‘‘I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.’’
—Ed Ruscha Ed Ruscha’s News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues (1970) brilliantly exemplifies the American artist’s distinctive style, which straddles the Pop and Conceptual art movements. This portfolio of six screenprints challenges our assumptions about language and imagery, blending humour, ingenuity, and visual poetry. The works feature a series of monosyllabic, rhyming words rendered in an ornate font evocative of medieval manuscripts or vintage newspaper headlines. This font serves as the only consistent element among the six compositions, as the tone and hue of the text and backgrounds shift from one piece to the next. The seemingly random words – linked solely by their shared “-oos” sound – transform the act of reading into a multisensory experience, where seeing and hearing overlap.
The assonance of the six words suggests a loose narrative that resists clear interpretation. To all appearances, daily news has nothing to do with the mews of a cat, or with the pews that offer us a seat, the brews that we drink, the stews that we eat, or the dues that we pay. At first glance, these words seem entirely unrelated, yet their juxtaposition invites deeper reflection on the mundane aspects of daily life. Ruscha’s characteristic wordplay provokes us to find coherence in apparent randomness, offering an intellectual puzzle with no definitive solution.
Ruscha’s choice of materials is as unconventional as the content. He used organic inks derived from everyday foodstuffs such as red salmon roe, cherry pie filling, raw eggs, chocolate syrup, squid ink, caviar, strawberries, leaves, and pickles. This playful yet deliberate use of edible substances underscores Ruscha’s knack for reimagining ordinary objects and materials, challenging us to reconsider what we typically overlook.
News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues captures Ruscha’s interest in the vernacular of the American West: particularly billboard and highway signs, gas stations and movie credits. Ruscha is an all-American artist who created his own very original but specific artistic language. In this sense, reading his rhyme of words is analogous to watching a cinematic title sequence of Hollywood’s New American Cinema: the flow of words seems to be engaged in points of time as opposed to a type of spatial arrangement, conveying the cinematic quality of a film still. For this striking and peculiar originality, which at the same time embodies the evolving demands of Postwar America, evident in News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews & Dues, Ed Ruscha is considered one of America’s most influential and successful living artists.
