Ed Ruscha: In Conversation | Artist's Talk | Tate Talks

good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Tate Modern thank you so much for coming this evening especially after such an incredibly hot day I think there's probably many people just wishing their heat was over at least it's nice and cool in here so we've got lots to look forward to my name is Karen Greenberg and I'm head of international collection exhibitions at Tate and it gives me great pleasure to introduce our two speakers this evening who actually need no introduction Francis Morris director of tape modern and of course the great edge Roche and this talk is being programmed to coincide with the opening of a Dru Shea's artists rooms display which you will all have an opportunity to visit at the end of the talk as a curator I'm often asked what are you working on next and irrespective of what I say usually it's oh that sounds nice but with when I replied I'm working on an ad rachet display I was like is he cool and when I replied yes is it mmm of course and it has really been an incredible experience so I just wanted to say a very sincere thanks to Ed I wish in a way we'd had more disagreements or things had gone wrong so I would have had more time to spend with you it has it has really been extraordinary and and so smooth so I have many people to thank for that not least my colleagues though who's been a fantastic collaborator but also Mary Dean and everybody in the ed rachet studio who are just exceptional everyone at Goshen particularly Gary and letter who have answered many questions and been very supportive all through but also colleagues here who've made tonight possible so in public programs Sandra and Hannah the a/v team especially Dan and Chris and the front-of-house teams are taped it is it always takes many people to realize something like this and I think much of that workers underappreciated so tremendous thanks to everybody but also just like to thank the lenders to the display although the works are predominantly drawn from the incredibly rich holdings in tapes collection and artist rooms there are a few really exception loans to to the display they're just rounded out so huge thanks to the lenders for their generosity how this evening is going to work is Edie and Francis will be in conversation until approximately 1940 so we've got an hour of conversation and then we'll be opening up the conversation to the audience for questions the event is being filmed so we would ask that when the question time comes - please wait until a microphone reaches you before speaking so that we can ensure to capture your questions as I mentioned there will be an opportunity to see the display after the talk concludes at 8 p.m. the display is on the level 4 of the Blavatnik building there will be visitor services colleagues to escort the group but the quickest way to get there will be to go upstairs in this building to level 4 across the bridge over the turbine hall and into the Blavatnik building and you'll see the display immediately on your left so without further ado I'm going to hand over to Francis thank you very much for coming and enjoy this evening thank you Karen for your very generous and to-the-point words one of the pleasures of this evening will be after we have had our conversation and you've asked your questions we will be going up to the artists rooms galleries and they are amongst the most beautiful of our new galleries in the black Nick building and they have been devoted since 2016 to monographic free exhibitions drawn from artists rooms now in its 11th year and unlike most exhibitions where we celebrate the the first time that we've explored an artist in this country or the first time we bought 300 loans from abroad these exhibits in our artists from space have almost always been seen before and we're very proud of that in a drew Shay's paintings and prints and photographs have already been shown at Swanson Arts Gallery and thurso at time span in Helmsdale at Inverness Museum and gallery at Wolverhampton art gallery and it's hackin gallery newcastle upon time and that's because they are part of artists rooms supported by the Arts Council England the art fund and creative Scotland a collection we share with the National Gallery's of Scotland I need to thank of course a home team Karen Greenberg and Valentina Reverb Lea for curating the display and as Karen said they worked seamlessly with Ed and his team in Los Angeles but of course I do want to acknowledge and thank Antony da Fay who effectively introduced ed rachet to artists rooms and to Tate and without his gifts and now the loans from the foundation we would not be making this display here for the coming months and we're indebted to Antony and the artists rooms team for making this extraordinary body of work available to the national collection as Karen said this event will take the form of a conversation we hope it'll take the form of a conversation we'll prop each other up when we dry up and Ed's has chosen a cluster of images that are kind of important and that he has things to say about and I've added a few more in and we'll talk until we run dry and then we are going to look to you for continuing the kettle boiling and asking some questions and we really love to hear some questions that have never been asked before of Ed rachet one interviewer some years ago said Edie is two highways what Warhol is - soup cans another JG Ballard in fact that aired has the coolest gaze in American art edge you came of age with a concept of cool but you were born a mackerel snapper in middle class middle West America Omaha Nebraska and so that's I think we're gonna where we're going to begin the very beginning with your first image okay there it is well this is known as the monarch of the Glen and that it was painted about 1851 by Sir Edwin Landseer and it connects to me because the next picture down there I should have my own clicker but then this is like a 20th century American knockoff copy it's made into a logo commercial logo from the monarch of the Glen and it was for the hartford accident and indemnity company of Hartford Connecticut which my father worked for for 25 years as an auditor so throughout my early years I would see this little image everywhere I would see it on stationery I would see it on an ash trays I saw it on his company-issued car it had a little medallion on it that had this image on it so I I'm particularly connected to this and and I'm reminded also that it came from the original monarch of the Glen do you have any idea with and why an insurance company chose that painting as their logo well you got to look at it and think we're down a little bit lower here we're looking up at something and so there's some Majesty and looking up at a subject and they probably recognize that saying well this is an easy thing to do will just make a black-and-white image out of this and use it for our logo I don't know it's probably a groupthink kind of thing on to the next one sure I've had heroes this was a hero of mine his name is satchel page and he was a baseball pitcher and most athletes make it to about age 40 or something before they pack it in and quit this guy as Laura Laura has it pitched in major league baseball maybe into his 60s and he did a lot of fibbing about his age and was managed to stay in the game and he said he was a very