Confessions of Ed Ruscha
A new Oklahoma Contemporary exhibit focuses on the artist’s Catholic story.
Some 20 years ago, then-graduate student Alexandra Schwartz began writing about artist Ed Ruscha. The California-based artist, 83, who grew up in Oklahoma, became the focus of her dissertation, which she published as a book. She penned another book of Ruscha interviews, for which she spent a good deal of time with him in his studio.
“What first struck me about it is I found it really inscrutable,” Schwartz told me about Ruscha’s artworks, for an article published earlier this week in National Catholic Reporter (which ARTnews also mentions). “I thought they were really puzzling and fascinating, but I did not understand them, and I really wanted to understand them.”
Schwartz, co-curator of an exhibit of Ruscha’s art on view at Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, found Ruscha’s work humorous in addition to inscrutable.
“His work is very funny,” she told me. “There’s always a different layer of it to be explored. It’s also very smart about verbal language and the nature of representation, including both verbal and visual language.”
Ruscha was not nearly as well known then as he is today. Schwartz got to know some of his works very well in grad school, as the library let students check artworks out. (Today, Ruscha’s art is in special collections and museums.)
“I had the physical experience of handling them, and I remember taking ‘Every Building on the Sunset Strip’ and stretching it out on the library floor,” she says. “It was an area where the grad students had their carrels, and there was no one else there. I was able to see the whole thing.”
Some may see the works as child’s play, or at least a few clicks on Photoshop. But Schwartz learned from handling them that “they’re in fact very meticulously handcrafted,” she says. “In ‘Every Building on the Sunset Strip,’ he spliced all those photographs together himself by hand. Of course there was no digital technology in the 60s that would have done that for him.”
The NCR piece focuses on one of the sections of the Oklahoma Contemporary show, which addresses Ruscha’s Catholic story. Here again is the link to my National Catholic Reporter article “Ed Ruscha, the most famous Catholic artist few Catholics know.”
Bravo...insightful and balanced. I have ruminated on "Oklahoma-ness" and its cultural implications (not to mention spirituality and art) and this was terrific on both accounts.