Often it’s artists who decide which of their peers will be remembered. Leaving a mark on others figures well in the history books. To understand Ed Ruscha, an icon who has spent the better part of 60 years mining Los Angeles for iconography devoid of glitz and glamour, we spoke to artists whose work he influenced in advance of “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” a major survey now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the spring. Some favored his photo book era, while others noted his sunset paintings and his text-based works, in which he rendered Los Angeles verbiage from the Hollywood sign to that ubiquitous onomatopoeia: honk. No matter the medium, Ruscha’s trademark is a kind of deadpan humor. But his humor has had serious implications for the history of art: before Ruscha and other Pop artists, art was a space set apart for subjects considered important and transcendent. Ruscha made space for the everyday, vernacular, and banal.
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William Wegman (born 1943)
Image Credit: ©2023 William Wegman/Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York Ed came over one day when I was living in Venice Beach. He was sort of just around, and he was amazing to know—because he’s Ed Ruscha, and I’m not. He said he really liked my photographs and he wanted to buy one. He came over and I laid out every photograph I had ever made on my ping-pong table. He bought 44 of them! This was 1971, and my part-time teaching contract at Cal State Long Beach had just ended. That exchange kept me living in LA for another year. Also, to be in the collection of Ed Ruscha was phenomenal.
His work has a power and simplicity that is just so present in my mind. Everyone knows the Hollywood sign paintings, but I was so interested in the photo books that he was doing with the parking lots. I don’t know if one can describe his influence because he’s so unique. You can’t really copy him, in the same way that you can’t really copy Warhol. He’s one of those artists you can only admire, or envy, or wish you were him—wish you had all those girlfriends and nice cars he was able to have, all without becoming damaged.
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Dena Yago (born 1988)
Image Credit: Courtesy JTT, New York, High Art, Paris, and Sandy Brown, Berlin Ed Ruscha’s text paintings have definitely had a big impact on me. I tend to gravitate toward language that I encounter in the urban landscape. Sometimes a certain term will bubble up or feel really omnipresent and then start to rattle around in my brain, taking on significance. Language we encounter through ads and signs becomes this medium for understanding my relationship to the urban environment.
Ruscha doesn’t shy away from talking about commercial vernacular, a subject I’m interested in because it governs our lives as the substrate of capitalism. A lot of artists want to position themselves outside of that, but I don’t. This comes from my time as part of [the trend-forecasting artist collective] K-HOLE and also informs my own work. The tensions that arise from using commercial vernacular in artistic contexts are very interesting to me.
I learned about Ruscha’s book projects first and was drawn to how invested he is in the vernacular of the city. He gets pigeonholed as this LA artist, but the material he’s dealing seems more broadly American. Still, he has really left his mark on the city. I’d always hear things like, “Oh, did you know Ed Ruscha bought that building?” To be so present for that long in a single place, and to leave such a mark on a scene, that’s aspirational. He feels like this cool dad.
When he started addressing everyday culture, though, he was living in a monoculture—the aesthetic vernacular was more topdown. Today, the “everyday” might mean some ultra-niche TikTok phenomenon that’s completely illegible to many people. Still, his work feels as resonant today as it did in the ’60s, which is impressive. He mixes the celebratory and playful and fun qualities of LA art with this deadpan seriousness. His work has a slow burn. It gives you immediate gratification, but it doesn’t stop there.
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Gary Simmons (born 1964)
Image Credit: ©Gary Simmons/Courtesy Rubell Museum, Washington, D.C. When I went to CalArts, Ruscha had such a footprint that you could not—nor would you want to—avoid connecting to him in some way. My father was a fine-art photography printer, and a lot of the images, places, and things that Ruscha was drawing on were very familiar to me for the way they figured in how we perceive America through photography. Like Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, and Robert Frank, he’s one of those artists who put their thumbprint on the portrait of America. His photographs and paintings are so iconic, with that kind of California vacant space and their midcentury-design influences.
I’ve made a lot of text work, and the way he looked at text almost like an object was fascinating to me, the way that text for him extended beyond narrative. Ruscha has a place in a lot of the signs and vacant or discarded bits of history that I’ve painted. His Hollywood-sign painting is a real influence. For me, there’s a political application to that, in the fragmentation and the familiarity of that kind of signage and the way you understand it and receive it. He’s done things most of us haven’t even thought about yet.
