“I’m not really painting mountains, but an idea of mountains.”

—Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s text-based art fundamentally reshaped how we view the intersection of imagery and language. A quintessential West Coast artist, Ruscha embraced the visual culture of Los Angeles—its sprawling landscapes, both natural and artificial. This sensibility positioned him as a pioneer of the West Coast Pop Art movement. Drawing influence from artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Ruscha made text his lifelong medium, exploring its aesthetic properties and its slippery relationship with imagery. Most recently exhibited the group show, L.A. Story at Hauser & Wirth, the present work is a playful representation of the artist’s most recognizable subject matter and adopted hometown, Los Angeles. 

Ruscha often pulls words from memory and mass culture—advertising, print media, billboards—creating a kind of visual dictionary of American life. “Some [words] are found, ready-made, some are dreams, some come from newspapers,” he once said. “They are finished by blind faith.”ⁱ As in the text-based work of his peers, such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, Ruscha’s uses this popular language a vehicle for cultural critique. Employing the lexicon of popular media, the artist’s familiar graphics feel at once reassuring and disjunctive within the artist’s compositions, prompting the viewer to question how aesthetics and language present in their everyday media consumption. 

Hollywood—its icons, logos, and mythologies—has long been a staple of Ruscha’s visual language. In Alvarado to Doheny, painted in 1998, the iconic Paramount mountain emerges in crisp, snow-dusted detail. Paramount has used a stylized mountain logo since its founding in 1912, embedding it deeply into the visual language of American cinema. Here, Ruscha’s mountain, though similar, is distinct—more idea than replica—rendered in layers of vivid blue, sunlight grazing its peaks. Across this pristine landscape floats the phrase “Alvarado to Doheny,” stenciled in icy white, stark against the intense azure hue of the sky. The phrase itself is a visual and conceptual puzzle and while the in-painting text refers to the histroic streets and surrounding neighborhoods of the Tinseltown area, “Alvarado to Doheny” hints at a quiet, static view of nature—at once artful and disorienting. A keen example of Ruscha’s sharp wit and fluency in word play, his dexterous use of image and text recalls the visual puns employed his Surrealist predecessors. 

Ruscha presents a majestic landscape—an image of the sublime—only to overlay it with mundane typography. The grandeur of the mountain is undermined, or maybe enhanced, by the neutrality of the text. “They’re not really mountains,” Ruscha has said. “They’re ideas of mountains... picturing some sort of unobtainable bliss or glory—rock and ways to fall, dangerous and beautiful.”ⁱⁱ His landscapes are informed by photographs, memories of road trips, and imaginative reconfigurations. Rendered with the saturated light and hyperbolic palette, they are reminiscent of the hand painted sets for Hollywood soundstages. They are cinematic in their artificiality—flatter and more theatrical than real.

 

“I had a notion to make pictures by using words and presenting them in some way and it seemed like a mountain was an archetypal stage set. It was a perfect foil for whatever was happening in the foreground.”

—Ed Ruscha

This theatricality is underscored by the text itself. Applied with Ruscha’s custom typeface, “Boy Scout Utility Modern”—a straight-edged, style-less font he invented—the words take on a bureaucratic banality. “If the telephone company was having a picnic and asked one of their employees to design a poster,” he jokes, “this font is what he’d come up with.”ⁱⁱⁱ It’s this tension—between grandeur and plainness, symbolism and absurdity—that defines Alvarado to Doheny. Angular and unbending, the almost mechanical stenciled letterforms dramatically interrupt the placid landscape behind them.

Ruscha has always insisted that the words in his paintings are intentionally void of traditional meaning. “I like the idea of a word becoming a picture,” he’s said, “almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.”^iv For him, words are visual material, capable of evoking emotion purely through color, typeface, and context. “Words have temperatures to me,” he explains. “When they reach a certain point and become hot words, then they appeal to me.”^v In Alvarado to Doheny, that temperature is cold—detached, consumerist, ironic.

Historically, mountains have symbolized the sublime—from Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscapes to the majesty of Albert Bierstadt’s Hudson River School imagery and Ansel Adams’ environmental photography. They represent the unreachable, the divine. But Ruscha subverts this tradition. Instead of spiritual awe, he offers slogans and slick surface. Obstructing the statuesque snow caped peak with his stylized white text spelling out the names of active Los Angeles thoroughfares, he undermines the quiet solemnity of the American landscape tradition. This discordant relationship of urbanity and the pastoral, text and image is characteristic of Ruscha’s gleeful irreverence towards semantics. As critic Martha Schwendener notes, Ruscha “resists knee-jerk spiritualism… by emblazoning slogans that render the scenes absurd.”^vi The words seem to hover, disconnected from the landscape, caught in a liminal zone between real and unreal. Even nature, in Ruscha’s hands, becomes another layer of advertising, another image filtered through pop culture and contradiction. Albert Bierstadt, Merced River, Yosemite Valley, 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Ruscha himself puts it best: “A lot of my paintings are anonymous backdrops for the drama of words… In a way, they’re words in front of an old Paramount Studios mountain. You don’t have to have a mountain back there—you could have a landscape, a farm. I have a background, foreground. It’s so simple… just meant to support the drama, like the Hollywood sign being held up by sticks.”^vii Ruscha’s aim is not as much to create a pictorial representation, as it is to create a contrast which provokes the viewer to reconsider their understanding of the relationship between text and image. Ruscha’s irreverent treatment of the mountainous background in the present painting is almost Duchampian; a refashioning of imagery borrowed from the public consciousness in his own vision he challenges visual understanding itself. With Alvarado to Doheny, Ruscha delivers not just an image, but a meditation—a cool, wry critique of how we see, what we read, and the meanings we assign to the seemingly ordinary. In his hands, even the most majestic view becomes a canvas for doubt, irony, and play.

ⁱ Ed Ruscha quoted in R.D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London 2003, p. 239.
ⁱⁱ Martha Schwendener, “Ed Ruscha—Reviews”, ArtForum, New York, November 2002.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv Martha Schwendener, “Ed Ruscha—Reviews”, ArtForum, New York, November 2002.
^v Ed Ruscha quoted in Jana Sterbak "Premeditated: An Interview with Ed Ruscha," Real Life Magazine, Summer 1985.
^vi Ed Ruscha quoted in Adam Gopnik, “Bones in the Ice Cream,” Ed Ruscha Paintings, Toronto, 2002, p. 7.
^vii Ed Ruscha quoted in Kristine McKenna, “Ed Ruscha in Conversation with Kristine McKenna,” Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London 2009, p. 58.