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Edward Ruscha's Biography |
Born: 1937, Omaha, Nebraska Ed Ruscha, a Los Angeles based artist best known for his innovative use of language in paintings, is represented by five works in The Broad Art Foundation collection. No End To the Things Made Out of Human Talk, 1977, (illustrated) is a mid-career work, created when Ruscha was building a home in the Mojave desert and working on a series of Òfireplace studies. Raised in Oklahoma, Ruscha moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s to study commercial art. Motivated by the potential for painting as an expressive medium, he developed canvases that incorporated words and images from popular/advertising culture (e.g. a box of Spam, a gas station, etc.). Like other paintings of the Pop Art movement, Ruscha's work called attention to consumerism's role in art and culture. In No End To the Things Made Out of Human Talk, we encounter a looming, cavernous fireplace, like one in a movie or dusty mountain cabin, which is both inviting and psychologically distancing. This fireplace is depicted using Ruscha's signature worm's eye perspective' with plunging diagonals, as seen in his paintings of architectural structures (e.g. 20th Century Fox, Norms, Standard Oil Station series and others). In a style, which has been compared to the Precisionist paintings of the 1930s, an absence of painterly gesture forces us to concentrate on the abstract angles, direction of light, and subject matter. The wide, minimal quality of Ruscha's paintings was very much stimulated by long drives along the endless stretch of desert road on Route 66 between Los Angeles and his home state of Oklahoma. The scale of No End To the Things Made Out of Human Talk is particularly stretched, becoming a panorama. Its scale, 2.33:1, is similar to that of Cinemascope film, whose ratio is 2.35:1. Panoramic film was promoted in the 1950s to compete with the increasing popularity of television; Ruscha has stated that film has had an impact on his artistic decisions, even directing a movie in 1975. Describing his relationship with panoramic perspective, Ruscha has stated, most of my proportions are affected by the concept of the panoramaÉI try to focus on where the sky meets the ground so you have a stretched-out version, something panoramic a panavision format. In the early 1980s, Ruscha further eliminated the narrative image by using blocks of color to substitute for words floating in an atmospheric space. In a way, No End To the Things Made Out of Human Talk is a forerunner to those panoramic paintings that included words and phrases floating on the horizon. The title speaks of infinity, of a series of never-ending occurrences. As the endless hazy background suggests, even with a finite number of words, an infinite number of interpretations exist. Ruscha's work explores words as a language separate, equal and often reliant upon visual communication. While in other paintings he uses words to induce visual images, here he uses a visual image to invoke the idea of words (storytelling around the hearth). All of Ruscha's work questions our preconceptions of words by highlighting our intuitions. His work makes us think about the definitions and values we assign to popular culture, and in this particular painting, about the values we assign to traditional symbols.
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