Make a letter crystal dear or fuzzy, give it good posture or a slouch, shear its edges or pad its curves, and you’ve got some of the variations Ed Ruscha bleached or stained onto the faded cloth covers of his ”S Books,” 1993–2001, and “O Books,” 1992–97. These letter objects can’t help but suggest roads and mouths, respectively. Sly references come unbidden: S is for Standard, Ruscha’s jutting logo out of Amarillo, Texas; O is Oklahoma, the state the artist hails from and was driving back to in 1963 when Twentysix Gasoline Stations, his first book, appeared.
Yet as if to show how little he cares for the impulse to stretch these two letters into words, Ruscha tends to give his Os a standoffish roll to the side. The serpentines, true to form, show little respect for top and bottom. If you look to the spines of the found S and O books to try to read the titles (everything from The Health and Turnover of Missionaries to Jet’s Adventures), you’ll often find that the book is upside down in its frame. Ruscha rotates the volume as if to underscore that S can be smacked a 180-degree spin and will top out the same. He also denies the viewer, in the hanging of the show, a neat array of SOSes: In the three galleries of S and O books, like letters are grouped, and ample white space intervenes, as do paintings and photographs of book silhouettes and vitrines holding books with words on their covers.
Having dealt throughout his career with the illusion that’s created when a word or shape is depicted on a flat plane, Ruscha still indulges his melancholy streak by representing presence through erasure. He treats the dimming fabrics of the book covers with bleach; he imparts myopic double vision by making an S of powdery black acrylic so tenuous the wisp seems in danger of blowing away.
Ruscha claims that reading Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson got him started on these two letters. He became interested in the way the rhythms of Row’s dialect (shet up yo’ foolin’) sounded like gangsta rap. Three 1995 editions of Pudd’nhead Wilson that Ruscha printed at the University of South Florida’s Graphicstudio were also on view; a chalky white S wavers on the red ground of the cover. Picture the artist in this, his self-proclaimed Tom Sawyer period, swinging a pint-sized pail of bleach as he prepares to whitewash the wall of the word that has been his own running fence.
And how dynamic Ruscha’s drollery can be. The most elemental forms of visual communication (mustn’t the letter precede the word?) lead to the complexities of motion, rhythm, static, hum, vibrato, and of course instructions. But to stand in front of the books is to differentiate the fittings of the senses from the stability of speech. The gesture, which has surely been elaborately thought out, nevertheless looks immediate and instinctive. Ruscha generally elicits his forms by stripping; for at least one of these books he seems to have just done something—say, set down a glass with a rim of bleach, generating a partial round the mind must complete.
Ruscha has been evoking presence and absence, hope and letdown ever since his photographs of gas stations and the notches of empty LA parking lots promised the tracklessness of an encounter in the dark and obeyed the impulse to commemorate it. Ultimately these Ses and Os spell the contradictory impulses of wanting to be there and gone.
—Ellen Berkovitch
