"I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again…I see myself working with two things that don't even ask to understand each other."
E ncapsulating Ed Ruscha's career-long exploration of semiotics and text, Japan Is America embodies the conceptual rigor and signature style that have come to define the artist’s highly acclaimed practice. In the work, the eponymous phrase hovers over a diagonal windowpane, its very shape seeming to indicate the passage of t.mes . The rhythm and composition of these three words seem to reinforce this—cinching around the central word ‘IS,’ they take on the form of an hourglass, as if to suggest the increasing reality behind these words with every second that passes. Composed in the early 1980s, the present work reflects on the rapid commercialization of Japan and its globalizing effects as it experienced a meteoric rise in its cultural and economic capital, with an explosion of toys, fashion, and movies reaching the American mainstream. Much like America, in the 20th century the world saw Japan overcome the losses and devastations of World War II to transform into an economic powerhouse and begin to export its cultural influence. Fascinated by how ideas are made manifest and concrete through the act of painting, the present work exemplifies Ruscha’s exceptionally clever ability to make profound cultural observations with an economy of means.
Ruscha’s dramatic and seductive textual compositions trace back to his first road trip to California in 1956, as he made his way across the country to begin art school at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from his home in Oklahoma. Ruscha, who worked briefly as a commercial artist, found inspiration in the sudden ubiquity of advertising billboards, which spoke to America’s rising tides of prosperity and consumerism. Intrigued by Jasper Johns’ use of readymade images as supports for abstraction, Ruscha began to consider how he could employ graphics in order to expose painting’s dual identity as both object and illusion, using words in his paintings as visual constructs. Japan is America was completed in 1982, just prior to Ruscha’s first foray into the airbrush medium, which helped achieve a “strokeless” quality found in many of the works he would create from the mid 1980s through the 1990s. In the present work, the words ring with perfect visual claritys while the hazy background brings us back to the concept of t.mes as it recalls the artist's longt.mes connection to Surrealism. Using his signature hybrid of arch conceptualism and Pop Art aesthetics, Japan is America recognizes a familiar modus operandi of Postwar culture to reveal its increasingly globalized nature.
