Eddie Ruscha
Seeing Frequencies

In A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel about love and death in Los Angeles as the Cuban Missile Crisis rages outside, George, the protagonist, has a revelation:

A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.

George’s moment of absolute clarity, as he put it, takes him out of himself. At a juncture when the total annihilation of the world felt imminent, he was able to feel rather than think, and see everything he has ever known as if it had all been made that morning. When I get up close to one of Eddie Ruscha’s canvases, I often feel like George. This is no doubt down to their shared sense of time and place—Ruscha’s paintings feel very sixties, very Los Angeles—but something else, as though these paintings seem to document the very beginning of the world, or its very end, while delighting in the fact that we will never get close to comprehending either. These canvases seem to push and pull you simultaneously: everything is about to be revealed, or taken away, and their beautiful ambiguity allows you to believe both at once.

When I think about Ruscha’s paintings I think about the lush Californian light of the sixties, and its sense of paradise, even as it hid from catastrophe. Looking back, California embodies a sense of paradise that seems always–or, more accurately, must always–be at the edge, at the far side of the world, at a remove from sameness, predictability, and mundanity. If we take Ruscha’s spirals and mandalas, they seem to try and take us to that place of paradise, which is at once so far away and yet at the centre of everything. In Descendless (2024) he takes us to such a place: the outer rim of soft triangular lines converge and coalesce, as though a series of arms placed on a series of shoulders. In Diskos (2023) I see  a target: something to aim for, another place to get to, however mysterious or beguiling it might be. While so different in subject matter and approach, it is easy to see the light that spills onto Isherwood and his life partner, the artist Don Bachardy, in David Hockney’s first double- portrait from 1968, in Ruscha’s compositions. They are both bathed in the same exquisite light. But if Hockney’s Californian canvases are so often pitch-perfect, depicting white recliners on sun-drenched terraces as lithe bodies float in rectangular pools, Ruscha’s abstracted visions are circular, endless, and, importantly, conscious of the end of paradise.

Ruscha is a master maker of patterns. The moiré effect, commonly used by the West Coast avant-garde in the sixties, is produced by the superimposition of two slightly displaced groupings of lines, whether they be curved or straight. The resulting visual effect, generally curved, radiating and sometimes very complex, seems totally unrelated to the linear structures that produce it. The visual illusions of motion that are produced when an observer changes his viewing point of an object with these patterns of lines are very striking. (Moiré has practical applications in engineering because it can be used to detect a minute loss of alignment or a small divergence in identical patterns). For instance, when one looks through a window screen that happens to be in front of another window screen, one sees a curious pattern that results from a combination of the lines in the two screens. Moiré is the French word for ‘watered’; in English it is most frequently heard in the term ‘moiré silk’, a fabric that has a shimmering appearance resembling the reflections on the surface of a pool of water. While Ruscha’s paintings don’t always cohere to the strict logic of the moiré, a similar effect is created in his swirls and spirals: lines are at once defined and yet porous, as we feel our eyes dart and jump in unusual ways.

Ruscha’s experiments with line and form should be seen within the pictorial legacies of the West Coast avant-garde, at least as far back as Oskar Fischinger, the German-born filmmaker and painter who emigrated to Los Angeles to make silent films, who was known for creating special effects on Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929) and as an influence on Disney’s Fantasia. But it was his Spirals (1924-26) that stand as one of the great interventions into non-objective optical poetics, a fascinating experiment in which parallel lines are made to curve and contort towards an operative centre. These resemble a cartoon vision of a black hole with its monochrome layering inverted, a kind of endless feedback loop that speaks to Ruscha’s belief that it is only in California that one feels ‘the end of the line before time starts again… it’s got a sunset embedded in it.’ Later, in the early sixties, Jordan Belson created Allures (1961), an abstract, mutable, and hypnotic series of studies into human optics that sought to research the psychology of perception.

Like Ruscha, Belson’s films seem to occupy a sense of present-at-the-creation intimations of organic and molecular forms, while also opening out to shifting planetary bodies and magnificent cosmologies.  John Whitney’s Permutations (1968), an early computer animation experiment which resembles fireworks in a city night, or Scott Bartlett’s Offon (1968), an assault on the senses as complex geometric compositions are fused with synthetic shapes and Rorschach symmetries, are further examples of a mid- century West Coast avant-garde who used non-objective art to test our habits of looking, recognising, and knowing. Ruscha’s acrylics on canvas are kaleidoscopes of shifting and fractured images, changing colours, and pulsing rhythms. The sixties loom large in Ruscha’s visual vocabulary, a decade  which represented, for the artist born in its headiest year, 1968, ‘the birth and death of counterculture starting with the acid tests and ending with Altamont (the infamous music festival which broke out into violence, resulting in one homicide and several deaths by misadventure) and the Manson Family murders.’ The violence, the optimism, the hallucinogens: all of this has ‘seeped into’ Ruscha’s mandalas, spirals, and ovoids.