fast ball pitcher and you know he he didn't paint he didn't paint paintings he was an athlete and he would say things like I'm so fast that when I go to the bed at night I hit the switch at the in the bedroom and I'm asleep before the room gets dark and he would also say things like don't eat fried foods it angers up the blood and don't look behind you because what you'll see is is who's gaining on you so it feels like he's a real men tool for you well he is and and I watched him play baseball and and he was just a very colorful character and had a very high stature in my mind okay this guy is the Lake Clark buyers and he was a sign painter that's a roof of a barn behind him there and he would paint paint that rock city he would he'd he said I never passed up a good roof he'd paid four or five these a day and he'd get like $40 each for them and and he painted for a long long time and until one day he he came in contact with a hot electric wire and he got 7,000 volts and he said that's enough to kill a dozen mules he said so I better I better retire so he retired with 900 bonds behind him yeah how many paintings have you made so that's just just two just two and these are images that you have chosen of people and events and things that early on in your life created the kind of influences that you've carried with you yeah and they just become part of my part of my history and I admired these people they were gun kinds of guys who would what do you say take their lunch pail to work mm-hmm and so I always admired them for that and and I got a whole bunch of them in my in my mind but they kind of kind of my it's a kind of behavioral thing as well as a the fact he was a sign paper humor yeah not that I didn't appreciate fine artists either because we'll come to that in a minute - okay here's the next okay a different kind of okay so now we have on the left hand side we have Albert Einstein the right hand side Muhammad Ali who to me is like the ultimate hero American hero of all time I mean he was like in the he came along at the perfect time in the perfect time of history and and he was the perfect figure for it too and he he would say things like well of course he was a boxer everyone knew that and he was a master boxer and a master talker too so he would say things like I'm the only escape and he'd say things like well he had a fight with somebody and then he said boy afterwards that guy hit me so hard he jarred my kinfoke in Africa the pairing of these two you know they're side by side in a book about Muhammad Ali and I saw this and on the left hand page is Albert Einstein right in page Ollie and there's only one comment underneath Ollie and he says I said I was the greatest not the smartest [Laughter] is that it I think that's well there's some we could go on for another hour about this gentleman but anyway well switch genders for a moment yeah we'll go thank you this is the only female who features in the whole presentation you sure about that I think Stein Gertrude Stein and she she just added pyrotechnics to the English language along with people like James Joyce and and she was very extremely inventive and and difficult to follow difficult to understand but she wrote beautifully and people would ask her about well they'd ask her something like what was as were found like and she said something like Ezra Pound was the village explainer excellent if you're a village if not not [Laughter] why do you write and she are who do you write for and she'd say I write for strangers and for myself I always like that well what would she have said about Ed rachet I don't I don't know that's something we'll never know what a terrible pity this is a man named Spike Jonze and he had a band called the city slickers and he was a very irreverent bandleader he would concentrate on taking Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and Bach and all these classical musicians and murder their works with Dixieland jazz and that sort of thing so he was almost like a dhatus and I knew about him when I was about 10 years old in Oklahoma City and I went to see if I could see him didn't have enough money for a ticket so I went to the back door of the stage door knocked on the stage door and he answered the door this is right before his concert and he said what do you want kid and I said well I just I just like to see you know I'd like to see Spike Jones and his city slickers and he said okay well here's a dollar go get me a dozen eggs so I ran off and got a dozen eggs and came back immediately they all the band members threw eggs at each other so I felt like I was a part of something that I feel good so in case you're wondering what the what the kid looked like that a met spike at the side door that's a drew Shay aged about well it was about the about the time when I went to see Spike Jonze yeah and that bag up in the corner that says Oklahoman times and I was a newspaper carrier so that was and I was sitting at the table of the district newspaper drop-off place and so what are you doing well I was waiting around for the newspapers and nothing else to do but SEP drive draw some funny pictures so you're drawing a cartoon yeah which doesn't kind of surprise us in a way yeah so was that your that was your first kind of image making probably was yeah so you love comics you love cinema I see see movies I liked Roy Rogers Gene Autry those those kind of things go on Saturday morning when they had cereals and they would be you know there'd be like 20 minute movies with the with all our favorite western movie stars I'm not sure how much that added to my life as an artist but I'm sure it all adds up it's all part of the and tell us about the newspaper round that was a negotiating that the neighborhood the streets that yeah yeah I had a bicycle but they wouldn't let us deliver papers on the bicycle because we would always drive across people's lawns and they found on that so we had to walk and what they call three corner the newspapers folded three ways throw throw them on a porch so that was a my enterprise for about three years but just just come thinking about the you know if you talked about the the people the invents they're sort of landmark those images that shaped you there were things that you were doing at this time that feel as if they were kind of antecedents to the grown up ed rachet you were collecting I understand you collected stamps you loved the the print the feeling of the the feeling of the ink on the paper the that the way the stamps were designed you there's a story of you spilling a Indian ink from it from out from a bottle and it's kind of loving the smell and watching it crackle of those real things are they part of the mythologizing no there are real things and I'm sorry we don't have a picture of what a higgins India ink bottle looks like we should have that here but anyway it was just a the shape of a an ink bottle that always stuck with me because it meant black India ink and I loved the way it came out of the bottle and I'd even spill it out and let it dry and crack and the smell didn't have much of a scent to it okay we'll come back later yeah so okay so here's the this is the char the formation of the love of making and visuals and puns and cartoons you like work words are already there is that right well you were Joker did he tell jokes I don't know whether I don't know where all this