Art Journal #61: Ed Ruscha at Hayward Gallery

Good retrospective show (retro always easy to please) spanning 50 years of Ruscha's career, focusing on his paintings. His use of words for his art and how it evolved was fascinating! One more artist that I add to my list of "painting with words" then!

It goes from the early years of just playing with sound, font, design, to embedding words of little (and sometimes a lot) of meaning in paintings with diverse backgrounds, from LA night areial view to "idea of ideas of mountains" that's only in our imagination.

While he's stuck to painting words consistently over his various works, every series felt new, there's a new interpretation (or explanation by curators/critics) on why he did it that way, so it still felt innovative even after 50 years. Lesson: so, I guess if an artist found his vice, there's really no need to change? Had to say I look across the 70-80 odd pieces of work, and found a common thread, but indeed felt that there's progression and new ideas in every series.

Want to pick up the catalog, but felt its not very well made by Hayward, and the works are reduced to relatively unexciting photos on that picture-book scale. Part of the power of his work came from the at least 1.5x2.5m canvas he painted on.

One set of his work that I found particularly interesting. They are recent pieces that are "answers" to his previous works from about a decade ago. So he will paint similar buildings (in this case these are factories or schools) but with the old words taken out and new ones put in. Its meant to be a reflection of the change of times - or sometimes, how little things have changed. Like the idea - and hey, what's better than "redoing your own work" but giving it a whole new meaning and still being admired for that?

PS - one more to add to the list of "artist using words" is Baldessari that I saw at Tate. Interesting conceptual artist that question what is art - eg, he will design a trivial scene, asked someone to paint it for him, ask a sign painter to paint in his name, and that's Baldessari work! Another one is a growing piece, where he started in 1968, hiring someone else to paint in words describing when this piece is show (eg, Shown in MOMA, NY on Dec 1, 1976)...and when the canva is filled up, he'd add one more, and it's a growing piece that is never completed, started 30 years ago!