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拍品专文
Two frontiersmen drive their horse-drawn Conestoga wagon ever-westward in Ed Ruscha’s Dry Frontier (1987), one of the artist’s iconic silhouette paintings. An atmospheric twilight is evoked through Ruscha’s careful layering of airbrushed paint, a medium he adopted in the mid 1980s seeking ‘stroke-less’ paintings for inscrutable, text-free images. A sharp diagonal cuts dramatically across the picture plane, formed by the dense blackness of the convoy against a pale, smoky sky. Assuming a low, cinematic vantage point, the viewer becomes a silent witness to the scene, like a spectator to a film. Since the early 1960s Ruscha has examined the powerful semiotic function of the stereotype, playfully yet poignantly probing the words, phrases and imagery of American mass culture. In the present work, Ruscha looks to the ‘West’ as a carefully cultivated national mythology. Ruscha’s silhouette paintings are held in several major museum collections, including a variation on the theme of the present work, Uncertain Frontier (1987), in the collection of the Orange County Museum, Newport Beach. A recent major retrospective of the artist’s work, Ed Ruscha / Now Then, travelled from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art across 2023-2024.
Ruscha’s silhouette series drew closely on the Los Angeles-based artist’s proximity to the film industry, featuring imagery that conjured old Hollywood Westerns: howling coyotes, horses, desert cacti and desolate houses. As a young man Ruscha had journeyed from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, and the significance the word ‘Western’ held additional resonance for the artist. His first California studio was located on Western Avenue, Hollywood. Despite their cinematic, even photographic feel, Ruscha’s sources for the silhouettes were most often imaginary, indebted to the overall spirit of the Western genre rather than any one image or film. The composition of the present work could be a film-still from any number of movies, in which the camera lies low as a horse and wagon rattle through the frame. The effect is heroic and otherworldly, and at the same time intimately familiar. The horses and their cargo will charge onwards, beyond the picture, so despite the fullness of its composition the canvas contains a sense of expectant spaciousness: the vast and liberatory possibility of the West.
The critic Christopher Knight suggests that ‘a primary difference between Ruscha’s word-paintings and his silhouettes is the difference between speaking and listening’ (C. Knight, ‘Against Type: The Silhouette Paintings of Edward Ruscha’, Parkett, No. 18, 1988, p. 84). In the present work, there is a sense of the artist mining his own visual library. The diagonal which cuts across the composition, while accentuating the convoy’s forward-driving momentum, also recalls such iconic early Ruscha works as Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) and his Standard Station series. The latter were themselves inspired by earlier photographs, collated in the artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), which documented Ruscha’s own westward voyage along Route 66—the storied highway to the modern American West. ‘I don’t have any Seine River like Monet,’ he once said. ‘I’ve just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.’ Two decades later that road no longer existed, having been formally decommissioned two years before Ruscha painted the present work, and replaced with a series of new, high-speed interstate superhighways. With its vision of American pioneers of the past, Dry Frontier haunts its contemporary moment like a lost photograph emerging gradually from a national subconscious.
Ruscha’s silhouette series drew closely on the Los Angeles-based artist’s proximity to the film industry, featuring imagery that conjured old Hollywood Westerns: howling coyotes, horses, desert cacti and desolate houses. As a young man Ruscha had journeyed from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, and the significance the word ‘Western’ held additional resonance for the artist. His first California studio was located on Western Avenue, Hollywood. Despite their cinematic, even photographic feel, Ruscha’s sources for the silhouettes were most often imaginary, indebted to the overall spirit of the Western genre rather than any one image or film. The composition of the present work could be a film-still from any number of movies, in which the camera lies low as a horse and wagon rattle through the frame. The effect is heroic and otherworldly, and at the same time intimately familiar. The horses and their cargo will charge onwards, beyond the picture, so despite the fullness of its composition the canvas contains a sense of expectant spaciousness: the vast and liberatory possibility of the West.
The critic Christopher Knight suggests that ‘a primary difference between Ruscha’s word-paintings and his silhouettes is the difference between speaking and listening’ (C. Knight, ‘Against Type: The Silhouette Paintings of Edward Ruscha’, Parkett, No. 18, 1988, p. 84). In the present work, there is a sense of the artist mining his own visual library. The diagonal which cuts across the composition, while accentuating the convoy’s forward-driving momentum, also recalls such iconic early Ruscha works as Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962) and his Standard Station series. The latter were themselves inspired by earlier photographs, collated in the artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), which documented Ruscha’s own westward voyage along Route 66—the storied highway to the modern American West. ‘I don’t have any Seine River like Monet,’ he once said. ‘I’ve just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.’ Two decades later that road no longer existed, having been formally decommissioned two years before Ruscha painted the present work, and replaced with a series of new, high-speed interstate superhighways. With its vision of American pioneers of the past, Dry Frontier haunts its contemporary moment like a lost photograph emerging gradually from a national subconscious.