Don’t Nod at an Evil Olive: Ed Ruscha at Oklahoma Contemporary By John Selvidge
Ed Ruscha, Don’t Nod, 2002, acrylic on canvas. Photo Credit: John Selvidge
Obviously, this past year hasn’t been the best for art-goers, but it’s been a very good year for Ed Ruscha fans in Oklahoma. First, this past fall and winter, there was the remarkable OK/LA at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman that featured six artists originally from the Sooner State—Ed Ruscha among them—who migrated to Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Then, just after this companion show closed, Oklahoma Contemporary unveiled its landmark Ed Ruscha: OKLA, the first solo museum exhibition of Ruscha’s work in the artist’s home state. That it took Ruscha so long to “come home” is surprising, but considering the groundswell of excitement—perhaps only slightly blunted by COVID—for everything the Contemporary’s new location, resources, and programming can mean for the OKC arts scene, it’s possible that it just simply could not have happened before.
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In part because his vast, six-decade body of work comprises an impressive variety of media—incorporating paintings, prints, drawings, books, photographs, and films— staging a Ruscha retrospective likely presents a considerable challenge. Further, given aspects of his reputation for inscrutability, is Ruscha difficult to present to the public? Thankfully, the Contemporary and co-curator Alexandra Schwartz organized OKLA in a way that allowed what so many have enjoyed as the fundamental humor, obliqueness, and spirit of experimental play in Ruscha’s art to shine brightly through the 74 works included. Most often resisting “explaining” Ruscha through over-arching statements or definitive interpretations of his works, OKLA provides a refreshingly light curatorial touch, grouping pieces together in fairly loose constellations of subject matter (Oklahoma, religion, Pop Art, car culture, America) and then mainly getting
out of the way, offering minimal wall text so viewers can riddle over what they experience on their own. But, of course, there’s no shortage of text in this exhibition since written language is a consistent presence in Ruscha’s art, likely its most heralded hallmark. Even just looking at a few works quickly makes it easy to say that something interesting happens when Ruscha deploys words. With the screenprint Sin, the single word of its title is presented, via trompe l’oeil technique, as if tilted out of the traditionally flat, two-dimensional realm of writing into three-dimensional space. Rendered now as if physical, both unwieldy and vulnerable with its paper-thin letters, the word “SIN” effectively enters the perceptual field as a thing—specifically a fabricated thing, as if someone had snipped its letters from a ribbon. However, when juxtaposed with the olive, fleshy and luscious, that sits below it, does