came from I didn't I wasn't really a reader of poetry and I wasn't a great reader either but somewhere along the line well I did respond to Gertrude Stein and somehow her line of thinking lined up with my line of thinking and so I I took a lot of that in the takeaway so the takeaway took you away eventually oh there's a come on there we go crazy cat crazy yeah this is where the take away took you these are friends of mine and I'm sitting down there in the middle we had a rented a house over in Hollywood for $60 a month and so this is you go to art school by this stage this was in art school yeah and we had a garage and back it was more like a summer house that was completely dilapidated but we will turn it into a painting studio and so this is just a stop on the highway capture Avenue can you just roll back a bit because I as I understand it you were very much your feeling or your desire was to study commercial art or to work in within a kind of commercial design environment yeah I thought I wanted to be a sign painter and I did some sign painting and then in school I thought maybe advertising or something like that book design that sort of thing and and so I I got it involved in printing and and then I I went to a school actually I wanted to go to this place called Art Center school that was the automotive design Center School of the of the world really and they their capacity was beyond so I couldn't go to that school and so I picked the second best place which was called sure nard and it was the Bohemian School he could do dress any way you wanted to Art Center School actually had a dress code you couldn't have facial hair you couldn't were couldn't have a bongo drum in school you couldn't wear sandals you couldn't wear a beret or any kind of affectation of a beatnik life and so but in our school here you could do anything so it was free and easy and and we had very competitive kind of interaction with each other and we learned as much from each other as we did from the instructors but the kind of modus operandi at that time late 1950s in America even in in on the west coast was abstract expressionism still is that right yeah and they taught that at this school too you know you'd have a blank canvas and then you could look at that blank canvas for as long as you wanted to and some people looked at it for an awful long time and then the idea was to attack that canvas and and make something happen and you had a go at that I had a go at you know and then and there were so many good artists that were doing Abstract Expressionism that I almost felt like it was like saturated with the the style of painting and then maybe there's something else should have happened when I read somewhere where you talked about the that the Los Angeles was not a city for Abstract Expressionism that it was kind of out of kilter with with the city and your relationship to it did you feel awkward about that practicing that kind of painting there no no and actually a lot of people I mean we we sort of cut our teeth on on abstract imagery and even in the design courses and the drawing and printmaking and everything had to do with immersing yourself in abstract design abstract thinking and less on figurative art so you obviously during that decade early on made it absolutely you turn a kind of complete switch in your work how did that happen I'll just take years and decades to move from one style to another through iterations and reinventions but there must have been a rupture in your what well I think it just evolved and I could see that maybe the abstract highway had been saturated and maybe there was something else to do and so I started looking at making art and making paintings that were preconceived and I would have an idea about something I wanted to do and then execute it so that seemed to be the way to go but that must have seen been seen by some as a sort of great betrayal because as you've said that that idea that you you face the blank canvas as a kind of naked hero and the gesture if something comes to you and drives you that notion of inspiration which is so central to that that period in American art this was a really an interesting moment where you could move from that idea to the idea that you could have an eye an image planet executed well the beginning of that I don't know and I all these things came together and then my training as a as a sign painter and my training of just you know working with printing and making books and that sort of thing I just kind of dovetailed into painting paintings and then it moved along in that snail pace it's a very fast nail so about that time just after that you came to London for the first time yeah I came to London this is like 1961 after I got out of art school and travelled around Europe for a while and this is an example of something that really shook me up and I visited the Imperial War Museum here and I came across this object which was I don't know about so tall it was in a glass case and I thought well it looks like something that was made on a lathe or it made it I mean I looked at it from different angles and I thought what is this uh is this a bedpost or what is this and then I looked at the label and it said the endless Mussolini and then I step back and really love this thing and it was done by an artist named Bert le and I think a lot of people know about this now but it didn't I was not aware of this through an art museum where this thing should have been it was from the Imperial War Museum which is a kind of an oddball way to find a work of art when you say that I mean it's an extraordinary thing isn't it I love the fact that it's endless Mussolini made in 1933 so not actually so endless but when I mean it struck you how can you make a connection between it's striking you and then how it stayed with you and you know what is the impact of a image like that on your practice I just decided this thing was going to be important for me and so I managed to get a photograph of this from the museum and I just had this I tacked this up on the wall like a lot of artists do with imagery and pasting things up on a wall and you know referring to them and I've never incorporated anything like the mechanics of this work of art into anything I've ever done so but it's still to me a profound piece of art and another profound piece of art closer to home even than the Imperial War Museum is in text collection which you saw in 61 yeah and this this was painted in the same year as monarch of the Glen by John Everett Millais and I would go visit this painting at the Tate Britain and it's somehow connected with me and I can't explain why and I'm not I was I mean it's yes it's figurative art but I it had something else some other dynamic element to it which maybe I translated into some of my own art maybe we'll see that I think you ever yeah this is one of those sort of conjunctions that art historians get when they're interviewed by universities when they give you two images and you're asked to kind of describe an account for the connection so that's what we're going to ask ed to do tonight the thing about Ophelia was yeah now monarch of the Glen of course we're looking up at and it's got this heroic state of affairs with it from that standpoint this you're looking down out on so it this artist sort of really captured the concept of an oblique view of looking at an