Lightening Up the Getty

John Walsh is determined to make the J. Paul Getty Museum a living entity. A scholar of 17th century Dutch painting and former curator of European paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Walsh has a degree from Yale and a sensibility cultivated in the hallowed halls of high culture. Walsh has a pedigree but he’s not a snob, and his populism is reflected in his enlightened stewardship of the museum, where he’s been director since 1983.

Artist Ed Ruscha, on the other hand, has street smarts and has parlayed a hipster’s sensibility into a body of work of enduring interest. Walsh may be to the manor born, but Ruscha is a natural aristocrat, equally at home at posh art world dinners and seedy nightclubs. Born in Oklahoma in 1937, Ruscha has lived in L.A. for 40 years, and it was here that he hammered out his signature style. Juxtaposing enigmatic words and phrases against emotionally cool backgrounds, Ruscha’s work has usually been steeped in a kind of breezy irony.

A permanent commission Ruscha recently completed for the Getty’s Harold M. Williams Auditorium, however, is something of a departure: the artist’s largest canvas to date (it’s 23 feet high), “Picture Without Words” depicts a blazing shaft of light slicing through a dark void. To provide some context for the painting, Walsh has curated “Ed Ruscha’s Light,” a show of 24 paintings and works on paper on view at the Getty Museum, charting the artist’s handling of the theme of light over the past 25 years.

Talking with Walsh and Ruscha in the director’s office at the museum, one is struck by the fact that for all their differences, the two men are remarkably alike. At 60, both are diplomatic in the extreme and charmingly self-effacing. They also seem to find the same things funny and to enjoy making each other laugh. We asked them to speak a bit about the genesis of “Ed Ruscha’s Light,” and the symbolic significance of light in art of the late 20th century.

Question: What are the rewards and difficulties of working with a living artist, as opposed to historical material?

Walsh: I usually deal with dead artists, which is more convenient because there’s less material you have to make sense of, plus, they can’t talk back. With Ed, the amount of material is overwhelming and it just keeps coming. As nice as Ed is, he makes you work, too. His paintings can’t be taken at face value and you have to do some thinking in order to experience them, because Ed lives by his thought. Being part of that for a while has been a kick--and, as anyone who’s met Ed will attest, he’s a really hospitable guy. He always made me feel welcome in the studio and he’s extremely well organized--museums should be so organized.

Q: What does it mean to you to be exhibited at the Getty?

Ruscha: When the Getty was under construction my assumption was that it would be a facility for antiquities, so I’m surprised to find myself here. Some people think of it as a stuffy place and yes, they do show old art, but even the most progressive places can be stuffy and many a fine tune is played on an old violin. And John isn’t stuffy at all. John doesn’t look like an athlete, but having worked with him that’s how I’ve come to think of him--he has a phenomenal amount of energy. His position is very demanding, and my show was just a fraction of what he has to deal with every day, but he was open and available to me, and put in long hours making sure the show looked good.

Q: When the Getty commissioned you, Ed, to make a work for its auditorium, were there any parameters you were asked to work within?

Ruscha: There were none, and when I first visited the site I felt like a headless chicken. As to why I decided to paint a shaft of light, all I can say is ideas come from nowhere and are produced by everything an artist is about. I’ve been doing this light shaft business for a while, and when I look at this version of it, I can see Muhammad Ali in there, and there’s also me putting my socks on in the morning. Everything I’m about is in that picture--and that’s something I could say about all my work.

Walsh: We gave Ed no limitations, but the limitations are built-in because the commission was for a specific wall with specific light conditions. The project was overseen by [former Getty Trust president] Harold Williams, [independent curator] Lisa Lyons, [Getty executive vice president] Steve Rountree and I, and it’s hard to imagine four more different people. But when Ed brought in four big pastel studies for the painting, we were unanimously convinced. One thing I immediately loved about the proposal was that it would be a depiction of light, but would also have some of the power of the real thing. I also loved that it was going to be in a Richard Meier building. No living architect has made as much of a mystique of light as Meier has, so there’s a certain audacity in putting a painting about light in a room flooded with self-consciously architectural light. That’s pretty cheeky.

Ruscha: I didn’t think about Meier or his handling of light, and my project wasn’t architecture-sensitive. It was, however, sensitive to the light in that location. I had a computer shadow study done of the site and I can tell you what the light in that area will look like at any time of year. I didn’t work from those studies though, nor did I work from a photograph. This is an imaginary jumble of light, so I allowed myself poetic license in terms of cropping and positioning. You might say ‘if you’re going to give us a light shaft, how about the whole thing?’ but it didn’t work when I made it scientifically correct. It’s a much more powerful picture cropped as it is.

