Nick Stillman

In 1992, when Ed Ruscha made his suite of five Blue Collar Paintings, America was in the thick of rapid economic transition. A once-powerful manufacturing sector and the buildings that housed its producers were making way for service industries and non-tangible goods like information technology that have come to define the national economy. Products can now be manufactured far more cheaply overseas and imported. By 2005, when Ruscha revisited the Blue Collar Paintings with five new canvases showing the same imaginary sites as they would appear now, a subtle but dramatic transition had been completed. Seen as a body, Ruscha’s Course of Empire cycle allegorizes America’s socio-economic transition and subsequent decline in confidence and power.

Ed Ruscha (left to right:) Blue Collar Tool & Die (1992) The Old Tool & Die Building (2005) Both acrylic on canvas

Any follower of Ed Ruscha’s long career as an artist knows what to expect from him by now. Ruscha’s output is nothing if not consistent. He’s the self-styled doyen of deadpan, endlessly sampling American language and iconography to duplicate the country’s visual systems of representation, identification, and communication—logos, landscapes, language. Course of Empire, Ruscha’s series of paintings on view beginning November 17 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, shows a conspicuously different attitude toward subject matter for Ruscha. Whereas he typically approaches his subjects with dryness, sometimes to the point of silliness, these ten canvases edge him into new territory: melancholia over the death of a bygone era.

Course of Empire represented the US at last summer’s Venice Biennale, made the cover of the September 2005 Artforum, and the Whitney is currently showing the entire body of work. This is as close as it gets to being the toast of the American art world. Nine of Course of Empire’s ten paintings, five made in 1992 and five this year, show imaginary sites in industrial LA then and now. For each painting in the 1992 suite (entitled the Blue Collar Paintings), Ruscha rendered the upper third of imaginary structures inscribed with the signage of fictional corporations like TECH-CHEM or TOOL & DIE, set against stormy black-and-white skies. To complete Course of Empire, Ruscha revisited the Blue Collar Paintings this year, re-imagining each structure as it would appear now. A microcosmic study of urban flux, the 2005 paintings show the same sites, all under different ownership, including one that has become occupied by a telephone pole and a sycamore tree. The TECH-CHEM building from 1992 has become FAT BOY; the former TOOL & DIE façade is now cluttered with Chinese characters. Moreover, the black and white palate of the 1992 paintings has been updated—the new ones are rendered in vivid color.

Ed Ruscha (left to right:) Blue Collar Tech-Chem (1992) The Old Tech-Chem Building (2005) Both acrylic on canvas

Ruscha’s deadpan humor, epitomized by paintings of small pills floating through the air or painted text like I Don’t Want No Retro Spective, tends to elicit a smirk that fades quickly. Course of Empire may well be a deadpan rendering of dull industrial edifices, but it’s an on-the-money allegory about a nation desperately grappling to maintain its singular position of prominence. Speaking in a 1999 interview about his decision to make individual photo prints from his previous books of photographs, Ruscha said, “Things that are gone from you—that you’re not interested in—you retrieve these things and look at them once again and you want to make something of them.” The quote seems particularly relevant to Course of Empire, a series based on the sadness of watching a historical era fade into unrecognizability.

Ruscha recently said that Course of Empire represents “An accelerated, aged version of the same urban landscapes, possibly to the point of deterioration.” Moving back and forth between the 1992 paintings and this year’s, the banal architectural details that stamp the passage of time are apparent. The trade school building from Ruscha’s 1992 painting has become an ambiguously threatening space cordoned off by barbed wire and chain-link fencing. Ghostly outlines of the previous buildings’ logos haunt the updated facades of The Old Tech-Chem Building and The Old Trade School Building. The Old Tech-Chem Building’s prominent inscription is FAT BOY, potentially referring either to the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs the US dropped on Japan in 1945 or to America’s fast-food restaurant industry, which has helped make 24.5% of its residents obese as of 2004. Site of a Former Telephone Booth shows cropped portions of a lamppost and a skeletal sycamore tree in the space formerly occupied by the top of a telephone booth in Ruscha’s Blue Collar Telephone from 1992. This is urban fluctuation at its most literal; structures with ostensibly outmoded functionality are forced to clear out and make way for the new. It’s even tempting to peg the mighty sycamore on the right-hand side of Site of a Former Telephone Booth as a cell phone tree, an overly perfect, utterly fake imposter of nature that serves the dual function of providing beauty and better cell phone reception.

Ed Ruscha (left to right:) Blue Collar Telephone (1992) Site of a Former Telephone Booth (2005) Both acrylic on canvas

Benjamin Buchloh recently wrote in Artforum that Course of Empire “demonstrates the entropic conditions of the experience of space.” Specifically, Ruscha shows the literal passage of time as measured in urban change, the inexorable forward march of the calendar. Talking about music in a 1988 article in the Los Angeles Times, Ruscha is quoted as saying, “I guess I have fairly sentimental tastes in music, and the stuff I like tends to evoke a rather romantic notion of the America of the past. We were going at a slightly slower RPM then and I like that.” In a July 2005 interview with Richard Prince, Ruscha said, “I wish time would stand still.” Course of Empire is Ruscha’s funeral march to that America of a slower RPM. As of November 10, the country’s trade imbalance reached a new record level, according to the US Department of Commerce. The industrially thriving America of Ruscha’s youth is no longer reality, and its structures—the background music of anycity, USA—have been forced into frantic modernization mode. Course of Empire is a visual essay on mortality: of the era Ruscha grew up in, of the tenuous cultural empire that inspired his pieces, perhaps even his own.

Nick Stillman is Editor of NYFA Current.

For more information on Ed Ruscha and Course of Empire, visit:
www.whitney.org/exhibition/upcoming.shtml
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/12/AR2005061201584.html
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_6_35/ai_n14693958