angle down on something and you know also you know it the story the allegory the story of this whole thing with the with the girl and she's it's a it's a sad unfortunate thing here and it's done in such a bucolic restful manner with its so beautifully done and I've I've somehow gotten that this next picture you you can put on there I I felt like this was my Ophelia and and this happen to be the art museum on fire and it's also some sort of raging active thing that is happening in a very quiet peaceful kind of background it's it's and that's what I was attempting to do here so I always refer back to Oh Helia and I'm also looking down on this thing I went in a helicopter over Los Angeles and I took a Polaroid camera with me and took lots of pictures of this building this was yeah 1965 and the building had just been finished and so I I worked on a on this for a period of about three years but I always was thinking about aphelion here okay so the feeder was kind of in the back of your mind when you're actually working on the painting I think that's so interesting that it's not so much the imagery in a philia but as you said this this very strong perception of a kind of oblique point of view of it in representation in painting rather than looking from an oblique point of view the representation I mean is that is that that kind of epiphany moment that you had with Ophelia is that something that you there's very rare or is it I know you know you've been to the National Gallery today I know you've you're you're a connoisseur of art museums and art history is that something that you that often happens to you that you see something in a painting from the 19th century or earlier and then can reimagine it in the 21st century well I see these old works like aphelion and monarch and somehow I see that they're they really have a reference to our present a state of visuals and an art and so and how does that how does that the act of seeing how does then that connect to the subject matter well somebody said all art comes from other art and I I kind of see that with almost everything that I do somehow I'm a link to something earlier and and and I'm so I'm influenced by everything and I try I throw off a lot of influence I'm even influenced by things I hate let me ask you another question about this particular painting which I really love and of course we're speaking in a in a museum you know a new museum and this when you painted it was was a new museum and this you first showed at the Irvine Bloom gallery in 1968 and you announced apparently via telegram that the fire marshal would be on hand to and I quote see the most controversial painting to be shown in Los Angeles in our time and this painting was exhibited behind a velvet rope as if to hold back an angry crowd so I was wondering what that had to do with the failure but also what did that have to do with your feelings about the Art Museum at that time well I just looked at the art museum as though it were an authority figure for a person of my age and and position in the art world and I didn't dislike the art museum I felt like it had a total function in facts of life and so I had no grudge and but then I also wanted to paint a picture and I liked the idea of painting architecture and I thought hey how about a fire on this too just to add something it's like a code in music something at the very end yeah and that's what this is in a way so there's no great message here but it's just institutional critique then right maybe it is anyways okay so then I should say that that first visit to London in 1960 I asked Edie the other day how he had find London and he in Europe and he kind of said it was kind of okay and then I was looking through interview edit in 1980 which is part of the Smithsonian record in archives of American Art and he had something slightly different to say about Europe and the UK at that time and he talked about seeing your first Jasper Johns painting in Paris ever so encountered John's in Paris on surface $75 and then you say that was the only thing I saw in Europe at all art and Europe was just out I mean there was no art in Europe except ancient art and I had no interest in it you said you found the graffiti on the walls more interesting than the art in the museum's and then Britain was cold and dark and you returned now on the hottest day ever well I may have said that but I didn't I I just I made one afternoon in in London I happened upon a record store and in this record store was some of the greatest music that I ever that I knew about and it was mostly American music and so I found that I could see that and especially with the artists here they were operating at the time in the early 60s of London that the artists and the musicians were very they knew more about American culture than Americans and so I I mean you could go to many record stores here and find music that we didn't really have in America it was American music but it was like blues music and Howlin wolf and people you know we knew didn't even know about these artists but the British people did they knew about it and they sought it out and there was even a market for it here so you go to record stores and you find fabulous things that you couldn't find in America I mean we were like lagging behind we were producing the music but we were lagging behind well we could add a footnote to the Smithsonian archive you came back to London in 1970 and you actually made a really fantastic portfolio of prints which are on display in the artists rooms exhibition news news brews stews and brews thank you not quite news music a news muse of alleyways pews Westminster Cathedral maybe bruised ales stouts all stews English stews and unfair taxation dues and newspaper new tabloid crazy country you live in I mean it really evokes a picture of Britain in the 1970s I'm not sure how familiar we feel about it now Stu's is my idea of British cooking with little rooms smoky fires and fireplaces smoky kitchens and fireplaces warming by the fireside users dues the story of Robin Hood under their Taxation unfair taxation they're still talking about it the British protest and how did you make the prints because this is not your average printmaking process well I was invited to to come to this workshop studio that called Alecto that was here in London and so I arrived here and I really kind of arrived empty-handed not really knowing what I was going to and never having had an invitation to come and do something like that in collaboration with other printers and people who are I was going to work with so I had to get on to something as soon as possible and so I I don't know I started experimenting with chocolate and caviar and milk I mean cream grass cuttings and organic materials and as long as the organic material would print and make an image and keep the image then it was suitable for my idea here so that's how this portfolio got together so you see we you were making printing ink out of edible materials yeah and I used the silkscreen method to to do this so so it sort of evolved in this three weeks I guess I was here to do this so then it just evolved as I got going on it and and the printers were all eager to do things and so unconventional materials appeal to me at the time and they've been pretty stable over the years you know this is Covent Garden which was then a fruit and veg market