. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last 7ycoon(1941; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 4; ThomasPynchon, 7he Crying fLot49 (NewYork:Bantam, 1966), p. 12.57. Ruscha inJohn Pashdag, "AConversation with EdwardRuscha," n Outrageous .A. (San Francisco:Chronicle Books, 1984), p. 9; reprinted in LeaveAny Informationat the Signal, pp. 242-45; Ruscha inSuzanne Muchnic, "Gettinga Read on Ed Ruscha,"LosAngeles7imes,December 9, 1990, p. 3 (Calendar);reprinted in LeaveAnyInformationt theSignal,pp. 309-11.

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lines of support-behind-the-scenes architecture rarely pictured in other images ofthe four-story-high landmark and reminders that it is, in Ruscha's words, "a realthing."58 Another fanciful work pictures the sign's lop-cornered letters as if viewedfrom behind, representing "Hollywood" not as an amorphic abstraction but as aword composed of tangible letters whose legibility depends on their left-to-rightorientation. (Ruscha makes the point explicit in the drawing Holloween [1977]:stylistically akin to the Hollywoodworks, the neologism is seen from a rearview, and werealize on a doubletake that it doesn't say what we expect it to.) In a 1968 screen-print, the sign repeats the gently gradated hues of the sunset-washed landscapebehind, as if its two-ton steel letters are pliable matter affected by changes of lightand time. "I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body,then coming back and becoming a word again," Ruscha remarked, and his picturesof the word for the city of pictures-a word whose allusive force sponsors its disem-bodiment-concretize this process.59Like "Hollywood," another of Ruscha's best-known subjects, the 20thCentury Fox trademark, has more connotative power-cinematic culture, bigstudios, a whole host of images the company has produced-than any specificmaterial resonance. The sign is most familiar projected flat, filtered through particlesof light onto movie screens. Ruscha endows his Large Trademarkwith Eight Spotlights(1962), however, with a near-comic weight and presence. "It's all substance," he saidabout the sign, and relays a sense of its three-dimensional heft with a crane-shot,58. Ruschain Quinn, "Art:L.A.R.T.:EdwardRuscha,"p. 82.59. Ruscha,conversation with author, LosAngeles,July 20, 2003.

Ruscha.Top:Hollywood Study #8. 1968.Bottom: Hollywood. 1968.

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one-point vantage and prominent perspective lines.60 (One preparatory studydescribes the number "20"from various angles, as if a bodily object rotating inspace.) More than eleven feet wide, the painting itself is of CinemaScope propor-tions, its 20th Century Fox trademark so concrete that, unlike most images of thelogo in which light beams seem to interpenetrate its letters, the klieg light raysbehind are broken and obscured by the sign itself.On the question of whether he intends to picture a connection between awritten sign and its possible meaning, Ruscha is characteristically equivocal: "Ifind that the pictorial look of something almost alwaysstays close to the word thatrepresents it,"he has said, but has also declared,"I am careful not to be literal, not to offer thisother option to anyone. If I paint a picture ofthe word 'coot,' I don't use a lot of blue orother cool colors; instead, I find myself deliber-ately taking another route."61But several earlyworks contain what Bois terms Ruscha's "figura-tive words," words that do "offer this other

option" of viewing the material embodiment oflinguistic meaning.62 These calligrammaticpaintings recall Ruscha's training in graphicdesign: the color gradations of Electric (1963)darken evenly from bright yellow to rust orange,evoking thermodynamic processes; the opacity ofthe letters in Scream(1962) splinters into thindiagonal slices; three versions of Dimple (1964)show individual letters indented by vise clamps.Ruscha's various depictions of fire, too, andfire's physical trace, smoke, are also of a mimeticsort, one explored multiply in Damage(1964): topaint a word on a canvas is to "damage"any pictor-ial pretension of window-on-the-worlddeep space,and the block type of the word itself is "damaged"by flames. The usually separate activities of read-ing and looking converge further in the liquidword series, begun in 1966. Bois puts forth theseworks as an instantiation of the informe:heir letters (painted to look as if poured,dripped, and spilled onto the canvas) appear on the verge of entropic retreat intothe spatiallyindeterminate reaches of their neutral backgrounds. But Ruscha is able

60. Ruschain Conklin, L.A.Suggestedy heArtofEdwardRuscha.61. Ruscha in Karlstrom,"Interviewwith EdwardRuscha,"p. 150; Ruscha in Blistene, "Conversationwith Ed Ruscha,"p. 136.62. Yve-AlainBois, "IntelligenceGenerator,"n EdwardRuscha,CatalogueRaisonneofthePaintings,Volume1, 1958-1970 (New York:GagosianGallery,2004), p. 8.

