“Sometimes a cheesy metaphor is just a cheesy metaphor,” wrote one critic, a sentiment that has been echoed on social media. But “Our Flag,” like so many others in the 65-year arc of Ruscha’s career covered in this essential show, directly references a historical precedent, Frederic Edwin Church’s 1861 “Our Banner in the Sky.”
That painting, in which a cloudy sunrise (or sunset) creates the illusion of a tattered American flag, was made only weeks after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and it, too, was painted at a moment of grave political peril and civil disunion. Church’s work is anguished and may well qualify as a cheesy metaphor. But Ruscha’s invocation of it is as canny and knowing as his earlier pop-conceptual borrowings of signage, comic books, logos and advertising.
The work comes late in an exhibition of more than 200 works, providing a postscript to the show as powerful as the prelude offered by another work, Ruscha’s 2003 “Charles Atlas Landscape,” at the entrance. That work is painted on a curiously shaped canvas, which seems to bulge at the center, under the pressure of the precisely rendered cross of pipes pushing out to the margins, like the framework of a construction scaffolding.
A cross, a sense of pressure and containment, and the remains of a sunset as the background: This is overdetermined symbolism, perhaps referencing Christianity, empire, false sense of security, flexing muscles and, obviously, the worst foreign policy decision (to attack Iraq) in generations of bad American leadership.
The standard view of the 85-year-old artist, abetted by his reticence to elaborate or explain his work, is that he straddles the pop and conceptual worlds, fusing them with enigmatic mash-ups of language and representation that often spark a dizzying sense of intellectual vertigo. All that is probably true. But I found it more interesting to think of Ruscha as a classic painter of history and landscape marooned in a world in which there is little appetite for that kind of work. Pretend he is a Hudson River School painter accidentally sent by time machine to Los Angeles in the 1950s to watch the zenith and decline of American power, first slowly then all at once.
The Hudson River School analogy seems forced, perhaps, but there is ample evidence within Ruscha’s work that he knows their work. His 2017 tattered flag was preceded by 1987’s “Mother’s Boys,” which shows the flag in better condition, against a blue sky, but flowing in the same direction and occupying space just like the one depicted by Church (even the angle of the flagpole is the same).
When Ruscha was invited to represent his country at the 2005 Venice Biennale, he turned back to an earlier series of large, black-and-white architectural paintings known as the “Blue Collar” paintings, recasting them in color with subtle but telling variations. Installed together in the U.S. Pavilion, the ensemble was called “The Course of Empire,” an explicit reference to the Hudson River School series (documenting the rise and decay of an imagined empire) by Thomas Cole.
Architecture, apocalypse, landscape and a self-conscious sense that time is passing with epochal consequences all come together in many of Ruscha’s most compelling works, as they do in the best of the Hudson River School. The combination of these themes and elements is often uncanny, as in his 1965-1968 “Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire,” in which a pristine rendering of the museum floats disconnected from the world (perhaps like high art in a large, capitalist, multicultural society) in a putrid yellow background. Flames and smoke surge out of the back of the building, with the same intensity as the wind whipping the flag in the 2017 painting, but in the foreground the museum floats in a pool of water showing nary a trace of disturbance.
The effect of this combination, a mash-up of urgency and complacency — imperturbable emergency? — is dreamlike and a bit maddening, perhaps like Cassandra shouting her warning to the gullible Trojans. It marks a recurring gesture by the artist, to combine elements into paradoxes that sizzle with possible meanings. Perhaps the trompe l’oeil addition of a half-torn popular magazine to the classic rendering of a gas station in Ruscha’s 1964 “Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half” is a surreal twist, or a chance to prove his graphic skills. Yet this is not just any magazine, but a popular dime-store western rag, so that we get a perfect juxtaposition of two ideas: power and majesty occupying most of the space, then fiction and lies besmirching or staining it in the far upper-right-hand corner.
Framing Ruscha as a history or landscape painter is inadequate to cover the full, thrilling scope of his creative life. He is obviously deeply engaged with a kind of uncanny common to language and representation, which is the arbitrary nature of how signs and words represent the world. Stare at any word — “Boss,” “Hotel,” “Oof,” “Annie” — long enough and the signifier begins to untether from the signified. That can be frightening, inciting in the brain visions of anarchy, glimpses of utterly arbitrary tools, language especially, we have for making sense of the world.
But if you can harness that dreamlike state and direct it at the big concepts in life, things like religion, politics and the state, you may find many of those basic concepts arbitrary to the point of anarchy. Unsurprisingly, Ruscha often deploys his most painterly rhetoric when he is debunking illusionism. In his 1965 “Angry Because It’s Plaster, Not Milk,” a bird opens its beak to take what appears to be a tiny glass of milk, which we assume has to be fake, or plaster, a reference perhaps to the plastering over of things to hide serious deficiencies or rifts.
The painting is a reference to a famous painter, the ancient Greek Zeuxis, who was said (by Pliny the Elder) to have been so masterly at representing the world that real birds would peck at his painted grapes. The story goes on: In a competition with the painter Parrhasius, Zeuxis was himself deceived when he tried to pull back the painted curtain that appeared to cover his rival’s work.
So, there is always another level to illusionism, another more masterly bit of deception. Los Angeles, where Ruscha made his career, is home to Hollywood, an inexhaustible American industry and the leading technological center of mass illusionism. A smart painter, living in that world, would both represent it and unmask it, and very often that seems to be exactly what Ruscha does. We often see the famous Hollywood sign against an ambiguous sky — is it sunrise or sunset? — and sometimes it is seen from the front, sometimes from the back. It is a growing menace, or a passing age? Perhaps it is both.
Darkness creeps into his later work, often tempered by a paradox that keeps old people tethered to the world: You want to know how this all turns out, even as you sincerely hope the story outlasts you. A long, horizontal rendering of a highway guardrail in a 2021 painting is both a landscape in its format and subject and a metaphor for democracy, if you are inclined to read Ruscha as a history painter manqué.
And you will never be quite sure just how much to read into his work. In his 2014 work “Bliss Bucket,” a mattress with rumpled sheets lies discarded by the side of a road, with a musical stave depicted on an angle, like the dream of whoever slept, or made love, there. The key of the music is probably F major, and the one note represented, an F, is the tonic, which is the beginning and ending of most music in F major.
So, on the side of a highway, barren and abandoned, is the alpha and omega of life, the bliss of creation or the bucket we kick. We can’t know for sure, which is unnerving, but that’s life. It all feels a bit like living in a country that is overstretched and overconfident, endlessly productive and recklessly profligate, surrounded by still waters but on fire everywhere, constantly in a state of imperturbable emergency.
Ed Ruscha/Now Then. Through Jan. 13 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. moma.org.
