A loosely painted bird, hovering in an indeterminate space, is crying over unspilled milk in a painting which contains a representation of a sculptural trompe l’oeil. If not for the title, we, two, might be fooled into thinking that the glass contains milk, but not necessarily because it looks like milk. Even Ruscha, who is a master of the most sophisticated trompe l’ouiel effects (which he has chosen not to deploy here) could not have painted the difference between plaster and milk. He has relied on us to make the same assumptions as the bird, and he has relied on our ability to read and reveal to us the content of our assumptions. Unlike the bird, we exit laughing. Ruscha has painted an updated version of the story of a painting contest which took place in Greece during the fifth-century B.C.E. The painter Zeuxis showed a still life of such realism that birds flew down to eat the grapes from the painting. Ruscha has moved that scene to America (note that he portrays a glass of milk instead of grapes) and painted it from the point of view of one of the deceived birds. Unlike the Greeks, he does not believe that the best paintings are the most realistic.
J. Fiskin, “Trompe l’Oeil for Our Time,” Art Issues, November/December 1995
The present lot Angry Because It’s Plaster, Not Milk, 1965 is an exemplary work from Ed Ruscha’s group of paintings from the mid-1960s that take the strict idea of literal representation into the realm of the absurd. This body of work is characterized by what the artist termed “bouncing objects, floating things,” such as the radically oversized red bird and glass hovering in front of a simple background in the present work and have a strong affinity to Surrealism, a recurring theme in the artist’s long career.
The artist’s fascination with Dada and Surrealism began in his school days: I looked at a lot of pictures in books on Dada in the library. It wasn’t because I was interested in developing scholarly appreciation –I was more attracted by the titillation I got from the works I saw in the books. I was inspired by this sort of lunatic group of people who made art that ran against prevailing ideas. Their nonsense was synonymous with seriousness, and I’ve always been dead serious about being nonsensical.
Ed Ruscha in R.D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 131
With its clear composition containing just two things : bird and glass, Ed Ruscha’s work calls to mind Magritte’s The Treachery of Objects, 1928- 1929 both compositionally and conceptually. Both artists have such clear renderings of their objects presented in a straightforward manner on their canvases. However, there is something of a mystery behind their choice of subjects. There is humor in their play between image and text with Magritte’s insistence that it is not a pipe, but a depiction of a pipe, while Ruscha puts us in the frustrated position of the bird by declaring in the title that we are not looking at a glass of milk, but plaster.
Statements made by the two artists decades apart are strikingly sympathetic: Magritte explained, “My painting is visible images that conceal nothing. They evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my picturesone asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does that mean?’ It does not mean anything because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.” Ruscha expands on the same theme: “I’ve always had a deep respect for things that are odd, for things which cannot be explained. Explanations seem to me to sort of finish things off.”
R.D. Marshall, Ed Ruscha, London, 2003, p. 134
Unlike Magritte, Ruscha completely leaves the words out of his canvas, a particularly pointed decision in Ruscha’s body of work. The bird and the glass are so iconic and symbolic that they almost read like his text paintings.
In these paintings we are given images of birds, not real birds but generic birds, like Audobon’s floating on a flat ground. In other words, rather than the word “cardinal,” we are given the image cardinal, or more generally, we are being presented with birds as words. The transformation in the bird paintings is based upon a rhyme at the first level of generalization. Thus, even at this early date, Ruscha is playfully exploiting in an imaginary was the relationship between words and images and the instruments which create them. The transformation of words –birds into words –is rendered imagistically.
A. Livet, The Works of Edward Ruscha, Hudson Hills, 1982