Ed Ruscha at C and M Arts and Gagosian - New York - Brief Article

In 1961, Ed Ruscha traveled to Europe where, famously, he remained largely indifferent to the great art of the museums. One of the few objects that attracted his attention was Renato Bertelli's well-known head of Mussolini, a Futurist sculpture which Ruscha saw in London's Imperial War Museum. The work's fascination for him lay in its unique multiplication of its subject's likeness: essentially, a two-dimensional profile of II Duce was rotated 360 degrees on a vertical axis so that the result, which somewhat resembles a chess pawn, presents two back-to-back profiles of Mussolini, regardless of the angle at which it is viewed. This memory of uncanny mirroring seems to lurk behind Ruscha's most recent series of canvases at Gagosian, views of mountains that are split down the middle into two halves, one the reverse of the other. The visual "trick" of these paintings is soon noticed (some works, such as Step on No Pets, 2002, even have a vestigial line running down the center of the canvas), and this reversal motif is reinforced by the artist's addition of palindromes--phrases that are identical whether read forward or backward--painted in block letters across the dramatic scenery.

Several of these palindromes, as in Tulsa Slut (2002), have mildly smutty or sexual references, and closer inspection of these paintings in particular reveals an erotic topography. emerging from the rocks and snow of the mountaintops: read down the middle, these images unmistakably suggest female genitalia. This evocation does not appear to be specifically sought by Ruscha, for early examples from this series (see Never Odd or Even, 2001) lack these hidden naughty bits. Rather, it seems to have emerged as an effect of the doubling strategy, much like the patterns in a Rorschach test. Once he discovered it, however, he happily exploited it, and in the end one is tempted to say that, for Ruscha, every mountain is a mons veneris.

The images of mountains themselves are unremarkable, appropriated from banal photographs, all taken head-on; they are, in other words, anything but sublime. Their fascination derives wholly from the mirroring device. (Three very large paintings do not utilize this doubling and, interestingly, make use of more dramatic mountain imagery; one, Clarence Jones, 2002, is a tremendous enlargement from a Western painting, with even the original signature of "Robt. Wms." reproduced in the lower right-hand corner.) In the rear gallery, a large selection of recent paintings of books and actual, altered books reinforced this sense of the picture plane as a site of textual and visual punning. After all, what do the open leaves of a book resemble if not the mirror images found in the paintings hung in the front gallery? The mirror and the book, open leaves and spread legs, amalgamate into a complex set of displacements and metaphors.

Ruscha here reveals himself to be closely attuned to Surrealism--not the Surrealism of ostentatious sexual weirdness (featured recently in the Met's blockbuster show "Surrealism: Desire Unbound," which was dismissed by most critics), but the Surrealism of the uncanny, of the strangely familiar image and its iterations. In other words, he understands Surrealism as a matter not of iconography but of formal strategies inseparable from the pulse of desire.

C&M Arts's magnificent display of the artist's rarely shown 1963-65 series "Birds, Fish and Offspring" offered an earlier incarnation of his fascination with representational play. With images taken from the likes of American naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, Ruscha constructed an unlikely group of natural history narratives. Angry Because It's Plaster, Not Milk (1965) retells the myth of Zeuxis while warping our sense of scale; but the most remarkable paintings in this series have birds seamlessly metamorphosing into pencils (as in Birds, Pencils, 1965). Those pencils are familiar from other, better-known paintings by Ruscha, such as the contemporary Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963). All these works--with their fauna, drawing instruments and adolescent pop-culture emblems--seem in retrospect to evoke childhood and its obsessive fascinations. That atmosphere is if anything heightened in the "Birds, Fish and Offspring" series, where the iconic words that were already a Ruscha trademark are absent, leaving these homely representatives of the animal kingdom as monumental, haunting presences in the deep space of the canvas. Even if we cannot immediately fathom the unconscious logic of his transformations or enter into his private associative universe, it all makes perfect visual sense. It is a variety of optical humor and punning that younger artists such as Bruce Nauman would quickly adopt and exploit to great effect only a short time later. Almost 30 years on, Ruscha continues to mine this vein of deadpan Surrealism very convincingly.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group