The King of California Cool

Pop Art master Ed Ruscha has never been hotter, with an astonishing 50-year retrospective in London and exhibit interpreting Kerouac’s On the Road. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

When Ed Ruscha first showed in London in 1973, the invitations offered viewers a little guidance: “Ed-werd Rew-Shay” read the card created by the artist. Nearly 40 years later, Ruscha is still up to his old verbal tricks as two new shows in London—a retrospective at Hayward Gallery and an interpretation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at Gagosian—make plain.

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Perhaps that thoughtful spell explains the sense of continuity in the 50 years of canvases gathered in the Hayward’s extraordinary, and extensive, exhibition (running through January 10): the first retrospective to focus exclusively on Ruscha’s paintings.

• Dennis Hopper’s Sixties

• Art Beast: The Best of Art, Photography, and DesignThe rooms collecting Ruscha’s work from the 1960s contain his almost gleeful sense of having found a vacuum to playfully inhabit. The space between the meaningful and the meaningless is endlessly re-made, from his brash orange Annie painting to Noise, Oof, Faith and Purity—great empty slogans (their power learnt by the ad-artist) promising everything and delivering a sense of nothingness that’s giddily evocative. His materials, as he has noted, are the detritus that nobody really wants but which surrounds us all—be it endless advertising or ugly buildings, or his ubiquitous Standard gas stations. While initially this might have seemed an overtly American landscape, the rest of the world has caught up, as he quips in fairytale language in another painting showing LA’s glinting progress, “faster than a beanstalk.” That vacuum has opened up, the more mechanized the world has become. In an interview in the catalogue, Ruscha talks of his “irritation” at iPhones and computers, and the fact that he doesn’t have either. Their hollow burble, though, has long been his prophecy.

As a result, he has become synonymous with an acute sense of the banal, of a world as shallow and flimsy as the famous white sign he depicted in his 1977 painting, The Back of Hollywood. The city's where he's made his working life, and his subject, he has said, is “illusions.” The sign’s huge block letters onto which a million hopes and fantasies are projected, are revealed to be nothing more than grubby wooden structures: letters on stilts. That sense of disillusion calls to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald (and his sense of artifice as a great American subject) and of David Lynch, who has cited Ruscha a major influence. The Back of Hollywood also recalls the earlier Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights. Here, the 20th Century Fox logo is transformed from a glittering talisman of escapism to a common ruler-drawn child’s diagram.