Q: John, when you decided to curate a show of Ed’s work revolving around the theme of light and you began researching it, did you find an abundance of work that could potentially be included, or did you really have to cherry-pick to pull a show together?

Walsh: There was more than enough work. When we saw sketches for the painting several things about it struck me as unusual: It’s large, it doesn’t have jokes or words, and it exploits the notion of radiance in presenting what appears to be a dark room invaded by a shaft of light. Because I’d known and loved Ed’s work for years, I was surprised to learn he’d been stewing in these ideas long before the Getty got to him. There’s no way I could’ve known it, though, because Ed has lots of work that’s never been published and few people are aware of.

The idea for the show really shifted into focus when Lisa Lyons and I spent a day going through the slides of Ed’s work dating back to the early ‘60s, paying special attention to painting. Midway through that visit Ed said, ‘You might be interested in these--I showed them 20 years ago but they haven’t been out much,’ then he pulled out a huge flat file. Out come eight big pastel drawings of light bursting through clouds and casting great shafts of light downwards. My field is older art, so I’m looking at this stuff thinking this looks like an Italian Baroque altarpiece, or Rembrandt’s “Annunciation to the Shepherds.” I asked Ed what they were called and he said, ‘This is ‘The Miracle Series.”

Q: Ed, is this the Catholic in you emerging? You’re also currently in an exhibition on view through June 27th at Cheim & Read in New York, called “Three Catholics,” that pairs your work with that of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Ruscha: Yeah, I can’t deny it. I was raised Catholic, and I’ve been warned it’s impossible to leave that behind. I’ve taken my own road in this thing but it probably does permeate everything I do, and I see traces here and there--Catholic literature, for instance, has been littered with images of light shafts for centuries.

Q: A current of irony has always coursed through your art; does the subject matter of this body of work preclude the possibility of irony?

Ruscha: It’s not as evident in this work, which is possibly more sober than the rest of my stuff. At the heart of this work too, however, is some sort of paradox that I don’t understand--and that’s what fuels my art.

Q: In much of your work you’ve handled light in a manner reminiscent of Rene Magritte: Both of you create compositions that depict mysterious objects hovering in an eerie, existential void. Has the Surrealist treatment of light been a reference for you?

Ruscha: No. Things like that patch of light on the floor over there [gesturing across the room] have been more a source of inspiration. I’m intrigued by the fact that it sort of has no character, yet it’s there, and I use things like that as a kind of anonymous background. I’ve been working with sources like that for years, and I’m still asking myself about the reality of those things.

Q: Is there anything recognizably regional in the way Ed handles light?

Walsh: One could make the case that the paintings evoking celluloid light projections have a regional flavor. There’s one in particular, with the words “The End” in nice gothic letters, like the end of some historical romance, that feels sort of L.A.

One of the first miracle works is a 28-minute film Ed made in 1975 called “Miracle” that we’re screening in conjunction with the show. It’s set in a garage and centers on a filthy mechanic working on a Mustang. In a series of cuts, he gets cleaner and more lucid, and in the final scene he’s wearing a pristine white lab coat and has solved the problem. The “miracle” of the story is that we’re given no indication of what brought about his transformation.

Finishing up with the question of regionalism, Ed may dismiss this, but I can’t look at “Picture Without Words” without thinking of artists of his generation like Bob Irwin and James Turrell, who’ve made installations with light. Ed doesn’t make a depiction of light so much as he makes an embodiment of it, but I think they all share an appreciation for the significance of light as a creative raw material in Southern California.

Ruscha: We might be getting into dangerous territory if you align me with artists who’ve taken this light business to its most serious end. Jim Turrell is a good friend and we agree on lots of things, but his approach to light is completely different from mine. His approach is more pure than mine, because he goes back to the source. I stop the source by making a painting out of it, and have no interest in the peculiarities and science of light itself.

Q: As an art student in the ‘50s, were you told it was necessary to work out an ideology about the treatment of light in painting? Was that part of the curriculum?

Ruscha: Not at all. In previous periods that was definitely something they did--they did light studies and fiddled with the camera lucida and so forth. When I went to art school the course of study was, however, much more classical than it is today. These days they don’t even have figure drawing and art students sit at computers. It’s future world--which isn’t to suggest I mourn the passing of the mode of study I had.