Ruscha. Top:Electric. 1963.Bottom:Damage. 1964.

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to "catch" them (the notion is his) before word and the matter that form it dissoci-ate: Jelly and Ruby look as if made of the substances named, and Slug is spelled outin brown slug-like masses. Air is bubbly and sheer, the horizontal swaths of thethinly painted canvas below visible through its outline, while the letters of Poolhave darkened outer edges, as if formed of puddled liquid.These mimetic inclinations are not limited to words; Ruscha's images oftrompe l'oeil pencils both recollect a painting's origin in preparatory studiesand guide the direction of our gaze by pointing. Indexicality is figured explicitlyin a study for the mid-sixties "birds, fish, and offspring" series, which shows theindex finger of a sketched hand mutating into a pencil. The pencil in TalkAbout Space (1962) points to the lower edge of the canvas, limning the actualconfines of its pictorial "space" (and thus enabling us to "talk" about it), whilethe list-like title Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963) seconds theactivity of pointing by proposing an order in which to behold its four objects,positioned midway on each side of the canvas. The drawing Bull, Pencil (1964)pictures a causal link between depicted form-the word "bull"-and the toolused to render it, overtly figuring the pencil as material cause for the drawing'sbeing. In his late 1960s "gunpowder drawings" series Ruscha moves from picturingthe implements an artist uses on a surface to representing those surfaces as sub-ject. These ribbony words counter drawing's usual functions to bound form,outline object, and separate figure from ground; they look as if formed of thesame stuff as the ground on which they appear. Self, for example, is drawn on thevery material out of which its "self" looks to have been made. Here too Ruscha'sdepictions of his linguistic selections point suggestively to their meanings: thecrisp ovals of the middle two letters in Pool presage the shapes of the Las Vegasswimming pools he would photograph for his Nine Swimming Pools book the follow-ing year (as if to confirm the aquatic reference, small trompe l'oeil droplets ofwater dot the lower half of the page), and most works in this series realizeRuscha's aspiration of "leading the viewer of my work into what the definition of

Ruscha.Left:Hand-Pencil-Bird. 1964.Right:Self. 1967.

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the word I've used is."63The soft granular surround of Dusty looks dusty; the uni-formly modulated background of Flaw is itself "flawed" by a small photorealisticbubble; Strip is drawn as if formed of a strip; and the semblance of pictorialspace created by what appear to be three-dimensional letter forms is an effect ofOptics.

Discovering gunpowder as a medium was an accident, Ruscha maintains,and he regrets his decision to acknowledge the material: "If I could do it all overagain, I would not tell anybody it was made of gunpowder, because people sus-pected some kind of stunt."64 Our knowledge of his medium is of interest less forits suggestion of a possible prank than as a material whose very name imparts ahint of sonority to the presumably silent space of the painting or drawing. "I guessthe idea of noise, of visual noise, somehow meant something to me," Ruscha said,and discusses art works that influenced him in sonic metaphors: Renato Bertelli'sContinuous Profile (Head of Mussolini) (1933) "broke the sound barrier for me" andWalker Evans's Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York(1931) "somehow evokes ...an aural sensation."65 The spotlights in his own Large Trademark"connote somethingas farfetched as trumpet sounds," and what he sought in Actual Sizewas "some audi-ble response from the painting, almost like when you go to a butcher store andorder a pound of bacon and the butcher slaps it down on the counter."66 Ruschaseems especially drawn to words about sound, music, and speaking, and theseattempts to conjure, as he put it, "noise in a painting without any noise" flag63. Ruschain Karlstrom,"Interviewwith EdwardRuscha,"p. 191. As is often the case with Ruscha, how-ever, this seeming affirmation of his interest in the connection between word and meaning is followed byits contradiction: "A lot of times the words are unimportant, their definitions are unimportant. Theybecome almost abstractobjects"(ibid.).64. Ruscha in Bourdon, "AHeap of Words,"p. 27. Gunpowder is 80 percent charcoal plus sulfur andpotassium nitrate.65. Ruscha in Blistene, "Conversationwith Ed Ruscha,"p. 128; Ruscha, "Ten Things That ImpressedMe,"www.sfmoma.org/membership/formembers.66. Ruscha in Wolf, "Nostalgia and New Editions," p. 264; Ruscha,"Ten Things That ImpressedMe" (ibid.).

