Reviews
Think of Ruscha's oeuvre as a bizarre, decades-long bit about failures to communicate. It's the contemporary-art equivalent to "Who's on First?": an extended gag in which meaning slips between words like oil running across water., Sassy, reverent, diffident, disarming: an unprecedented survey of the artist's career is an enticement into looking at the unremarkable., The excellent catalog to the exhibition features a revealing cover...Could there be a more succinct introduction to Ruscha's six decades of exceptional art?, Giving viewers an encounter with something that may not mean anything at all, or be a concept that is so overdetermined as to be impermeable, these are parts of art too - parts that Ruscha excels at like few others., There is very little in it not to like. Anyone can connect to a picture with no fixed meaning; like the dual-action exhibition title, every Ruscha is a two-way street., Just about everything that Mr. Ruscha has ever put his hand to is--radically and conventionally at the same time--simply very good-looking., If you think you hate conceptual art, see this show. Chances are you hate bad conceptual art. Ruscha made drawings using gunpowder and paintings of maple syrup and beans, but few image-makers have so rarely lapsed into gimmickry, and even fewer have got such consistent laughs., The schemas of many of Ruscha's drawings and paintings establish his idealization of how information could be conveyed in a flash., As this survey shows, Ruscha grew out of the temptation to such polarizing jibing to become the finely sharpened commentator in his work that both the State of the Union and artworld, as a whole, deserve., Ed Ruscha, intrepid explorer of language and image, prefigured a digital culture of words on the move. A retrospective at MoMA shines new light on his groundbreaking career: the books, the paintings, the room made of chocolate., The keen observations and careful execution of these paintings speak to a maniacal tendency in America toward anger, billboards that are empty of sentences but have plenty to say.