As he prepared this new body of work, Ruscha devoured cult mythological and occult texts, especially the work of scientist, anthropologist, and lysergic acid enthusiast Margaret Mead. Drawing on Mead’s cautious utopian ideals— ‘we are faced with the problem of building a new world’, she said, in 1942—Ruscha was seduced by Mead’s emphasis on the emancipatory potential of expanded consciousness, as he sought a new direction for his practice. Mead, for one, thought it was crucial that we ‘reach an awareness which will give us a new control over our human destiny’ and ‘learn consciously to create civilizations within which an increasing proportion of human beings will realize more of what they have it in them to be.’ In their pulsating rhythms, reaching arcs, and brilliant colours, Ruscha’s paintings bask in that same desire. Listening Post 1 (2024) is a direct reference to Mead’s conception of herself as ‘a listening post’ or, a source that collected and synthesized information from across all fields of data recovery, like a central computer or a proto internet network. As Benjamin Breen put it in Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Birth of Psychedelics (2024): ‘Mead had come of age in the era of Freud, when the unconscious was thought to define human behavior. But she believed that scientists like herself were in the process of a revolutionary transformation in collective consciousness, making those invisible drives and motivations visible in ways that could end ancient divisions, heal trauma, and unlock human potential.’ This sense of all forms of knowledge, all matter, emanating towards a single source, a listening post, is visualised in Ruscha’s painting. Purple discs are partly in shadow, as though extending up from the surface of the canvas like a trompe l’oeil even as everything gravitates to that centre, which is to say away from the viewer, while accelerated triangular discs burn with white heat. The energy that this arena of activity generates appears to be so great that the doors of perception, hinted at by the negative space at the foot of the painting, have been prised ajar. We are seductively close to Mead’s utopia beyond, but not yet. Ruscha’s paintings are vibrant not because they seem to coalesce time and space in the same image but because they offer an imagined route through when the distinctions between each are no longer stable.

Many of Ruscha’s paintings can be categorised into two symmetrical formats in the coordinate system: rectangular and circular. In Visa Versa 1 (2023), two sets of waves cross each other in a motion of friction, which is often known in physics as interference. The effect of this is a humming, vibrating quality, represented on the canvas by the off-white central diagonal negative space: it’s like the opposing force of the symmetrical waves keeps its rival in varying states of an irregular holding pattern, buffered by a demilitarised zone in between. The two shalt never meet. From the Latin, meaning ‘the other way around’ or ‘conversely’, visa versa refers to this state of radical transformation; as is one, so the other. In this way, the pushing and pulling of the wave sequences structures the overall composition, which is textured by an earthy, pallid palette of soil browns and stem green. If you stare closely and allow your eyes to drift off as they please, you are likely to get the sense that the two armies of waves are being repelled back into their respective camps on a horizontal axis, as though the centre ground is holding its role as truce-maker. But it is perhaps in thinking about these waves as visual embodiments of sound waves that their meaning is best revealed. Like sonar, which locates objects underwater by means of sound waves sent out to be reflected by the objects, Visa Versa 1 appears to use sound (or the spatial logic of sound) to measure space. The implication that sound is creating space is even more pronounced in Vice Versa 2 and 3 (both 2024), each of which seem to prise open the centre-ground with a powerful atmospheric tension that resembles vibrations on a drum skin or sound frequencies waywardly dancing back and forth from a standing wave.

If we compare the Visa Versa series to Tropical Techno (2023), we find a different spatial logic altogether. The picture seems to be both great in magnitude, like a spiral galaxy coalescing stars  in its curved arms, and minutely quantum, like a falling stone into a body of water. When one drops a pebble from a high vantage point into a well, we all know what happens next: small but strong waves will immediately force themselves out from the centre, before slowly becoming weaker but, in their weakening, expand in size as they reach towards the outer limit of the well. The same effect is created here. In this work, the wave-like structures (I use this more ambiguous phrasing because these shapes feel more like particle dispersal, like when you obscure a garden hose with your thumb over the nozzle) are circular and seem to emanate from a central spiral.

In Vanishing Point (2023), Ruscha refers to the long history of painterly perspective but transforms its Renaissance logic into a kaleidoscopic vortex that plays with our sensory perception of colour. A vanishing point is a point on the image plane of a perspective—a painting, a rendering, a diagram—where the two-dimensional perspective projections of mutually parallel lines in three-dimensional space appear to converge. Think of standing on a railroad, stood in between the two tracks and stare down to the horizon. You know that the tracks do not meet, because you are stood between them. But, in the very far distance, we see them meet. Or, to take an example from the early Renaissance, think about Pietro Perugio’s use of perspective in the Delivery of the Keys fresco at the Sistine Chapel (1481-82) and the way the octagonal temple of Jerusalem and its porches dominate the central axis. In Ruscha’s Vanishing Point, the five-sided rectangular shape is coloured purple-pink, or renders the waves beyond purple-pink, while the waves themselves appear—in their true state—to be a blackened blue. By organising colour in this way, Ruscha reminds us our sensory perception  is so often mediated by obstacles—windows, screens, even self-deception—that transform the truths of our world into something else. At their most compelling, that is what these paintings are capable of: as a means for us to recognise, in our own lives, how to differentiate what is true from what is false, and what is real from what  is an illusion. These might be paintings that are in conversation with the sixties but, if you look closely enough, they are also talking to us in our future.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman