Ed Ruscha Interview: Words Have No Size

I think that I mean it's like a my work is kind of like a gumbo of gravel or gumbo gravel maybe I don't know I mean you know what that would sound like in a Cuisinart you know it sound yeah so it's a lot of that and but I I just keep on you know it's the same menu for me to just continue on with what I'm doing and everything I do comes from the way I was when I was 16 17 years old it's just a seems to be like a variation on a theme [Music] it's always been good to do what I want to do and when I first started it wasn't that simple and it was I had to you know I had to make a living and I would do that by painting signs and I had a job writing names on gift items for Christmastime and I would do that for about five years I could work maybe one or two months and then I could live almost the rest of the year on that so I had a little bit of an income and then I could go paint and work in my studio and and that that served me well so it's always good for an artist to have a backup and I had a backup until I could get going and it's always cloudy out there there's no you have to more or less invent your own future and and see how things work its but it's a little like you know blind leading the blind or I mean you just you never know what's happening out there and it's a it's a it's a puzzling kind of thing to try to you can't write your own history I mean you just have to go on blind faith and that seems to be what guides me [Music] well I think I saw I mean my first connection to the art world the worldwide art scene was through visits to a library and I started looking at books on surrealism and Dada and that had a great interest for me and I just thought well this is a very unconventional and unorthodox way of approaching the world through these various means and so seeing this work in in books kind of got me going and I didn't visit museum so much I was not really interested in museums and until later and then I saw that museums had much that I missed and so then I started going to mediums but and then I went to art school for like three or four years and and that was helpful but and I maybe learn more from fellow students than I did from teachers so there was always a seem to be a competitive atmosphere that was going on in school and and that made it possible just to make little baby steps forward you know and just like you'd be inspired by the very people that you're side-by-side with your friends who were also artists [Music] well there was a lot happening in this city in the 1950s they had like progressive jazz and there was a jazz world that was going on that didn't seem to be much in evidence anywhere else I mean of course it was in New York and Chicago the big cities but Los Angeles had a what they call West Coast jazz scene and that was lively and those people were creating their own music and their own art and and that put together with what we were taught in school like the Abstract Expressionists and and that seemed to be the the prevailing method of approaching making art was the idea of facing a blank canvas and and there you've got colors and you've got a blank canvas and now what do you do you know is that kind of thing and nobody paid much attention to recognizable objects as subjects for art it was mostly all abstract and the way they taught this and was pretty enlightening eventually I could see that that maybe abstract art was not for me and that I was I had two preconceived ideas that I would put into a picture so then that was a big step for me when I got away from abstract non objective art and started putting recognizable things like words or objects into a painting and then I from there it was like a another move along the way [Music] I I don't know maybe it was a life experience that kind of set me off against painting with oil paint and I got sort of frustrated maybe I got a I didn't have a an artist block or a writer's block I didn't have that I had something else which was like a I felt fatigued from it or something and then I I just I was more interested in making books and working with works on paper and so I worked for a printer I learned how to set type you know from metal type and learn how to do that that was an aesthetic indulgence for me right there just being able to set type and and then see all these and I worked for a book printer for a while and and so I learned a great deal from him and I knew at some point that I wanted to do something with books whether it was painting a picture of a book or making a book or something like that so books had a great deal to do with my with my art and you know I like I say I selected words that I wanted to to put into a picture and I knew that these words were not they were not tied to any particular size so if you see a picture of an apple you know what size that Apple is because we know what size an apple is but a word had no size and I like that aspect and so that just made me want to get deeper into it I think a lot of artists felt like that this wave of creativity that was found that the foundation happened to be Abstract Expressionism and and minimalism and that sort of thing was maybe exhausted or had been so well stated that there was it was it would be difficult to state anything more so it was a natural evolution for people to begin moving in different directions and I'm one of those artists who's just saw that common objects had more appeal to me than then throwing paint at a canvas [Music] when I think about how people are going to respond to my art it's not I run into really a very fog bank I mean I I can't see through it I don't I don't make art to communicate with people necessarily I and I it's not important for me to for people to see the way I see things because I don't even know how I see things I just produce things that I feel like have to be made official and I make a picture and it just has to I have to satisfy myself with this and and hope that someone whoever looks at it can derive something from it but there's no way to to craft any kind of explaining or conceptualizing something to an audience and so that's for that reason I don't really know who my audience is in many respects it's the way it works I just think that the artist has to report make his report it's almost like doing a book report except you're making it about your own work and the observations that artists go through are not always meant for any audience but you know artists have to do things for themselves and and the audience is another thing that's just it's a it's a baffling thing [Music] I think that a lot of art that people make and can truly influence other other arts to like you know a person may paint a picture and then someone says I want to make a costume out of that I'll use that image to make a costume and then somebody else will come along and say well I feel like there's some kind of cadence or some kind of movement to that I'll make some music out of that and so I think music and art and all these things begin to come together and they can actually you know although you're not making sounds with paintings musicians can actually get inspired by by that filmmakers can do that and an artist likewise can be can be impressed and influent influenced by filmmakers too and musicians I know I am and that's sometimes it's hard to say where the thoughts come from but they they do they come [Music]

Channel: Louisiana Channel

Views: 68,750

Rating: 4.9291668 out of 5

Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, Ed Ruscha, Pop Art, painting, Los Angeles

Id: 7CDQ5iynxYE

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2017