Ruscha.Left:Bull, Pencil. 1964.Right:Strip. 1967.

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another aspect of his especially material mode of signification.67He paints the word"noise" several times in the first decade of his practice, and draws Opera,OperaSinger,Stardust, Music, and Jazz in short succession in the late 1960s. By imbuingwords about sound-language that denotes the inherently nonrepresentational-with substantive materiality, Ruscha lends body, form, and permanence to theimmaterial, inarticulate, and temporary: Slap,Oof,Smash,Scream.The halated whiteletters of Honk in three 1964 works cast sharply described shadows on soft back-grounds, as if the word's very suggestion of noise has imparted a tangibility to itsform.Ruscha explains that he was attracted to what he calls "loud words"for theircommunicative rawness:

When I first started painting it became an exercise in using, oh, gutturalutterings, monosyllabic explorations of words, like "smash," "boss,""won't." I've noticed when I look back on my work that most of myearly works had less of a fascination with the English language thanthey did withjust trying to imitate monosyllabicwords like "smash,""oof."They all were power words like that.... I think that I could have beeninvolved in painting an environment for what the word sounded like andlooked like at the same time.68

An emphasis on "guttural utterings"-the assonance of Ruscha's phrase betrays thevery poetic sensibility he is quick to disavow-was described by Russian formalisttheory as one function of poetry. Bois writes persuasively on the utility of Russianformalism for evaluating the liquid word series, and Ruscha'spreference for "powerwords" indeed recalls V. I. Shklovskii's argument that in poetry "the articulatory67. Ed Ruscha, "Ruscha on Ruscha" (lecture presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and SculptureGarden, Washington, D.C.,June 29, 2000). The best essay on sound and sense in Ruscha is Dave Hickey,"WackyMoliere Lines: A Listener's Guide to Ed-werdRew-shay," arkett 8 (December 1988), pp. 28-35.68. Ruscha in Karlstrom,"Interviewwith EdwardRuscha,"p. 191.

Ruscha. Honk. 1964.

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aspect of speech is undoubtedly important.Perhaps generally a great part of the delight ofpoetry consists in pronunciation, in the indepen-dent dance of the organs of speech."69Meaningis not distinct from articulation-the very utter-ance "oof' is its meaning-and the more physicalwork required for enunciation, the more force-fully is linguistic palpability communicated byspeaker and sensed by listener. Ruscha hopesviewers of his work experience this: "They'vemade a test with instruments in people'sthroats and in their mouths with their tongues,testing the pronunciation of words when theyread. I guess everyone tends to move theirtongue slightly towards the back of their headwhen they're reading softly to themselves.... Iwould like to think that people looking at thepainting will not pronounce it out loud, but willget this kind of throat motion."70 This "throatmotion" is stimulated by Ruscha's distinct prefer-ence for words beginning with plosive (p, d) andfricative (f s) consonants, which produce audiblenoises when sounded and require greater physi-cal effort on the part of the speaker than dosofter phonemes. Bois notes Ruscha's sustainedengagement with "everything that makes it[language] into matter," and an interest inlinguistic corporeality links the word worksGag, Chaw,Lisp, Tooth,Dimple, Voice,Air, Fatlip,Cut Lip, Gush, and Lips.71A sense of letters as palpable matter alsoemerges in the orthographic rearrangements of Ruscha's "satin"and "stain,""war"and "raw,""lisp"and "lips.""Lisp," n addition to being an anagram of the organwith which one lisps, is onomatopoeic: pronouncing it causes one to lisp. From theGreek for "wordmaking,"the term refers broadly to some fitness between a word'ssound and definition, and in rendering onomatopes, Ruscha again calls attention tothose instances of semantic opacity when verbal sound is imitative of meaning, or

69. Shklovskii in Boris Eichenbaum, "The Theory of the 'Formal Method,"' in Russian FormalistCriticism:FourEssays,trans. and with an introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln:Universityof Nebraska,1965), p. 109.70. Ruschain Karlstrom,"Interviewwith EdwardRuscha,"p. 193.71. Yve-AlainBois, "LiquidWords," n Bois and Rosalind Krauss,Formless:A User'sGuide(New York:Zone Books, 1997), p. 127.