at the central centre of London but then afterwards you went to the local supermarket to buy your canned goods and again you know the world was different in those days you went to Harrods to buy your baked beans yeah you and your ingredients yeah yeah and did they taste good as well but this was also a period of correct me if I'm wrong when you were having a little bit of a break from painting is that right I always looked at it that way and it was putting things down and I'm on a flat surface and so it was a big wide world and I would use canvas and I would use paper and printing techniques and all that just added up to everything I was working on and of course at that that same time the other thing that was really you know big in your work was bookmaking and we are so familiar with your books now we adore your books you know everybody in this room would like died I have a collection of your books but when they seem to come up come apart come about and quite a kind of prosthetic fashion how did you start making books well photography I kind of got onto photography when I was in art school and I felt like maybe there's a it had a future for me and I I was introduced to the work of Walker Evans and to Robert Frank saw this book called the Americans which is a great book published by 1957 or something like that and it was a kind of a chronicle of this man's travel across America and he just took a little 35 millimeter camera and went all across America and took pictures of all kinds of things and they were very unconventional and kind of shocking at the same time and so I somehow felt like photographers in photography were not really considered art like they are today and now they've got some consideration and so I I felt like I wanted to make a book I didn't know what I was gonna make it out of so why not make it out of my travels which was this gasoline stations and I drove a lot across the western US and so I I started collecting photo of gas stations so it's kind of chronicling that the kind of the the car journey the landscape that the things you passed yeah no people the photographers you great photographer you mention a great people photographers or inhabited landscapes and these are empty not too many people there's not too much human interest here and I like the snapshot idea of doing a photograph rather than setting up a tripod in composing a picture so mine were more like hold the camera up snap a picture and walk away I mean there's such modest simple little books and you talk now about them that they won't you know you didn't think about photography as a work of art what were you thinking about the books as just books the documents or well like paper and turning pages the act of turning pages and and then to have some kind of thematic anchor to this idea would be the way to go with it and also just the process of designing a book from scratch by myself and going on and so eventually I started getting into this thing and I thought why why not I've done one book why not make a second one why not make a third one how about a fourth and etc etc so by this stage there really a central part of your practice this is a photograph that a friend of mine took Jerry McMillan took this picture and it was for exhibit I did here at the Nigel Greenwood gallery there it is Oh 1972 yes so that was quite a mean in terms of you know the artist book this is quite an important exhibition very much projecting the the book as the work of art the beginnings of that great period of artists making looks yeah I didn't know what I was doing I mean I just felt like it had some potency to it that also to make an exhibit out of things made out of paper and printed works was a variation to what goes on in an art gallery usually paintings are on the wall I thought what's wrong with books on a wall or something like that well we have plenty of books on the wall upstairs we do I guess yeah so one of the things you mentioned in talking about the artists book was this idea of chronicling aspects of America and those images are particularly drawn from you know the west coast and kind of iconic things that we now associate with that era can you we check we've chosen a few I mean though your next three images are really reflections on the US and the first image here in this sequence you chose was the American flag by Jasper Johns this I saw I saw a little reproduction of this in a some art magazine or something and I there's a little black-and-white reproduction of this and I thought well that's a painting and it's done by somebody named Jasper Johns and I thought well how could you get a better name for an artist did you think that up Jasper Johns that's terrific and then also it said that this this was a painting and they gave the dimensions of the painting and and it's it described the medium as encaustic well that meant sent me running to the dictionary yeah I didn't know what encaustic was but I was intrigued and consequently though the whole thing I felt like how can somebody pick a subject that is so stupefyingly simple and make a painting out of it like this and the more I thought about it the more I thought that this is something very important and I thought it was important enough to go to the instructor at school and and I think what I I said tell me about this and they said oh it's just a gimmick you know so it was discounted now of course today these this kind of thinking is prevalent and everybody's seen this and and then I think about back to that subject of all art comes from other art well I mean lore has it that there was a woman named Betsy Ross who like 1780 began sewing together these pieces of fabric and eventually as she went along doing this thing she would kind of invented what this thing's gonna look like so nobody really knows how this were this design of an American flag came but this art comes from other art and and unlike the Ophelia this had that kind of epiphany moment for you I felt like this is the atomic bomb of my education and kind of that was it was it was an image like that is it a flag or a painting that helped you get out of the rut of Abstract Expressionism I guess so and then I also looked at this thinking oh this man also he knew what he was going to do before he even started and in this thing so this was preconceived art and he also said something just that's really important that he knew what he was going to do before he set out to do it yeah so the complete opposite of the blank canvas yeah well you throw paint at a canvas yeah some people do that pretty well too yeah but this Jasper John said something really important about this he says a lot of people look at this painting are are too busy knowing that it's a flag well that's just you know a little point of interest about about any anything that you're looking at now this I saw this this is almost like an extension of stripes and a flag didn't it but I saw this and I found out later that this is called odd lots and what it represents here each one of these lines or objects shapes things like that are all proportional pieces of property within the city of New York and this man Gordon the late Gordon matta-clark his father was Mata as Sri on a Chilean painter and the Gordon matta-clark lived in New York and he somehow got out of the idea of buying these properties so like the long skinny line there represents a piece