Ed Ruscha
Until January 16; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Ruscha is a made-up name. “Pronounce it Rew-shay,” the cognoscenti take pleasure in pointing out. You may take pleasure in replying that you prefer Rusiska, the name of the Los Angeles artist’s great-grandfather. Arriving from Germany or perhaps Bohemia, Mr Rusiska thought it would be a good idea to change his name so that it would rhyme with the Oklahoma town of Chickasha. Chickasha, unfortunately, is notoriously prone to mispronunciation.

Ed Ruscha often insists that the words in his paintings bear no great premeditated messages. He just wakes up the morning and finds a particular word or phrase irresistibly appealing. He goes into the studio and paints it in big letters on a mountain or an abstract ground, leaving art critics the world over scratching their heads in an effort to decode imagined layers of meaning and intention.

Like great-grandfather, like great-grandson. The word just sounds good, godammit. Does there need to be a reason?

Well, actually, there probably does. Ruscha might claim the spontaneity of an Abstract Expressionist (he was trained in that gutsy, gestural, manner), but his works – be they paintings, drawings, photographs or books – are tightly controlled. Their themes have been remarkably consistent since the 1960s, suggesting something far more profound than a series of whimsical antemeridian urges.

At the centre of all of Ruscha’s works you will find signs. These take the form of words and of visual symbols. Sometimes they are actual physical signs – on roads, shops and billboards. Ruscha trained originally as a sign-writer, which pretty much qualifies him as a landscape painter in the text-packed urban sprawl of Los Angeles. Ever since his arrival from the midwest, Ruscha has been enamoured with the strip-malls, intersections and freeways of the west coast city.

PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL. ASIAN GOLF-COURSE COMMANDOS. TREMBLING STALKS OF AQUATIC VEGETATION. Who knows how these phrases got stuck in Ruscha’s head, but they are carved for posterity into blue-ridged mountains and dappled blurs of soft colour.

While most of Ruscha’s creations keep the words and pictures compositionally disconnected, occasionally they are brought together in tantalising union. Most of one long, double-canvas is occupied by a stream of light travelling from left to right, and it is only on the cinema screen at the far right that the light forms the words “THE END”. It is fascinating that this centuries-old religious motif, the holy shaft of light, can be recast as a simple bearer of text.

In other recent works the words have disappeared entirely, and images take on their role. A silhouetted chicken, very much the symbol we’d expect on a weather vane, is more of a sign for a chicken than a picture of one. Three galleons, again in silhouette, evoke the idea which appears in your mind when somebody says the word ‘galleon’. It’s not a specific ship. It’s not any ship. It’s a sign for a ship.

To complicate matters, this painting is called PARTS PER TRILLION, a phrase often used when calculating levels of pollution in water. This is where you have to remind yourself that Ruscha uses words because they sound good. The chances are, he’s not taking any kind of stance on water pollution or historical war ships.

That said, you try getting from Gallery 1 to Gallery 10 of this retrospective without connecting the words and the images in Ruscha’s paintings. It’s impossible to avoid. We’re taught to read art as a series of interconnected symbols, but if you tried it with real life you’d soon be diagnosed as mentally ill.

Ruscha loves the absurdity of life, and specifically of fast-paced Los Angeles. You might see an image of cool blue mountains one minute and a sales offer the next. The two might dance around your brain simultaneously as you sit in traffic. Now that they share canvas space they don’t necessarily have new meaning.

Ruscha is a self-proclaimed fan of Marcel Duchamp, who invested a urinal with meaning simply by signing it, naming it, and placing it in a gallery. In fact, Ruscha’s process of taking a readymade image and painting unrelated text on top of it is not far removed. In doing so, he toys with people like me. My analytical antennae get all tangled up as I try to bridge the gap between intuition and critique.

Ruscha has said in the past that to explain art is to kill it off. He must be pleased that this exhibition contains no interpretative panels, no explanatory wall texts. The texts are his, and his alone, and believe me, they are utterly inexplicable.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 14.11.04