Do you know the way of Ed Ruscha?

I managed to catch the Ed Ruscha retrospective at MoMA this week right before it closed (a Casey hallmark: plan to go see a show and then wait until the last possible minute to do so).

Ruscha’s pieces have always tickled that part of my brain that likes to laugh at what I’m seeing. “Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head,”¹ he once said. And I realized as I drifted in the liminal early-morning sleep zone this morning why this was so.

As a writer, I’m always trying to set a scene with words. As a roadtripper, I’m always drawn to the poignancy in everyday places and things. As an artist, I’m always attuned to the impact of the visual.

In the work of Ed Ruscha,² all these bits coalesce.

His oeuvre spans so much of what lights me up: the winking humor of wordplay; the vernacular of American architecture; signage, typography, and hand-lettering; and the Pop ethos of spotlighting the otherwise mundane.

And his stuff is funny!

His artists’ books are some of my favorites: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, featuring photos of, yes, 26 gas stations along Route 66 from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. Every Building on the Sunset Strip, which expanded into a decades-long project of documenting the architectural changes along the famous street. Drive it virtually and be amazed!

If you can’t laugh at him choosing to use this work for his first public commission in New York City, then maybe Ruscha is not the artist for you. But he is for me.

If you’re in Ruscha’s adopted hometown of Los Angeles, the retrospective moves to LACMA and opens in April. It’ll be fire.³

1. Henri Matisse, on the other hand, once declared that art should be “something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” And I argue that art can be both! ↩︎
2. Or Cowboy Ruscha, as we affectionately refer to him around here. It’s a long and dumb story but I’ll tell it if people want me to. ↩︎
3. I hope he appreciates that terrible pun. ↩︎