of property that he bought that it was like four inches wide and a hundred and 25 feet long these are there's a property between other properties yes some people might say worthless other people say anyway there's a rectangular piece there that's like 12 inches high by 18 inches wide and etc etc but I thought the chart is the art here and it also refers to this notion it's almost like a piece of performance art that he would go off and buy all these property he got fascinated by forgotten pieces of property that were actually up for sale and I think he got some at auctions that sort of thing unfortunately with every piece of property by there's always gonna be taxes on it and I believe that he was a little sloppy with his payment of taxes so I think that finally he maybe gave up on this he died it's sort of an early age back in the 80s I believe but I think the the city came and retrieved all these properties back and I don't know what they're probably skyscrapers today very very thin ones yeah this is a work that a friend of mine the late Noah Purifoy did these are tires like this and he calls this the welcome gate and he made sculpture in the desert on a site that's about 10 10 acres and all kinds of junk sculptures and he made things out of cast-off materials plastics things that the desert air would really play hell with by wind and sand snow and Sun and but he said something good he said I make art I don't do maintenance but I particularly like this because of the jumble of letters here within within this composition here but anyway you look at it I mean I always see that this thing is spelling out welcome and that was just like this is spells this spells welcome in my way of spelling yeah me too yeah I wanted to talk just momentarily about Los Angeles you know you arrived in LA in the 50s you just you deliberately chose not to go to New York LA was the place and your work just feels so embedded or it feels so embedded in your work and there's a fantastic documentary that you can see on online where Raynham Bannon there he is the architecture of 40 colleges beaches and beach towns of surf Verbier foothills utilitarian plains of Ede freeway system that he called Autopia Rainer came to Los Angeles in 1972 and he interviewed you about the city of Los Angeles he was totally in love with the city he described Los Angeles a city that makes nonsense of history and breaks all the rules and he described you aired as a local talent and a painter of the scene and I think you said to him about Los Angeles which magic was it it has got the right kind of decadence and lack of charm that it takes to make an artist you did yeah it's in print also when when quizzed by banham about what people should see when they went to Los Angeles you said gas stations or any kind of edifice that has to do with a car their streamlined that's why I like him okay well he was a very observant gentleman and I didn't quite understand him at first what his fascination was for the City of LA and I didn't quite understand that I mean other British artists came to LA and really woke them up like David Hockney loved it and lives there and and there's been numerous connections between Britain and Los Angeles there's a movie called a loved one which chronicles that line of thinking and Reyner Banham or Peter banham as we called him had a particular fascination for the cultural life of LA and so he he really made this very good study he also did a book about the desert a very being very observant in his study about the desert he would he would say things like well he he would observe this and he noticed that whenever you go to the desert and you see gunshots there always when people shoot guns off in the desert it's always at man-made things and they they never go in and shoot a tree they'll shoot a old refrigerator that's in camp in yeah thrown out there or a tin can so it's very very observant in many ways so he really chronicled life in California not just the culture of LA but you a chronic chronicling a different kind of a life which was you know pretty car based though here's more I mean to me like this is this goes back to Ophelia it's got that oblique look yeah things were you know a parking lots just lay themselves down there for a camera this is a aerial view of Dodger Stadium and then what about the big the big iconic Los Angeles things you know you know what what was what what part of that play it feel if these images now make one feel very nostalgic about a kind of different era well look it's monarch of the Glen it's just AG there it is the spotlights are the rack on his head his antlers and I don't know I think this image came from seeing movies and when I was a kid and and I remember one particular thing that they would a device that they would use in movies where they would show the movement of one place to another when people and on a train maybe they would always show it way off in the distance and it start with almost nothing and then the train would go zoom like this and then out of frame and that would show time span and I always like that that's the zoom that's a zoom and I so I saw that and I saw it looking like a gas station too so this is one in the same thing it's all part of the geography of my brain or something I don't know and honey would the view from your studio window is that right yeah the Hollywood I used as a sort of a weather indicator and if I could read it from my studio on Western Avenue then the air was pretty clean that smog wasn't so bad but if I couldn't read it I know not to go outside because there's two smoggy and again here's a burning gas list again the fire motif I think is really intriguing you you you in relation to the museum you talked about it as if it was like a decorative kind of a final gesture but you know this is the same year that you made that painting this is the same year though that the Watts Riots were taking place in Los Angeles I mean it's interesting that we haven't talked about politics at all but it feels as if somehow behind some of your work there is a kind of engagement with bigger questions that these paintings can then become metaphors for there's a resonate at all it does the Watts riot I never thought about this in conjunction with the Watts Riots but I'm sure I was thinking about that and it's sort of like backdoor influence and so it was I was my studio was not that far from where all these riots were happening so I didn't paint the riots necessarily but I painted some kind of after effect of it did you ever dream the Hollywood dream where did it pop for you well I mean this is a another kind of example of maybe I maybe I was thinking of bubblegum it's got the color bubble gun but it doesn't it that's long ago that I don't have to remember what I was up to and we have got this in more images we can go through or we could open it up for questions should we do that through them okay no I have a grievance against my own country do you have a I mean here let's see can we you can do whatever you like well or you can try mine doesn't work oh okay so that ya JG Ballard I found him to be very interesting oh this painting unfortunately is not in this exhibit here but I think it it came out of watching Superman and wasn't the newspaper that they worked for called The Daily Pleasant anyway that had a certain ring to it that had you know it just felt