Customer Reviews

They Called Her Styrene, Etc.

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Funny, but it seems as though every time a new Ed Ruscha book gets released, it then becomes the standard "must-have" edition. In my opinion, this is an excellent book for the price, even if only for a single viewing. What I mean is this: it's more like an object than a book, due to its small area (but thick volume), and lack of publisher information distraction - the absolute first page blatently plunges you into the art immediately. It will take the average art fan a good two hours alone viewing each plate at a contemplative pace. I have had two art shows myself, and Ed's work is by far my closest influence, so I am heavily biased. This book lacks the token interview with the artist, and also his other forms of work (notably the parking lot photography series, which is a sheer delight in its own right), but for the sake of the design, perhaps the book as it is says all it has to say (no pun intended, if you're familiar with his works). Part of the fun, though, with viewing these kinds of Ed's works, is reading his titles and materials used, as they are equally insightful; yes, I miss that. But the average or novice art buff wouldn't even notice it missing. All things considered, this is a great little form of entertainment all contemporary art lovers should own.

Bob Perelman was thumbing through my copy of Ed Ruscha's They Call Her Styrene (Phaidon, 2000) the other evening, which raises the question of intermedia from another angle. Ruscha, if you don't know his work, is a painter and photographer associated with the 1960s Los Angeles scene that proved to be an intersection between Pop, Funk and Conceptual art. His work takes different forms, but Styrene is representative of the works that have most attracted me: prints, drawings and watercolors involving anything from a single word to short phrases, often against backgrounds that are close to monochromatic but which may suggest a picturesque element. Styrene collects some 600 of these works into a single, affordable volume - I've seen individual paintings priced as high as $45,000. My question is this: fine as they are as visual works of art, are Ed Ruscha's text pieces also writing?



Ruscha himself has a cryptic, but intriguing comment right at the end of the book: "Sometimes found words are the most pure because they have nothing to do with you. I take things as I find them. A lot of these things come from the noise of everyday life." End of comment.



So far as I know, Ruscha has not undertaken to publish these works as writing, nor in the context of writing. As visual art, these works inhabit that territory that utilizes language for its own purposes. Its closest kin in that vein may be the signage of Jenny Holzer, the paintings of Lawrence Weiner, or the poster paintings of Barbara Krueger, but the more densely textual pseudo-philosophical musings of Joseph Kosuth and Art Language aren't entirely unrelated either. Ruscha's prints and paintings make use of color and the illusions of depth and texture in ways that Holzer's do not and his works often lack the overt political commentary one finds in her work and in that of Krueger's. At its most plain, a Ruscha work might consist of white sans serif letters centered against a black background:



A HEAVY

SHOWER

OF SCREWS



or



THICK BLOCKS

OF

MUSICAL FUDGE



or



WARM

AUDITORIUM



While Holzer has executed some pieces etched into benches, a form that has to recall the (literally) concrete poems of Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ruscha's droll texts strike me in many ways being better writing. If, that is, they are writing at all. The last text above, for example, makes great use of the recurrence of the a, r and m sounds (not to mention the echo of the w one hears in the two instances of the u), an attention to the smallest of details that might be more apt to associate with the poetry of Robert Grenier. Microwriting such as this can invoke every pleasure one expects from the best of poetry. The first two pieces above aren't bad either - both use the same strategy of invoking a single term that is "out of context" in its phrase (screws and musical), which functions to set the language around it into a kind of relief, classic demonstrations of what the Russian formalists called ostrananie, Brecht "the alienation effect," and which Pound characterized as "making it new."



In addition to reminding me at moments of Grenier, some of the more visually complex of Ruscha's pieces, where richly textured "3D" words float in idealized pastel skies, remind me of how Hannah Weiner used to describe her visual hallucinations, words that would appear on people's foreheads that to her seemed to be composed in "dog fur" or similar materials. Weiner used these messages to create her "clairvoyant" works, although that aspect of such found language is not carried through her writing - the closest she gets is to occasionally "erase" some lines of certain letters.



All of which makes Ed Ruscha's texts function as an intriguing test of the boundaries of writing - how can a lone word such as "fud," written in what looks like white ribbon on an intense red surface (onto which the letters cast shadows) function as a poem? It can / It can't / It can / It can't - like a Necker cube or other optical illusions, the text strobes in and out of the realm of literature (though it always remains within the realm of the visual). It may be that this flicker effect is precisely Ed Ruscha's contribution to writing.

I gave this one to a friend who never heard of Ruscha before. He loved it. It's a little unpretentious experience through Ruscha's world. It's not that kind of 7-colour-printed-on-coated-expensive-paper, but works very well as good entertainment and a valid introduction to west coast fine artists. Worth its price.

My adventures with They Called Her Styrene began on a subway ride in Boston earlier this month. I saw an older woman flipping through a book, each page containting a picture with a few words written on it. I started looking with her as as she flipped through it. She flipped through it for about 20 minutes, and then my stop was next. I was worried I would never know the title of this book, and, being too shy to ask, would leave the train and be unsatisfied. Luckily, just as the train stopped, she closed the book and I saw the title.

I bought it shortly afterwards.

I already described it- it's a book of pictures with words across them. I enjoy it very much. As you sit and thumb through all of the pages, each word or group of words, combined with the colors on the background, conjur all sorts of thought and feelings inside you.

For me, it serves very well to just sit and thumb through it, looking at all the pictures and letting my mind wander as the book prescribes.

Its wonderful.

The only thing that really bugs me is the huge 'Phaidon' logo on the front, almost as big as the title. But there are like 300 pages of his word pieces, and they're all really funny and awesome.

...because it is a nice object and very enjoyable to thumb through. The binding is failing a bit, but it is an essential in my library.