Material Fictions and Highway Codes


Sometime in the summer of 1956, Ed Ruscha decided to road-test a typewriter - a Royal (Model "X") - by hurling it out of the Window of a speeding Buick. In an action that elided the graphic languages of movement and thought, the experiment proved not very much, only perhaps what every frustrated Writer already knows ~ that you can't drive a typewriter to Work. Needless to say, the instrument itself Was a Write-off in the fullest and most ironic sense of the term. But, as an act of dead~ pan comedic instruction, Royal Road Test suggested more than just the egress of literacy as it impacted on the asphalt.

Documented as if it were a crash-site, the test collided the automotive and the typographic, merging as it were the lines of the page with those of the road. The results were both typomotive and autographic. Just as the material substance of language was speeded up to the terminal velocity of disintegration, so our under~ standing of it slows to the point of poetic inertia. Like the Symbolists, Surrealists, and Dadaists before him, Ruscha demonstrates that language is fluid, that even the material form of the word - the letters that make it up - is par of an unending game of generating meaning, none of which is final. The words and phrases which inhabit Ruscha's evacuated landscapes continue to reflect this encounter. Driven out of the control of narrative, they represent the tread pattern of a culture skidding inexorably away from history and the pursuit of meaning.

Ruscha's own voyage to the edge of history, otherwise known as southern California, took place ten years before when he migrated west from Oklahoma a accompanied by a friend, the writer Mason Williams. The journey from the heart lands to the City of Angels retraced the passage of the Beats along the telegraph poles and toothpick time of Route 66. But where the Beat diaspora was a flight from the unleavened materialism that wound up with Whitman's "fabled damned," cadenced in the delirious prose and headlong rush of the open road, of jumped box, 01 Jump cars and hitched rides, Ruscha's pilgrimage Was celebrated in the cooled-off hipster language of the documentary banal.

Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, 1965, Was the first of sixteen kindred publication that included Royal Road Test. It became the record of the stops and fill-ups of a roundtrip, perhaps the symbolic Calvary of a lapsed Catholic whose stations belonged not to the cross but to the gasoline architecture of Bob's Service, Phillips 66. Standard, Flying A, and so on, ending appropriately enough at the Fina Station of Groom, Texas. "Exactly as good as the best" runs the graphic advertisement for Ruscha's pop Golgotha. Like the later canvases, which the artist once described as being places of "no size," the idiogrammatic signage of the gasoline religion defies the scale of language by transforming its meanings into an abstract real estate of vacant lots, blank pages, and elapsed time. Coherence is slowly unravelled along the fault lines of California's asphalt seams.

The Royal Road Test, carried out three years later, suggested a similar roadside disintegration of literary form. The Royal, as the name suggests, was the ur-type-writer of its day. Its staccato rhythms syncopate the terse prose style of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and the school of L.A. noir. These rhythms hang With the generic language of the detective novel like a phonetic Morse signalling the ambiguities of fact and fiction from across seas of uncharted, sunlit corruption. Huscha's own book , in place of the pulped cover of the detective genre, bears only a trademark graphic - a heraldic ROYAL standing in for the displacement of literary content that has taken place Within: "It was too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation; carrying Within itself, the seeds of its own destruction," reads the parodic inscription on the inside cover. Only in the subsequent pages of the book do We get to see the object of Ruscha's destructive attentions a parnassus of keys and actions - transfer its impact from the page to the road.

The rest of the book proceeds in the deadpan manner of a forensic document. The test, We gather, took place on Sunday August 21, 1966, at 5.07 pm The car, a 1965 Le Sabre, was travelling southwest on Highway 91 at 90 m.p.h. The weather was "perfect" The action itself Was never shown but rather only inferred as the expressive connection between image and text. Debris strews the pregnant pauses and empty pages in much the same way as it does the desert. Captions - "Piece of Ribbon and Frame Shift Assembly (found furthest from point of impact)," or "Line Lock Assembly With Link" - tag the documentary evidence in the manner of a courtroom exhibit. Ruscha plays to our suspicions, allowing us to look behind the facade of language, only to confirm what we believe we already know. Just as Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust imagined something "truly monstrous" crawling out of the accumulated fakery of the Californian landscape, so does Buscha offer the illusion of emptiness as the Exhibit A of paranoid projection.

If the linguistic potential of the gas stations belongs to the pop dream of the road elevated to the level of static advertisement, Royal Road Test suggests the dispersal of such potential - its literal meaning curbed by the velocity of travel. And While the symbolic resonance of such an action might have suggested itself as part of some latter-day Luddite protestation - the destruction of the writing machine with its subtly implied sovereignty over the written word - the carefully assembled documentary evidence simply redistributes the facts of language across the pictorial rather than narrative, field. Ruscha apears to offer nothing more than a wry presentation of empty facts. Yet the facts themselves prove continually elusive. Nouns, like Hollywood, are apt to take on the volatility of verbs. Reshaped as interruptions, rather than agents of communication, they refuse the fill-up of standard octane meaning. Crossing the lines of signification, Ruscha attenuates the spaces between images and words, between words and things, even as he collapses them.