right and and I this painting travelled to Australia in an exhibit that Anthony don't they put together we had this painting up and we noticed that people were raising their eyebrows when they looked at this painting and we didn't we they would like titter like this which is what's the deal with a Daily Planet and they said this is the Daily Planet is the biggest bordello in Sydney can I just think about the composition of this do I see monarch of the Glen somehow in that up standing view of the the mountain you often you probably do you probably do you know I guess I do too it's got a sort of a grandiose heroic feel to it I always liked what Herman Melville said about mountains he said mountains are egotistical can we just this okay this is where is JT okay let's just this is a I'm very fond of this painting this is a painting that you very generously gifted to tape for artists rooms and I first saw it in your house when I visited with Anthony about ten years ago and so it's a it's a very it's a very precious painting for Tate but I wanted to ask you a question just really about your fonts because there's that there's the words there's the images but then there's the way you design the words and this I think font and as I'm wrong is a font that you designed and what do you call it from Boy Scout utility modern is that right mm-hmm you designed that yeah so why does this say Boy Scout to you I just thought it'd be a good name for a moment I was a boy scout but I wanted something that looked like it was designed by a guy who worked for the telephone company to make the poster for the annual telephone company picnic right and so this guy sat down and devised these letters that have no curves they are all it's made up of all straight lines even the S and the O have sharp edges so there's no curves and and I am that's that's how that came together and of course this fantastic text here is from JG Ballard and you two were friends I believe and he was hugely admire all of you yes and I I I mean he's a writer all by himself and he's he's got so many great things that he said and composed and these stories that he came up with and his vision of the world was was particularly great his vision obviously drew on your vision and this this little folio of images here that I think Anthony Anthony dha'fi gallery produced in 2000 with a text by Ballard a stack of them used to sit by Ballard's desk and when he wanted to write a note to somebody he would pick one of these cards the painting your paintings not the pictures of you and he would write his note and send them out so he was distributing your images and his writing together into the world which is a kind of nice so that's Daily Planet not in the exhibition shows that there's a quick word about Charles Atlas is this one of the very few shaped paintings that you've done unfortunately there's a background here and it kind of distorts what this painting really looks like but you can see it upstairs and I went to kind of elaborate measures to bulge through the sides of the painting out so I was kind of involved in this absurd idea that you could get a little extra visual real estate out of a painting if you've spread the edges of the canvas that's a very simplistic thing to think about but but I and then the idea of the pipes are gonna not let those things straighten out brilliant they're in there fixed in place and hence the the name Charles Atlas which by the way does that mean anything to people in England yeah Charles Atlas okay he was a body builder who's the guy yeah so it was a reference to muscularity okay really important painting this is occupies a great space and the exhibition and I have to say just at this moment in time it feels it like it has huge significance in all our lives I'm now reading something into it I've painted four or five maybe six seven paintings of American flags in different configurations totally unlike Jasper Jones who I you could say I'm emulating him I don't know but you're doing something to the flag here I guess so and this one here I feel like well this thing is falling apart because well it's like over 200 and something 70 years old and we can still go back to Betsy Ross having put this together on her sewing machine or maybe she did it by hand do you think you can repair it these days no but but and I feel like any flag that is that age deserves to have a little few tears and tatters especially if we help it along so it's actually it's actually a fondly image yeah well it also reminds me that it's actually great fun I remember a great fun to paint this and it reminded me of a meeting I had here in London with the late Malcolm Morley the artist Malcolm Morley who was a friend of mine and I met him for dinner here one night in London and we go to sit down and he gives me this envelope 8 by 10 envelope he says open it up so I hope ended up and there is a photograph in there of a painting of his that is of motorcyclists spinning and doing tricks and you know like dangerous motorcycle moves and and I just looked at this and I said wow you you must you must like motorcycles he says no I hate motorcyclists but I love paint that's great yeah he loved paint more than he did the subject of the painting mistake okay so this I did this back in the 90s and I've always had a dark outlook about the idea of gasoline powered engines and internal combustion cars and all that and I felt like it's it's gradually we're going to move away from these kind of cars and so I just thought maybe someday in the future this is a future painting from 1993 and we're gonna be moving away from these things but they will sometime have a have an exhibition of gasoline powered engines yeah and so I don't know devised this picture of kind of oil soaked walls and shafts of light like this and and then I felt like well okay if if they ever do have an exhibition like this that they owe me the courtesy of using this painting on the cover of their catalog okay and you'll lend your your cars to that exhibition yeah yeah right okay so we've got three final images that we call final reflections and I'm gonna hand the floor to Ed to say what he wants to say about these three extraordin images I saw these are close-ups of currencies this is a five dollar bill and I'm grew up with the one on the left and to me it it's a there's honest Abe Lincoln with warts and all and it's just on that images embedded them in my mind and then now we've got the Government Printing Office has gone and given the man a facelift and it's unfortunate because what was wrong with the original [Laughter] what was wrong with the original and then I I was thinking that and this is a ten dollar bill so this is Alexander Hamilton this represents a I mean he's got a that's a that's an engraving on the left and the one on the right is a digital image and I felt like the you know that the guy on the right I mean he's got the guy on the Left he's like a universal integrity and honesty the guy on the right he's got a three-picture deal at university this guy Andrew Jackson now again this is an old engraving on the left the one that I grew up with now we have something another facelift here the guy on the right I mean he's standing in line at Starbucks texting on an iPhone so I've got my gripes - so well so on that note if anybody's got a gripe they want to ask ed about we've just got just