Q: For centuries light was employed in painting as a metaphor for the divine, and was interpreted as an avenue to the worship of things not of this earth. That changed with Modernism, which presented aesthetic experience, and the art object itself, as the thing to be worshipped. Now that conventional notions of religiosity have been expunged from art, what is the symbolic meaning of light?

Ruscha: It’s interesting you use the word avenue, because the painting I made for the Getty isn’t an avenue painting that will lead me to paint more light shafts. It’s an end painting. I don’t see more light shafts in my future because I’ve taken it as far as it can go.

Q: Do you intend that the shaft of light be interpreted as a metaphor for a miracle, or is light itself the miracle?

Ruscha: I’m tongue-tied on that one.

Q: In a 1991 review of work by artist Wayne Thiebaud, critic Adam Gopnik commented on Thiebaud’s use of “a chalky, melancholy light, which seems to have been bottled sometime in the 1930s in a small Midwestern city, and has been spilling into American painting ever since.” One assumes Gopnik is referring to the light that washes over work by artists such as Edward Hopper, and has its roots in the art of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, among others. Do you feel yourself to be a part of this tradition?

Ruscha: Those artists actually painted light, whereas I’m painting an idea about light. Another difference is that those artists painted from life, while I’ve been more influenced by magazines and popular culture--my inspiration is often second-hand. I have a standing appreciation of those artists, yet I can’t look at any of them and say “this is where it comes from.” I’m influenced by living in the world. Yet, my interpretation of the world is filtered through art, so I guess I have to say I do belong to that tradition--so there you go.

Walsh: I think you can trace Ed’s handling of light further back than Hopper, to the Luminist tradition of Martin Johnson Heade, which has links with transcendental thought, that of Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. Luminism espoused a belief in an imminent, higher force embodied in the wonders of nature, which are there for man to contemplate for his own betterment. That’s an interesting counterpoint to the Catholic belief in divine intervention in human affairs expressed by bursts of light--and miracles!

Look at Fitz Hugh Lane’s sunsets over the sea, the sun casting golden light over all of God and man’s creations--that was a mid-19th century depiction of nature that survived well into the 20th century. Ed approaches this territory through popular imagery, and reflects the ironic point of view of a late 20th century artist. In what spirit will people take Ed’s paintings of light? How will they be interpreted? That’s where the voice of the 20th century makes itself heard.

Q: What’s the most difficult kind of light for a painter to wrestle with?

Ruscha: Probably Caravaggio’s light. I think that might be harder to pull off than my light shaft. I don’t have objects or people.

Walsh: On the other hand, Ed’s light has to stand alone and do all the work--there aren’t even any words to help. One of my favorite pieces in the show is a painting with that same shaft of light and the words “An Exhibition of Gasoline Powered Engines.” It’s hard to imagine two more disparate elements than this light shimmering with spiritual allusion, and a bunch of machinery. In that piece Ed undercuts the potential solemnity of the light; in the Getty painting it simply reveals itself.

Q: Is a painter always courting notions of beauty when he deals with light?

Walsh: He’s certainly courting conventions about beauty, and I think Ed’s work occupies that territory. This isn’t unmediated light; this is light that evokes thousands of paintings and graphic images. When Ed painted sunlight bursting though clouds, he wasn’t thinking only about the physical world; he was thinking about all those pictures that have conditioned us to accept sunlight bursting through clouds as something miraculous.

Q: The painting of natural light has associations with landscape; do you consider any of your paintings landscapes?

Ruscha: Yes I do. A work like “The Standard Gasoline Station,” for instance, is definitely a landscape. In a sense I approach all my work as if it’s a landscape in that there’s a background, a foreground and usually some other nonsense going on--lots of times it’s words. The background-foreground thing is an ever present issue for artists, and this is my response to it. It’s landscape once removed. You could certainly say that about paintings I made in the ‘60s and ‘70s of searchlights and so forth, and I’m maybe saying the same thing in the Getty painting that I said in those.

Q: And exactly what is it you’re saying?

Ruscha: I’m telling my side of the story.

Walsh: (laughing) She thought she saw pay dirt there.*

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* “Ed Ruscha’s Light” continues through Sept. 13 at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Getty Center Drive, Brentwood. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free, but parking reservations are required: (310) 440-7300.

Exhibitions of new work by Ruscha open June 27 at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London, and in October at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.