The punning and double entendre in the relationship between the pictorial and the literal continues to shape Ruscha's art. Seeking to provide dimension to words, the shape of the canvas often reflects the horizontal and vertical hold of the language it contains. In a series made over the last two decades, the cinernascopic format compounds the literal and the lateral in a sweep, landscaping the text into the form of a title credit. Like the 1966 book Every Building on Sunset Strip, these are Works to be cruised as much as they are scrutinised. Their visual perspective rejects the static easel tradition in favour of the mobile screening of the car win~ dow. Works such as Hell ½ Way Heaven, 1988, or You and Ale, 1982, literally put the viewer in the driver's seat. Unable to take in everything at once, we switch back and forth between an advancing present and a receding past, caught in the no-man's-land between windscreen and rear-view mirror. Panning between words, we reproduce the experience of driving, a spectacular form of amnesia in which everything is forgotten as it is discovered. Like road signs, Ruscha's texts speak the language of distance Without measurement. Superimposing the rear view on forward motion, their tense is the perpetual present.

The semaphore of fragmented messages that appear, disappear, and reappear across these deserted fields are drawn from the collective memory bank of songs, advertisements, billboards, brand names, platitudes, and the other disembodied voices that make up the langue trouvé of the motile World. The paintings them~ selves act as vacant lots open to the decorous potential of the disembodied voice. Talk Radio, 1987, floats the suggestion of disjointed conversation over the luminous grid of a cityscape devoid of narrative architecture, a silent, alienated immensity Where the lights are on but no-one's home. The metropolis depicted here takes on the character of a lysergic phantasm Where invisible voices begin their slow drift across the retinal field. Just as the buckling mountain of Swollen Tune, 1997, impresses its own sound of music over the romantic sublime, so does Talk Radio suggest a yearning for the timbre of a voice to rise through its visual static. To the eloquent emptiness of the image, material language lends its onomatopoeic swell.

Phrases, half-truths, clichés, advertising haikus, and plain talk float into the image ether. Cocktails of cosmic idealism and conceptual pragmatism, the meanings of Ruscha's paintings can be oblique and deadly literal at the same time: "I Think There ls Something Dangerous Going On Here,' writes the artist in gunpowder. ln the End series from the early nineties, black~type Gothic movie letters scroll down the painted screen. Clichéd and irresistible, Ruscha's final credits empty the endgame of significance. All that is left of their scarred descent are the letters themselves and their idiot smiles. Layered in alliterative meaning, they start to behave like mugshots of sounds. For all the literal substance and straight-forward "manual" style of the Words themselves, their ventriloquistic broadcasts fill the air With unstable half~lives and detached meanings. The paintings begin to function like vast cultural echo-chambers into which we send our encrypted signals, perhaps believing that one day they will be returned.

Ruscha's most recent Work marks a departure from the rectilinear word and landscapes of the past thirty years. The canvases themselves now bulge and swell as if unable to contain the "bloated empires" and "swollen tunes" that strain behind the beautiful facades and Pepto-Bismol fades. ln a work such as The Mountain, 1998, Where the almost central "T" of "The" acts as a kind of graphic spreader, forcing the canvas outwards, the curvature is restricted to the kind of shallow deflection found at the edges of a TV screen. In others such as Metro, Petro, Neuro, Psycho, 1998, the painting itself seems caught in the act of opening up, as if the word mass of "politan, muscular, chemical, logical," the central congregation of Ruscha's open and hyphenated compounds, force the canvas out towards its load-bearing limits. Where once the graphic of the Word pushed through the lines of our understanding, now the canvas follows suit. Lady with Spreader, 1997, the only painting of the recent series without words, consists of a greatly enlarged image of a Woman taken from the personal ads of a newspaper or magazine. ln front of the image, a painted stretcher bar literalises the spread. ln a typical Ruscha pun, lady and painting become advertisements for themselves and each other, bloated signifiers born of a wry conflation of available forms.

Pushing the literal and phonetic dimensions of words beyond typography into the very frame of their construction, the new paintings literally extend the visual field. The treacherous unbrightness of southern California persists in the bolts of projected light and the idea of painted mountains. The words and phrases still retain their cryptic relation to the dreamscape subconscious and the emigration of thirty years before. "Critters Crave Salt," is taken from a lengthy rhyming ode to Santa Claus, Written by Ruscha's longtime friend and collaborator Mason Williams. The Dick Tracy-style profile of Bloated Empire, Stuffed Regime, 1997, belongs to H.C. Westerman, Whose postcard correspondences often depicted the ex- Marine Corps artist standing stiffly in a maelstrom of sunlit destruction. Only the strange curvature of the canvases - the distention of form and meaning - sets these paintings apart. Deadpanning through the golden rot of this subconscious, the artist adds to the exquisite corpse of language the cadaver of formalist painting.

In 1966 Ruscha took language to the verge and impacted its form into the automatic Writing of the road. Three decades down the same trail, words and phrases continue to scrape the edges, thrusting out towards the slipstreams of other traditions. It may be part of a conscious strategy that engages with the history of painting and the creation of aesthetic value. Equally, it may just be Ruscha's way of gaining that little bit of extra picture per canvas - of inflecting the edges and bending the rules.





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