SEEING AND READING.(Ed Ruscha)(Biography)

Ed Ruscha, whose work is currently on view at the Whitney in a retrospective of his drawings, "Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors," and in a show of his well-known photographic books and far less familiar photographs, "Ed Ruscha and Photography," is one of the four most innovative and influential American artists to have emerged in the nineteen-sixties, along with Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Bruce Nauman. This is not a self-evident statement. Warhol, Judd, and Nauman modelled new relations of art to the world which continue to determine philosophies, methods, and forms of contemporary practice. Ambitious young artists must still come to terms with them, much as modern painters had to keep contending with Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse. Ruscha's eminence is comparatively ghostly. His gnomic paintings and drawings of words and phrases and his recurrent images of, among other things, gas stations, tacky architecture, pills, mountains, sailing ships, the Hollywood sign, and "The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire" have always struck almost everybody as terrific but perhaps lightweight. For much of his forty-year career, he has been patronized as a Los Angeles--that is, a marginal--artist. What's apparent now is that his work belongs to the art of the past half century as oxygen does to air.

Ruscha was born in Nebraska, in 1937, and raised in Oklahoma City. He moved to Los Angeles in 1956 and studied at the Disney-sponsored Chouinard Art Institute (later CalArts), intending to become a commercial artist. Exposure to advanced art, notably that of Jasper Johns, inspired him to direct his gifts as a draftsman and pictorial designer to experimental, poetic ends. The choice quickly yielded brilliant results, as "Sweetwater" (1959), the earliest work in the Whitney shows, testifies. Eight green ink splashes and four blue ones, in three horizontal rows, occupy a rectangle above the title word, which, like the rectangle, is crisply printed in letterpress. This schematic landscape juxtaposes signs of spontaneity (nature) and deliberation (culture) with swift, amusing elegance. It points toward the more integral effect of Ruscha's mature word drawings, such as renderings, in graphite or gunpowder, of "lisp" in script formed of a ribbon of paper or "pool" in puddled liquid. The effect of such works is a tantalizing standoff, in the brain, between looking and reading.

You can't look at a word and read it at the same time, any more than you can simultaneously kneel and jump. You may think you can, because the toggle between the two mental operations is so fast. Graphic advertisers play that switch back and forth. Ruscha learned to freeze it in mid-throw, causing a helpless, not unpleasant buzz at the controls of consciousness. At one extreme, he intensifies looking with beautiful texture and color, sometimes in strange stains (tobacco, lettuce, blood). At the other, he electrifies reading with verbal wit. Bodiless voices declare, in capital letters, "they called her Styrene," "honey, I twisted through more damn traffic today," and "brave men run in my family." There are plays on orthography ("he enjoys the co. of women"), scraps of commercial babble ("n' dinette sets"), resounding nonsense ("one night stand forever"), unwitting portents ("discontinued china"), and plausible-sounding but absurd entities, of which a favorite of mine is "aerosol particles suspended in haze." You can't suspend anything in haze, because haze is a condition, not a substance. But the phrase's ring of scientific truth, sold by the beauty of the words and of their ground rubbed with dry pigments (in black and a dispirited tan), won't quit. A concurrent show of new drawings at the uptown Gagosian Gallery sports palindromes, among them "senile felines," "starbrats," "borrow or rob," and "Tulsa slut."

For seven months in 1961, Ruscha travelled widely in Europe, driving a tinny Citroen Deux Chevaux. It was a voyage of discovery, memorialized in "Ed Ruscha and Photography" by a revelatory series of small black-and-white photographs taken with a two-lens camera (the kind you look down into, at a pane of frosted glass, to view the subject). Ruscha was transfixed by signs ("Galerie d'Arts ...