And he’s such a striking guy. He’s one of those guys that enters a room and you just sort of know he’s there. He’s got those movie-star good looks, and he’s got this Sean Connery thing going where, the older he gets, the more attractive he becomes. He’s iconic. He exudes cool. He’s 85 years old, and he’s still the coolest motherfucker in the room.
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Frances Stark (born 1967)
Image Credit: Courtesy greengrassi, London I got to write for Ed Ruscha’s catalogue for the US Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. That was one of the best invitations I’ve ever gotten. That body of work, “Course of Empire,” is so fantastic. The paintings show LA buildings before and after, past and present: he’d show earlier black-andwhite paintings next to new ones that show what the building looks like now. It was so straightforward, and so special.
In his work, you can really see how photography affected the look of contemporary art, especially when it comes to taking forms and subjects that were not “high art.” He obviously has his stylistic signature, but it’s never show-offy. It’s humble and direct. People always point out that he’s accessible and cool, but he also has this sophisticated depth, even when he just paints a goofy phrase. I don’t know how he finds that magic balance.
A few months after I got back from Venice, he saw my picture of me in a bikini next to a motorcycle. He thought that was interesting and he left several messages on my answering machine. But I never listen to messages, so I didn’t listen to them for weeks. Then I was like, “Oh my god, Ed Ruscha is on my answering machine!” He was reaching out to me as another motorcycle person; it’s not like some curators introduced us. It was very Southern California.
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Alex Israel (born 1982)
Image Credit: Photo Matteo D'Eletto/©Alex Israel/Courtesy Gagosian, Los Angeles Growing up in LA I came to know Ed Ruscha’s work at restaurants, with brave men run in my family emblazoned across a kitschy maritime scene at the Ivy at the Shore on Ocean Avenue [in Santa Monica] and men programmed to crave women and vice versa hovering above a grid of city lights at Morton’s on Melrose [in West Hollywood]. These phrases echoed through my head like sticky song lyrics. But unlike pop music, they came with no strings attached, and they struck young me emotionally before I knew anything about “art.”
In high school I wrote a paper comparing Ruscha’s Actual Size—the painting of SPAM—to Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, both at LACMA. I dove in wanting to know everything, and discovered Ed’s endless cool: the books, films, and gunpowder drawings; the Hollywood sign printed with Pepto-Bismol and caviar; the countless innuendos and movie-star-good-looks. Ruscha’s Pop art went beyond that consumable can of SPAM to show us what we actually wanted to buy but couldn’t: a lifestyle, a dream, a vibe. I now live above the Sunset Strip and every time I leave my house I feel like I’m driving through his work. Nobody could’ve done us better—he’s the ultimate bridge from our LA art community to the rest of the world. Maybe “bridge” is the wrong metaphor: he’s an overpass.
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Denise Scott Brown (born 1931)
Image Credit: Courtesy MIT Press, Cambridge Coming home from teaching at UCLA one day in the ’60s, I discovered Ed Ruscha’s work in a bookshop in Santa Monica. I’d been photographing ordinary architecture much longer than he had, but I liked very much what he was doing. I grew up in South Africa and found that his views about popular art resonate with African life. As a child, I’d often see houses made of things that had been left about, crafted with a wild kind of imagination. Some architecture needs to be modest, or what some might call “ugly and ordinary.” He saw that.
When I was teaching a class about Las Vegas, and I asked him to come talk to my students. The students liked him, and asked, “Why do people like Andy Warhol so much?” He said, “Because the lettering on those tomato soup cans is so Art Nouveau!”
In 1972 I made a leporello [accordion book] called Ed Ruscha Elevation of the Strip. I learned about the book he made of the Sunset Strip and wanted to photograph all the buildings on the Las Vegas strip. So I put a camera on the car and drove very slowly.
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Math Bass (born 1981)
Image Credit: ©Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York I’m inspired by the spaciousness of language I see in Ruscha’s works. He is so talented in the way he activates the poetics of a single word. His use of language as image, object, and location is significant to me as well. When I think of Ruscha, I think of the expansiveness of a one-word joke or a one-liner, the way that humor can unfold a single word that turns into an open-ended question or moment. The way he uses typography as object and image, or words as sculpture, has always figured into my artistic thinking.
I would describe his influence as coming from the intersection between graphic design, poetry, and drawing. My own work includes painting, sculpture, performance, and text in ways that are different but related in their intersectionality. His vision of LA has also been an inspiration. I love the way his work represents the experience of reading signage, ads, and billboards while moving through the Los Angeles sprawl.