Ed Ruscha’s Shallow Art, Driven by American Car Culture

Hundreds of millions of Americans have been raised in car-dependent habitats. They have had their formative impressions and experiences undergirded by four rubber wheels and the endless drone of the highway, their aesthetic opinions as much influenced by a Porsche as by a painting. Ed Ruscha, the late Angeleno artist with a current Museum of Modern Art retrospective, also had his aesthetics weaned on the automobile. Because of his inability to confront the unfortunate realities of relying on the American automobile for inspiration, the art Ruscha spits out is bland and shallow.

If there is any doubt as to whether Ruscha’s strongest muse was car culture, the exhibit’s curators assuage it; before the viewer even enters the Museum of Modern Art’s ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, on view through January 15th, they are hit with car culture. The blurb on the wall just outside of the entrance to the exhibit begins with, “‘I didn’t have any Seine River like Monet,’ Ed Ruscha once said. ‘I've just got US 66 between Oklahoma in Los Angeles.’” Later in the same paragraph, it talks about highway signposts as a metaphor for motifs in Ruscha’s lifelong body of work. The message is obvious: the car is central to Ruscha’s work, the highway is where he derives his inspiration, and car culture is the internal combustion engine unsubtly powering his work. Naturally, the car is everywhere in the exhibition—there are paintings of cars, paintings of phrases associated with cars, photographs of cars, photographs from cars, paintings of elephants supposedly inspired by cars, and paintings of gas stations.

What does this do? What type of art does an automobile-obsessed artist with an car-driven mindset make, besides, of course, art about automobiles? Well, Ruscha ends up creating art that, much like cars, is transient. Ruscha’s art is obsessed with movement and (to a lesser degree) destruction. Ruscha’s massive paintings of singular words depict inherently transient words or sounds, especially as most of them are monosyllabic words like “Oof,” and “Honk.” Even Ruscha’s most static car painting is naturally associated with movement. Parking Lines, a painting of four lines of parked cars from an aerial view, has a sense of movement to it. Two of the cars on the right-hand side of the painting have the tops of their hoods painted green to form arrow-like shapes pointing downward, supposing movement, especially since the cars painted beneath them are only outlines and so devoid of color. But even the theoretically more static, black cars on the left-hand side have this innate suggestion of movement—the viewer has been conditioned over many years to associate cars with movement, and so the feeling persists even when the cars are depicted as parked.

Though Ruscha’s art is deeply synced with the automobile and thus with movement, he does not readily ingratiate himself with the artistic movement most associated with these themes: Futurism. Futurism is a movement so intoxicated by the car that Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto contains the glorified yet vicious vignette of the car flying into the ditch, and many references to the automobile. But, it is important to recognize the differences between Marinetti, other early 20th century Futurists, and Ed Ruscha. Yes, they all loved movement, but this focus on movement does not on its own make Ruscha a Futurist. If Ruscha is to be associated at all with Futurism, then what NOW THEN displays is Ruscha as the weakest version of the Futurist. Ruscha is inspired by the most outwardly fuzzy and harmless of all of futurism’s obsessions, the automobile. The violence of language found in the Futurist Manifesto finds echoes in Ruscha’s work, but Ruscha’s motivations are completely different and thoroughly mainstream. The car and movement are everywhere in Ruscha’s work because it is his main source of inspiration and a critical part of his world, not because he has any sort of Futurist fetish for it or for movement. That his art ends up being transient and movement-obsessed is just a natural outgrowth of his inspiration, not an end goal elucidated in a manifesto.

Because Ruscha’s art is not as extreme or venturesome as that of the Futurists, it comes across as fundamentally shallow. There is a slick feeling to it, a boredom and frustration that comes with seeing too much of it lined up, as it is in NOW THEN. This may suggest that the problem with NOW THEN and Ruscha writ-large is one of scale, but that’s not it—NOW THEN wouldn’t be any better if it had half the volume of Ruscha’s work. The problem would merely be slightly hidden instead of fully on display. Instead, what Ruscha’s art lacks is serious depth. Movement is interesting for a bit, but it grows tiring after a while. And movement by itself, unless necessarily energizing in the almost dangerous Futurist manner (or containing some other bite), is shallow. Ruscha does not adopt this disruptive Futurist manner of deploying and thinking about movement, and in doing so he not only avoids becoming persona-non-grata, but also avoids making interesting, stimulating, or engaging art. Ruscha makes art about cars because they are everywhere in his world, not because he is drunk on their revolutionary possibilities. It is precisely because his inspiration is different from the Futurists (and not nearly as radical) that his art is shallow.

Ruscha amplifies these claims of shallowness by ignoring the myriad of problems associated with his greatest inspiration. Cars impose dramatic societal costs in comparison to other transportation options. Cars are noisy, polluting, and physically very dangerous. Cars take up incredible amounts of land and require incredible amounts of costly infrastructure. They are nightmares when it comes to carbon emissions. Cars also pose many economic costs through congestion and other negative externalities. As the old joke goes, the only thing you can get environmentalists and economists to agree on is that cars are really, really bad for cities. Whether or not Ruscha is on the same page of the environmentalist and the economist will remain unknown—he never investigated any of the drawbacks of his inspiration.