Ruscha.Top:Gag. 1965. Bottom:Lisp. 1966.

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when ties between the two collapse.72 (Like Lichtenstein, his inspiration here wasthe comics, and, more generally, the "Zonk! Pow! Blam!" tactics of 1960s advertising;Pop itself is an onomatopoeic label.)73 Some of Ruscha's choices are onomatopes inthe strictest sense: Lisp, Honk, Ding, and Chop nearly mimic the sounds to which theyrefer, while others are onomatopes by association, their sounds linked to meaningby resemblance-Squirt and Gush, Flash and Smash, Gag and Slap. Still others operateat a final onomatopoeic remove: "exemplary" onomatopoeia occurs, one linguistexplains, "if a word conventionally denotes a sound," because a listener or reader is"predisposed to become aware of any acoustical properties of the word which resem-ble the sound, however minimal that resemblance might be."74 Nonlexicalonomatopes, the sonic connotations of these words nonetheless imbue them with asort of onomatopoeic aura-Noise, Scream,Radio, Explosion, Voltage,Volume.

Onomatopoeia is a relatively rare linguistic phenomenon; more commonrelations of resemblance between signifiers are found in rhymes, and Ruscha'srhythmic proclivities manifest an additional sensitivity to language as, and as asource of, material. "Rhyming words," he said, "seemed to have some power that Ifelt needed to be pictorialized."75 This "power" resides in the very pictoriality ofthese words: the urge to represent the rhyme derives from the dependence for itsfunction on the look (and sound) of the word. As Ruscha had not yet begun tocombine words in phrases and sentences, single words represented in the firstdecade of his practice form phonetic chains, creating strings of echoes across thatbody of work: Smash and Flash; Ice and Ace and Age and Space; Greatand GrapesandHey; Boss and Loss and Sauce; Foil and Royal and Spoil and Soil. And, over the courseof a few years, Su, Foo, Pool, Rooster, Ooo, Zoo, Music, Dew, Soup, Kooks, and Fuel.72. Saussure relegated such motivated ties between "sound pattern"and "concept"to the margins oflanguage; he dismissed onomatopes along with exclamations as exceptional, "of comparativelylittle or noimportance": "Onomatopoeic words might be held to show that a choice of signal is not alwaysarbitrary.But such words are never organic elements of a linguistic system. Moreover,they are far fewer than is gen-erally believed" (Saussure, Course,p. 69). Jonathan Culler offers a compelling reappraisal,and reversal,ofSaussure's insistence on the arbitrarinessof the sign: "When Saussure defends the principle of the arbi-trarynature of the sign against motivation, the sentence in which he dismissesonomatopoeia as a delusoryappearance displaysremarkable effects of motivation, suggesting that discourse may be deviously drivenby precisely the sort of phenomena he wishes to exclude from language. 'Wordssuch asfouet ['whip'] andglas ['knell'],' he writes, 'maystrike [peuventfrapper]ome ears as having a certain suggestive sonority;butto see that this is in no wayintrinsic to the words themselves, it suffices to look at their Latin origins.' Fouetand glas both strike the ear, perhaps, because whips and bells strike: the term for what words do as theymake a noise seems punningly generated by the examples, or the choice of examples is generated by whatwords are said to do to the ear. This sentence, working to remotivate and thus link together supposedlyarbitrarysigns, displaysa principle by which discourse frequently operates and suggests that arbitrarysignsof the linguistic system may be part of a larger discursive system in which effects of motivation, demotiva-tion, and remotivation are alwaysoccurring. Relations between signifiers or between signifiers and signi-fieds can alwaysproduce effects, whether conscious or unconscious, and this cannot be set aside as irrele-vant to language" (Culler, "The Call of the Phoneme," in On Puns, ed. Culler [Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1988], pp. 12-13).73. Peter Benchley, "SpecialReport:The Storyof Pop,"Newsweek(April 25, 1966), pp. 58-59.74. I borrow these categories from Hugh Bredin, "Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a LinguisticPrinciple,"NewLiteraryHistory:AJournalofTheory ndInterpretation7, no. 3 (Summer 1996), p. 557.75. Ruscha in Ed RuschaandPhotography,. 268.