time for one or two or three questions so if you'd like to ask a question and hold your hand up do we have a mic we have a mic there's a hand and there's another hand so let's go for these two hands first in no particular order yep and then they're been on the front and can you speak nice and clearly so we can hear you over here sure I've enjoyed hearing you quote other people does it matter what people say so the question there was that the speaker has enjoyed hearing you quote other people and does it matter what they say does it matter what other people say about what about you Oh everybody's got some false modesty I guess I mean I think I don't like people calling me names but let it be if they do I mean it's it's it's not important it's a that's a deep philosophical question that probably I don't know whether anybody can answer that maybe not 9 minutes left to us this evening yeah if you're gonna say something about me make it funny very good then well I have a lot of questions I want to ask our trying to distill it into one and I'd like to ask you first of all when you paint the great detail and beauty that you do and then you use words sometimes do you what is the conjunction in your mind when you bring words and images together it's in many of your places even here there's always this words an image kind of always coming together and kind of like like a dance almost using the first image at the exhibition what is the what is the inspiration what is the effect you wanted to have on us as as an audience you know I'm not being sarcastic but I've been doing it for so long that I forgot why I'm doing I don't know it's I just I feel like I'm everything I do is coming from some sort of multiple thinking angle that is it's not good gumbo it's like a gumbo you know like a you put a lot of things in your gumbo and it's taste good and and sometimes I feel like my gumbo is full of gravel but looks good when it comes out but doesn't know it's good comes out and so there's never every time I start to work on something it's I don't have to go through a list of reasons for why I do something but I don't know whether I'm answering you or evading you I don't know and the next one who's gonna come next we've got one in the front I'm trying to be really democratic and take from a different part of the room and then we'll go back again yeah thank you very much um in the visitor that you made to London in 1961 you kept a journal and I think that's what was referred to earlier and you said you know just under a drawing of the picture you showed early you wrote the best thing about any creative urge passion is that it happens and I wonder if that's still how you feel and also how that relates to that the point you made a couple of times about having the preconceived idea but yet obviously you create something you don't just have the idea and that relationship about the need to create even though you have the idea do you think that was a question or a statement yeah I think it was a bit too much of a statement okay do you still feel that passion is what matters you know I I keep doing the same thing all the time so I feel like in a in a certain way I'm a being a variation on a theme and and so the my practice as an artist always takes me back to when I was like 17 18 years old and so things formed early there for me and so I don't feel like I mean much different than I did back then so I probably didn't answer that question did I okay we've got five minutes like I see a hand there it's kind of in the middle and there's okay how like so I'm gonna be favoritism get give Gregor the mic first yes it's a quick question it's about your rootedness what em and why did you why did you stay in Los Angeles um what's kept you there why did I settle oh why did you stay oh stay i I've looked in the mirror many times and said what am I doing here I love it and I hate it and but I I swing back and forth between loving it and hating it and I mean uh you know somebody asked me a question what do you think the most beautiful city in the world is and I had to think for a moment and I said San Francisco beautiful city in the world I really believe it because it's got a mystery to it that I experienced when I was about 11 years old and visiting San Francisco and it seems to have kept that aura and so San Francisco to me is the most beautiful but I could never live there got it so there I am back not understanding why I'm I am where I am but so I do I love it now I hate it but it's got growing pains and it's God it's filled to capacity with people I'll tell you that yeah I had so contemporaneously with this exhibit there is one at Koko's Ian in Mayfair I think it's Davey Street which is oh shi- and I fascinating little exhibit of your work paired with this somewhat maybe very obscure painter probably the other side of the spectrum versus from Jasper Jones so what did you ask one is there another painter besides our Seamus and Jasper Jones that you particularly admire and two Olsen context of this kind of collaboration but this this air exhibit at Gaussian what's the next inspiration for you well Elsie meais now had he was a very interesting artist I somehow there's lots of his work I don't like I felt like those are the kind of paintings you would find in a saloon in the Klondike or something like that and and yet what what what is it about his work that has something really compelling about it and it's I think because he's his own artist and he's got a very singular kind of voice that is like no other voice so I I wonder and I I'm really curious about him and also the study of his life him as an artist and him as a self-proclaimed genius and the life he led and the abuse that he took and he loved to write people I'm spending too much time on of lc-ms but he's worth it so he would write to people in a very joyful time responding to people that Curtis this work so he would write very interesting responses to critics and so it's just another stop on the highway and we think we've come to the end of the high rate highway tonight I just you know your your your the way you speak is every bit as compelling and beautiful and kind of frustrating and inspiring and compelling as your paintings and I love the fact that when you talk about what you aim for Ben he aims for a kind of huh well you've given us more than a heart tonight another another quote that I love from aired that maybe helps um pick some of those questions would talk about process he talks about the process of his work as slow like molasses and I love that idea that you know your your everyday Sisyphus it's kind of it's slow but it's so productive over such an incredibly long career and I finally wanted to just end that we've heard so much about Ed's life and his living in Los Angeles his childhood his encounters with London with other great people with inspiring role models and and great images and but your painting itself as as you say is like a diary of your own life and for you life is full of folly it's a diary and a diuretic a dark that's agree Shay thank you [Applause]

Channel: Tate Talks

Views: 12,494

Rating: 4.8208957 out of 5

Keywords: Ed Ruscha, In Conversation, Artist's Talk, Artist, Tate Talks, Frances Morris, photographs, Los Angeles, words, Tate Modern

Id: 0BrTZdslSS0

Length: 85min 51sec (5151 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019