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. 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.

Clockwise from top: Ed Ruscha, Mother’s Boys, 1987, oil on canvas. Photo Credit: John Selvidge; Ed Ruscha, Chocolate Room, originally installed 1970 at the 35th Venice Biennale, chocolate on paper. Photo Credit: John Selvidge; Ed Ruscha, Sin, 1970, screenprint on paper. Photo Credit: John Selvidge

“SIN” become more insubstantial or more darkly delicious? Does this olive gesture more towards the power of temptation that attends the theological concept, or does its neo-Dadaist or surrealist flourish just make the whole thing seem hilarious, an old idea worthy of a laugh and a martini? To my mind, a productive and valuable tension resides between these two poles. Ruscha’s nuanced manipulation of these elements can be understood to open up a field of play where a definitive meaning need not ever arrive.

Applied to a more sober subject, something like this indeterminacy can become poignant. In the oil painting Mother’s Boys, an American flag is depicted waving in the wind against an open but austere blue sky. Underneath it, a featureless white rectangle sits at the bottom of the picture plane. According to the Contemporary’s wall text, this white bar “obscures the title of the work painted beneath it and is meant to suggest censored or redacted words, as in a classified government document.” I find this take compelling but incomplete. Though this whited-out space, painted over the work’s title, may naturally stand for words now unavailable, the bar’s size and shape also recall a tombstone, a slab, a monument or cenotaph for fallen dead just as much as an act of whitewashing or censorship. As a presence marking an absence, might this empty space function more ambivalently, more inclusively as a blank zone of loss into which viewers can import whatever associations this flag may summon for them, whether patriotism, mourning, anger, national hypocrisy, or dreams deferred?

While many works insistently remain open like this, some might be characterized by an excess of signification, even its obliteration. The canvas Don’t Nod seems overdetermined in a sly, almost maniacal way, the visual joke of the mirrored double-image of a majestic mountain range repeating the symmetrical structure of the palindrome emblazoned across it with the uncanny effect of an abyss opening up behind the words. And with his Chocolate Room installation, positioned at the end of the exhibition’s tour, Ruscha’s 100 pounds of screen-printed Hershey’s chocolate exudes the funk of a sweetness that, given the artist’s persistent concern with consumer culture, might just be a whiff of an empire in decline. n

John Selvidge is an award-winning screenwriter who works for a humanitarian nonprofit organization in Oklahoma City while maintaining freelance and creative projects on the side. Selected for OVAC’s Oklahoma Art Writing and Curatorial Fellowship in 2018, his art writing, magazine writing, and poetry have appeared locally, nationally, and internationally.