This edition of White Cube Salon features a newly commissioned text by Rye Dag Holmboe, psychoanalyst, art historian, author and curator.

Words can also catch fire, as they do for the first time in Bull (1963). The second ‘L’ is almost completely engulfed in flames, dissolving into a blaze of orange and yellow, while a smaller flame licks at the preceding letter. Bull was based on two preliminary studies, only one of which includes flames.

It was around this time that Ruscha produced paintings he described as ‘guttural’ or ‘monosyllabic’. Bull belongs to this group of single-word masterworks, alongside ‘ACE’ (1962), ‘OOF’ (1962 [reworked 1963]) and ‘BOSS’ (1964). These painted words are usually colloquial and often onomatopoeic. They resonate in the mind as both visual and acoustic images, simultaneously seen and heard. The monochrome background, so often associated with modernist aspirations to purity and transcendence, is here punctured and deflated.

Ruscha is an artist who has never fitted comfortably into established categories. Although Bull now seems to belong within a Pop vernacular, Ruscha was not included in many of the major Pop Art exhibitions of the period (‘I’ve got a limited bitch about that’, he later remarked).¹ Unlike Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, it was not New York but Los Angeles that shaped his imagination. He wasn’t a Conceptual artist either. The 1960s witnessed what has been described as the dematerialisation of art, a turn towards art understood primarily as idea. Ruscha resisted that tendency. There is nothing immaterial about a painting like Bull. Rather than pointing beyond itself to an idea, the painted word insists on its own physical presence.

Ruscha here borrows from the sign painter’s technique, a deliberate response to the expressive mark-making that had dominated American painting for the previous two decades. The four italicised capital letters seem to hover above the picture’s surface, casting shadows onto a pale blue ground. They are painted by hand rather than stencilled; slight irregularities remain visible, reminders of the process of their making. Ruscha has compared his practice to playing in a sandbox, and there is something childlike in the freedom with which he treats words as physical things rather than vehicles of meaning. ‘There were no rules about how a letter had to be formed’, he explained. ‘I could make an “o” stupid or I could make it hopeless or any way I wanted to.’² Scale, too, was up for grabs. ‘Words live in a world of no-size’.³ The same sense of play is experienced in the absurd associations his words generate when isolated from the structure of a sentence. Bull might refer to the animal, but it is just as likely to call to mind expressions such as ‘a load of bull’ or ‘bullshit’. Slang and colloquial speech are distinctive forms of language because they can pack a punch; that is to say, they are used less to convey meaning than to evoke an affective response.

Many of Ruscha’s paintings adopt the perspective of a moving car, and the slanted letters in Bull seem less fixed than encountered in passing. One thinks of the many signs and places Ruscha passed while driving along Los Angeles highways, sometimes photographing them with a camera mounted on his car. These images – of gasoline stations, parking lots, billboards punctuating the Arizona desert – were glimpsed at the edge of his vision, flashing past too quickly to be consciously registered, making remembering difficult to distinguish from forgetting.

Flames would become one of the most distinctive motifs in Ruscha’s art, and Bull combines strategies that are regarded as cornerstones of his practice. The word appears to combust before our eyes, anticipating works such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965–68), Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire (1964), or Burning Gas Station (1966–69), in which iconic buildings are transformed into sites of catastrophe. In Bull, painting seems to undo itself as it proceeds, making creativity inseparable from destruction. The word functions as image, object, sound and sign, but meaning and perhaps culture itself are in flames.

¹  Ed Ruscha, in Fred Fehlau, ‘Ed Ruscha: ‘I have this kind of lofty idea of landscape being pivotal to making a picture’, Flash Art, no.138 (January–February 1988), p.70.
²  Ed Ruscha, quoted in Alexandra Schwartz (ed.), Leave Any Information at the Signal, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002, p.232.
³  Ibid, p.302.