Ruscha himself has a
cryptic, but intriguing comment right at the end of the book: “Sometimes found
words are the most pure because they have nothing to do with you. I take things
as I find them. A lot of these things come from the noise of everyday life.”
End of comment.
So far as I know, Ruscha has
not undertaken to publish these works as writing, nor in the context of
writing. As visual art, these works inhabit that territory that utilizes
language for its own purposes. Its closest kin in that vein may be the signage
of Jenny
Holzer, the paintings of Lawrence Weiner, or the poster paintings of
Barbara Krueger, but the more densely textual pseudo-philosophical musings of
Joseph Kosuth and Art Language aren’t entirely unrelated either. Ruscha’s
prints and paintings make use of color and the illusions of depth and texture
in ways that Holzer’s do not and his works often lack the overt political commentary
one finds in her work and in that of Krueger’s. At its most plain, a Ruscha
work might consist of white sans serif letters centered against a black
background:
A HEAVY
SHOWER
OF SCREWS
or
THICK BLOCKS
OF
MUSICAL FUDGE
or
WARM
AUDITORIUM
While Holzer has executed
some pieces etched into benches, a form that has to recall the (literally)
concrete poems of Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay,
Ruscha’s droll texts strike me in many ways being better writing. If, that is, they are writing at all. The last text above,
for example, makes great use of the recurrence of the a, r and m sounds (not to
mention the echo of the w one hears
in the two instances of the u), an
attention to the smallest of details that might be more apt to associate with
the poetry of Robert Grenier. Microwriting such as this can invoke every
pleasure one expects from the best of poetry. The first two pieces above aren’t
bad either – both use the same strategy of invoking a single term that is “out
of context” in its phrase (screws and
musical), which functions to set the
language around it into a kind of relief, classic demonstrations of what the
Russian formalists called ostrananie,
Brecht “the alienation effect,” and which Pound characterized as “making it
new.”
In addition to reminding me
at moments of Grenier, some of the more visually complex of Ruscha’s pieces,
where richly textured “3D” words float in idealized pastel skies, remind me of
how Hannah Weiner used to describe her visual hallucinations, words that would
appear on people’s foreheads that to her seemed to be composed in “dog fur” or
similar materials. Weiner used these messages to create her “clairvoyant”
works, although that aspect of such found language is not carried through her
writing – the closest she gets is to occasionally “erase” some lines of certain
letters.
All of which makes Ed
Ruscha’s texts function as an intriguing test of the boundaries of writing –
how can a lone word such as “fud,” written in what
looks like white ribbon on an intense red surface (onto which the letters cast
shadows) function as a poem? It can / It can’t / It
can / It can’t – like a Necker cube or other optical
illusions, the text strobes in and out of the realm of literature (though it
always remains within the realm of the visual). It may be that this flicker
effect is precisely Ed Ruscha’s contribution to writing.
Some of Ruscha’s word works
can be sampled on the web at the following sites:
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Golden
Words
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>The Mountain
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>News, Brews, Mews, Stews,
Pews and Dues
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Street Meets
Avenue
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Now
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Mud
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Selected Works
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Miracle
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Angel
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Evil
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Waves
of Advancing Technology