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Ruscha is equally gifted with rhymes that look like rhymes (Raw, Chaw, Flaw), andthose that must be sounded for effect (from a sketchbook page, "waters" and"daughters"). His rhymes, he notes, usually "present us with a set of clashing sub-jects and imagery,"76 but some words partake of semantic as well as phoneticresemblance: the ribbon words Tee Tee, WeeWee,and Pee Pee, for example, or Dusty,Gush, Trust, Tulsa, and Rustic Pines, which bring to mind the pastorality of Ruscha'snative Oklahoma.

Rhyme's sibling, or perhaps its offspring, is the pun. Both feature, in GeoffreyHartman's equation, "two meanings competing for the same phonemic space or asone sound bringing forth semantic twins."77 A conjunction of two different butsimilar-sounding words, the pun demonstrates, like the index and the onomatope,that "there is meaning in the coincidence of the signifier, and [that] an absoluteseparation between the functions of the signifier and signified is impossible."78The impulse to motivate implicit in the pun is evident early on in Ruscha: his 1962holiday card, showing two dancing chefs, reads "Have a Soup Super Season!" andhe was likely aware of the pun involved in naming two very similar works Dublin.Others are more explicit: the cover of the trompe l'oeil pulp novel pictured inNoise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western features "Complete Quick-TriggerStories," such as "Son of a Gunman," by writers named "Gunnison Steele" and76. Ibid.77. Geoffrey Hartman, "The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature," nhis Beyond ormalism:iterary ssays1958-1970 (New Haven:YaleUniversityPress, 1970), p. 347.78. Derek Attridge, "Unpackingthe Portmanteau,or Who's Afraid of FinnegansWake?"n OnPuns,pp.143-44. See also Culler's introduction to this volume (pp. 1-16): "What the functioning of puns revealsabout language is, first, the importance of the urge to motivate, which comes to seem a powerful mecha-nism of language rather than a corruption that might be excluded. Preciselybecause the linguistic sign isarbitrary,discourse worksincessantly,deviously to motivate" (p. 11).

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"Tom Gun."Trompe l'oeil is itself a sort of visual pun, in the illusionistically ren-dered object's pretense of occupying the same perceptual space as an actualobject, as are the bird-pencil, hand-pencil, and worm-pencil transmogrificationsin the birds, fish, and offspring series. (Dave Hickey, having observed, as Ruschalikely did, that "worm"is just a letter away from "word,"writes: "I've always sus-pected ... the early bird paintings to be the product of some rhyming slang, like'birds + worms = words,' creating not real birds but birds as words who 'sign'rather than 'sing."')79 In the liquid word series, Ruscha paints both Eye (1968)and U (1969), a pairing which evokes the homophones "I" and "you,"while the1970 prints Mewsand Dues echo his earlier depictions of Music and Dew. Oncewe become aware of Ruscha's lambent punning sensibility, it is hard not tonotice how many of his words have not only protean meanings and parts ofspeech but also alternate spellings-Great, Steel,Hey, Air, Sure (the list is long).Here again the artist is evasive about his objectives, claiming no pun intended."Sometimes I'll accidentally let something slip, but I've never consciously triedto do a pun,"he said, "except for the word 'damage' on fire."80Ruscha does concedethat he may be punning unintentionally: "Some of these things are actually doneby me unconsciously. Other people have come along and pointed out variousthings that have surprised me, so then I think that they maybe are really a partof my whole working habit."81 His citation of dreams as the impetus for severalworks, finally, recollects Freud's connection between the dream's skewed logicof indirect representation, condensation, and displacement and the mecha-nisms of the joke.82

*

To conclude an analysis of linguistic opacity in Ruscha's work in 1970 is atonce fitting and arbitrary. Frustrated with "the idea of putting a skin on a can-vas," he stopped painting for more than a year, and the early 1970s saw severalnew directions for his art: the use of organic materials as medium, the beginningof extensive work in prints and other editioned formats, and the shift from79. Hickey,"WackyMoliere Lines,"p. 33.80. Ruscha in Dave Hickey, "AvailableLight,"in The Worksof EdwardRuscha,exh. cat. (New York andSan Francisco:Hudson Hills Press and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982), p. 29. This disavowalcontradicts what Ruscha'sbrother Paulwrites about their family'sattraction to puns: "From he blood-Irishinfluence of her love of words and poetry, and her great sense of humor, Mother left a legacy of our feast-ing on the sounds of, and often enough, the double-meanings of words.Adding to that, we always ufferedthe frustrations of not quite paying attention through some distraction, or of hearing each other incor-rectly; yet after our initial confusion, we would madly laugh at repeating what we thought we had heard. Ifeel those early trompe'oreille,ool-the-ear miscommunications are still alive and active in us today"(PaulRuscha, "Some Comments on Ed Ruscha's Birds, Fish and Offspring Paintings,"in Ed Ruscha:Birds,Fishand Offspring,exh. cat. [NewYork:C & MArts,2002], n.p.)81. Ruscha in Karlstrom,"Interviewwith EdwardRuscha,"p. 157.82. "The techniques of jokes indicate the same processes that are known to us as peculiarities of thedream work"(Sigmund Freud,Jokesand TheirRelation o theUnconscious,rans.James Strachey [New York:Norton, 1960], p. 166).