The closest Ruscha gets to identifying the downsides of the automobile is with his works inspired by debris on the side of the road. NOW THEN only shows two of these pieces: Bliss Bucket and Psycho Spaghetti Western #7. Bliss Bucket depicts a mattress on the ground under a clear sky broken by a line of music. It has a bleary, dreamlike quality to it, almost as if it is a surrealist piece. But if it is a dream, it is not a bad one, merely a strange one. There is no introspection or debate as to why the mattress is there; there is not even a road or a car in the painting. Ruscha’s other piece inspired by roadway detritus, Psycho Spaghetti Western #7, is slightly less surrealist—there is no line of music floating above the painting. It is an unfocused piece, depicting a jumbled pile of items. The viewer sees them through a fuzzy lens; the contours of items aren’t sharp, nor are the colors. Again, the roadway and the automobile are both absent. And once again, Ruscha has failed to acknowledge anything more than the simple fact that, yes, there is litter on the side of the road. Serious reflections on why that is, or serious reflections on the effects of this roadway debris, are shunned. Instead the viewer is treated to a surface-level view of randomized objects. Though Ruscha has no technical need to analyze or moralize his inspiration, it is telling that he chooses to paint a scene that practically begs for such analysis without any such analysis—on their own, these paintings do not prove Ruscha’s work to be shallow writ-large, but they do show how utterly uninterested Ruscha is in what lies beneath the surface of his largest inspiration.

It’s a bit ironic that Ruscha avoids serious reflection; his work has the (unfulfilled) potential to spur introspection or analysis. The paintings of words, like Honk And Oof, often feature sounds that you hear only while around automobiles. That automobiles are the largest vectors of sound pollution, a type of pollution that is increasingly understood as dangerous and damaging, is something Ruscha catalogues in these paintings—even if it is unintentional. And it is unintentional—Ruscha’s presentation of these phrases is devoid of any real nuance. The words are slapped onto thickly painted canvases, presented glibly and with at best a blind curiosity. Presented in bright colors, oversized, they sit uncharacterized in any manner except in their naked grab for the viewer’s attention. Noise pollution of course diverts attention, but Ruscha seems to be uninterested in how that could be a negative. These paintings of phrases, the outgrowths of noise pollution, devolve into faux-deep phrases painted against backgrounds of sickly-sweet colors; this evolution is particularly abrasive in a bland and corporate fashion. (Hollywood is a Verb, for example, feels like some sort of “live-laugh-love” Pinterest quote.) Ruscha’s Honks and Oofs, though tantalizingly close to serious exploration, too suffer from the same problem of shallowness that blankets his other works.

So Ruscha is uninterested in the automobile’s negative externalities. Yet he is also completely indifferent to the positives of movement and automobiles. Cars shorten the distance of the world and bring things together, especially in spread out rural areas. Cars are vectors of life (and in the case of ambulances, quite literally so). Plus, movement is often just downright fun. Even if it can be dangerous, there is a reason why millions watch car races of various kinds, not to mention drive ten miles over the speed limit—speeding is just plain exhilarating. Then, of course, cars can be artwork themselves, as Italian car manufacturers have doggedly argued since their first models. Everybody has an opinion of what they think is a “good-looking car;” everybody has a dream car, a dream car that is usually picked mostly based on the car’s looks. But Ruscha’s artwork rarely features cars like these: sexy, sleek, beautiful. Ruscha’s work around movement is not done with a rush of exhilaration like the Futurists, and cars are not revered for their material positives either.

Ruscha’s work is divorced from its conceptual inspiration, or at least the interesting parts of it; Ruscha’s work remains in-touch with how most Americans experience car culture: as sheer dullness. Most Americans do not drive “exciting cars,” they do not drive fancy Italian cars that are supposed to be art, and they do not conceive of their cars as works of art. Most Americans drive a car because they have no other option, because they live in communities where it is virtually impossible to get anywhere without a car. Many have long commutes in their cars. The cars they drive reflect this: Camrys, Altimas, and, increasingly, SUVs. These aren’t flashy cars, they aren’t fast cars, and they aren’t beautiful cars either. Instead they’re cars that work, cars that don’t blow the bank, cars that get you from Point A to Point B.

Additionally, American car culture was never about sleekness or seduction, it was about comfort and size. American car manufacturers have always found success when building cars that are massive, cars that float along with plush seats and wide bodies. Cars that scream “middle-class, semi-affordable luxury.” Likewise, Ruscha’s art is certainly comfortable, but it certainly isn’t provocative. It certainly doesn’t make you uneasy. Ruscha’s art is comfortably thought-provoking, not thought-provoking in any serious, critical way that might disorient or disturb. Instead it offers the opportunity for Americans to look, think for only just a second, and then move on.
There is probably a way to use the automobile as inspiration for good art. Warhol was famously fascinated by car crashes, which resulted in his Death and Disaster series. Perhaps good automobile-inspired art comes from the understanding that cars are not benign objects—they are charged with danger, speed, mass, individuality, and sound; something American car culture has always tried to obscure. Ruscha, though obsessed with the automobile, confronts neither its negative externalities nor its excitements adequately. You can call Marinetti and the Futurists a lot of things, but “boring” is not one of them. It is not that Ruscha’s art is technically bad, it is that it feels a bit like candy. A little too much candy is a toothache, a lot too much is a stomachache, and way, way, way too much candy results in a trip to the Emergency Room. Funnily enough, cars tend to have the same effect.