“Words have temperatures to me. When they reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal to me..."
“Making his Stains in the early 1970s, a period that saw among other things the decadence of color field [staining], Ruscha economically revived the Pollockian marriage of beauty and squalor. This may help to explain why, with such apparent modesty, the Stains pack such a punch. They are filthy beautiful in a classic key.”
H overing over the nuanced ground of peachy taffeta, the words Hawaiian Music are articulated in a hue several shades darker than the iridescent taffeta below them; the similarities in tone and saturation between the two materials invite close inspection by the viewer, necessitating intimate interaction with a painting whose text persistently evades narrative or comprehension, exemplifying the artist’s whimsical transgression of the boundaries between looking and reading. Emerging from a critical period in the development of Ruscha's practice, the present work marks the transformative moment at which the artist began to shift away from his formerly monosyllabic vernacular toward a distinctly heightened linguistic complexity. Honing his autographic deadpan lyricism, the years 1973-1975 are considered the golden age for Ruscha’s most accomplished exploration of language and its visual resonance when manipulated, modified and expressed through pictorial means. In the present work, the eggwhite sinks into the satin support, allowing the text to penetrate the ground beneath it and exist within its woven construction, rather than sitting atop the surface as oil or acrylic on canvas would. In emphasizing the physical weight of the letters’ shapes and color through painting them in a ready-made organic material familiar to our everyday world, Ruscha transports the enigmatic phrase out of language and purely into the visual realm.
ART © 2022 Ed Ruscha
While the neat typeface of Ruscha’s letters invokes uniformity, upon close inspection, the edges of each form reveal softness, inconsistencies, and their unique hand-painted nature. In its innovative medium of egg yolk upon taffeta support Hawaiian Music advances ideas about the material volume of words earlier explored by Ruscha’s paintings of text rendered in trompe l’oeil fashion as if made of bubbles or viscous liquids; here, however, Ruscha brilliantly inverts this approach, using the once fluid medium to create the hard-edged typography instead of mimicking the runny substance in form. Ruscha similarly explored quotidian materials as medium in his 1969 book Stains, a boxed portfolio of seventy-five leaves of paper stained with various substances such as blackcurrant pie filling, axle grease, mustard, Vaseline and bleach, a work now in the collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Continuing his fascination with nontraditional media at the Venice Biennale in 1970, Ruscha covered the walls of the United States Pavilion in 360 sheets of paper silkscreened with chocolate, installed side by side in layered rows to resemble the shingles of a suburban roof. Initiated the following year, Ruscha’s Stain paintings of 1971-1977 mark the pinnacle of this creative inquiry: as in the present work, Ruscha creates these remarkable compositions by staining porous surfaces like canvas, moiré, rayon, and satin with such unconventional materials as chili sauce, salad dressing, eggwhite, cherry extract, grass, tea and castor oil—substances eccentric in the context of painting, yet banal in their everyday use. This extraordinary series marked the conclusion of Ruscha’s two-year hiatus from painting between 1969 and 1971, the artist revealing: “I can’t bring myself to put paint on canvas. I find no message there anymore.” (The artist cited in Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Ed Ruscha, 2000, p. 152)
“Nearly all the Stains employ substances that are or, in desperate straits (grass, ivy), might be food. (A few use shellac.) There may be something intrinsically hilarious, as well as disquieting, about food put to any use but the normal one… Ruscha’s abuse of the edible fascinates on account of its concentrated deliberateness, its air of dedication to a salutary or at least innocent purpose. Ruscha’s purpose is painting. Using some of the stain-iest stains there can be—those of food—he makes paintings of stains and stains that are paintings.”
ART © 2022 Ed Ruscha
The oft-ignored sensory dimension of language enraptures Ruscha. He stated, “Words have temperatures to me. When they reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal to me...Somet.mes s I have a dream that if a word gets too hot and too appealing, it will boil apart, and I won’t be able to read or think of it. Usually I catch them before they get too hot.” (The artist cited in Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery (and travelling), Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, 2009, pp. 46-7). We can attribute the transfixing seduction of Hawaiian Music partly to the tantalizing narrative mystery the word evokes, but also to our imagining of how the dried eggwhite bonds with the gossamer strands which make up the satin support—two simple words are viscerally charged for the viewer to hear, smell and taste, titillating a tactile polarity of attraction and repulsion. An enigmatic painting that possesses a resounding power, the present work poetically commands an exhilarating, sensory response.