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depicting single words to longer phrases and sentences.83 Yet the screenprintseries News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues (1970) also engages the idea of thenontransparent sign that marks Ruscha's first decade of work-in the relation ofthe words' definitions to their typeface and material; in their rhymes, both auraland visual; in the comic self-referentiality of picturing the words Stewand Brewasstews and brews-and prefigures its subsequent development.84 The rhymescontinue and multiply, both within single works (HostilePolyester, 977) and acrossseries (Sweets, Meats, Sheets, 1975; Metro, Petro, Neuro, Psycho, 1998), and a sense ofletters as palpable persists in works that reference stuttering and stammering(Pr-Pr-Process Food, 1976; I Don't Want No S-Silicones or No Accidental S-Sideburns,1979), that spell out words phonetically (Kay-Eye-Double-S,979), misspell them(Chili Draft, 1974), and parse them humorously (Elect .. tricity,1979); that evokecolloquial speech, dialects, and slang (WassA GuinMo? UDig Me?,1985); and thatdepict palindromes (Tulsa Slut,Lion in Oil,both 2002). What links these projects isnot an intention to picture communicative failure or represent the signifier as anempty cipher, but instead to figure the word as simultaneously physical object andbearer of meaning, and to render the concretization of meaning in and as form.As Ruscha said about the phrase in a recent work, "this had to be painted so Icould hammer down the words."85Ruscha is not a Cratylist, Bois maintains, and indeed the debate in Plato'sCratylus esolved long ago on the side of Hermogenes' conventionalist position inthat dialogue, that words do not resemble or embody their meanings. YetSocrates concedes to Cratylus, and subsequent linguistic theory has shown, thatinstances of verbal mimesis exist, and Ruscha demonstrates a sustained attractionto such instances, as well as a consistent urge to motivate the linguistic sign bywayof foregrounding its materiality,despite-and perhaps because of-the arbitrarynature of most signifying. This attention to the matter of the sign is manifest inother aspects of his work: we witness in the first decade of his practice a consid-ered inquiry into the lingering material validity of pictorial tropes (process andaccident, flatness, the integrity of the picture plane) that had been emptied ofresonance in Abstract Expressionism's bathetic wane, and the stubborn physicalityof his artist's books resists full absorption into those histories of Conceptual artthat emphasize the ontological and institutional status of the art work over its

83. Ruscha in "A Conversation Between Walter Hopps and Ed Ruscha, September 1992," in EdRuscha:RomancewithLiquids,p. 102; reprinted in LeaveAnyInformationat theSignal, pp. 312-28.84. The series, made in London, was executed in typically "English"foods-chutney, baked beans,Branston pickle; the Gothic font is "an Old English type set";and the words recall the place where theywere made: Mewsbecause "greens here are very beautiful," News because "England is a tabloid-mindedcountry," Pews to conjure the Church of England, Brewsas a reference to "English beverages-beer,stout, ale," Stews or "the idea of British cooking, with little rooms, smoky kitchens, and fireplaces,"andDues for its evocation of "the story of Robin Hood, unfair taxation, the British protest" (Ruscha in SiriEngberg, "Out of Print: The Editions of Ed Ruscha," in EdwardRuscha:Editions1959-1999, CatalogueRaisonne, ol. 2 [Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999], pp. 26, 29).85. Ruscha, lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, September 26, 2004.

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formal and perceptual components. Ruscha's preoccupation with materialitymay render him unique within Pop, yet it also suggests, at a moment when themovement seems to have a renewed critical currency, the merit of consideringthe specificity of Pop's individual practices and the referentiality, even the self-referentiality, of its signs.

ed ruscha and the language

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