Ruscha likes to spell it all out

The 43-year retrospective of drawings by Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha is an embarrassment of riches, which raises an inadvertent question: How much of a good thing is too much of a good thing? The show is huge -- about 200 drawings. It is impossible to absorb, even in a cursory way, except on multiple visits.

Organized by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, the show occupies nearly half the main building at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where it opened Sunday. It overflows MOCA’s modest drawing galleries, continuing into six more rooms. Coming around the bend to the show’s final gallery and spying the last wall filled with seven drawings that riff on the closing title cards of old movies -- “The End” -- should not be an experience that generates a sigh of relief.

But it does. Gigantism is becoming commonplace in the realm of art exhibitions, and it can be counterproductive. Looking at art is neither a labor nor an obligation but a vivacious pleasure, even when (unlike here) the work’s subject is bleak. But this show is exhaustive and exhausting.

It’s doubtful anyone could stand up to it -- including Ruscha, who is among the most important artists to have emerged anywhere in the 1960s. His work has performed a powerful critique of the limits on imagination imposed by established Modern art. By injecting a distinctly American ethos into a European aesthetic tradition formed by bohemian sensibilities, he opened new terrain. Artists still explore it today.

What was that ethos? Call it the power of the modern American vernacular.

From the mid-19th century on, American painters routinely came from the ranks of commercial artists. For every studio practitioner, a host of silverware designers, banknote engravers, magazine illustrators, newspaper correspondents and graphic artists painted independently, in their spare time. Think of artists as different from one another as the illusionist still-life painter William Harnett (a silver engraver) and the boisterous chronicler of New York slum life, John Sloan (a newspaper illustrator).

The old bond between fine and commercial art is not surprising. America’s national identity was shifting -- from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban. Commerce afforded a new mechanism for artists, given the paucity of prestigious state academies (not to mention the absence of royal patronage) to support them. But the stark difference from European traditions, where modern ideas of art were first established, also helped to fix a false dichotomy. High art and low art emerged as a stubborn hierarchy.

At the end of the day the only distinction worth making is between good art and bad art, and Ruscha’s is very good art indeed. It’s instructive that at age 19 he chose to come to Los Angeles from Oklahoma City to become an artist rather than to move to New York. In the 1950s, New York was the cultural capital of America -- and, by default, war-ravaged Europe -- but L.A. was (and is) the historic production center of mass art.

Ruscha spelled out his take on the place in a 1968 drawing whose capital letters abbreviate the name of the state he left behind, “OKLA.” You can also read the letters in another, strikingly affirmative way: O.K., L.A. -- period.

Ruscha was trained in graphic design and advertising at the old Chouinard Art Institute. Because his art employs words, and because Chouinard later became Cal Arts, a center for the institutionalization of Conceptual art, he is sometimes wrongly described as a Conceptualist. (The current show’s catalog tries something similar, straining to find the source of his drawings in the now-fashionable practice of photography.) In fact, Ruscha did what Andy Warhol was doing independently in New York: He took the radical step of applying commercial techniques directly to paint on canvas.

And drawing? Even in today’s age of pixels, drawing is the foundation of graphic design.

The show at MOCA is installed in a loose chronology. It begins in 1959 with “Sweetwater,” a study related to the first painting executed in Ruscha’s distinctive brand of Pop.

The sheet is just 2 feet high and a foot and a half wide. A rectangular field is outlined in the center, as if plotting out the shape of a canvas. Splashes of green and blue ink are carefully lined up in three rows, so that the gestural exuberance and improvisation of Abstract Expressionist painting comes across instead as contrived and formulaic. Beneath the ink-splashed rectangle is the word “Sweetwater,” printed with commercial letterpress.

This captioned image is literally a graphic design for a painting. (The big canvas version was accidentally destroyed in the early 1960s.) Its union of machine-printed text with desultory splashes of color shows an awareness of the exhaustion of Abstract Expressionism. It also acknowledges the audacious use of signs as a subject by the young New York painter Jasper Johns.

Why underscore the image with the lovely word Sweetwater”? Because that’s the name of a town in Oklahoma, due west of Oklahoma City and just shy of the Texas line. It’s the last town on the way out of state, heading for the coast.

Autobiography lurks concealed within a lot of Ruscha’s art, often hidden inside the choice of words that dominate his work. This reliance on personal history probably derives from two main sources: Abstract Expressionism and Catholicism. The confessional is paramount in both doctrines. Together they might be said to have made up Ruscha’s youthful faith.

Of course, between Abstract Expressionism and Catholicism an artist is squeezed by a dilemma. A spirit of transgression, which fuels the idea of avant-garde art, smashes up against a religious exhortation against sin. That dangerous collision is one thing that makes a drawing like “Honk” so preternaturally funny. The blaring white title word, “honk,” is propelled from out of the soft darkness of a black graphite background to make a graphic signal that visually shouts, “Watch out!”

Making art is playing in spiritual traffic. As we know from Ruscha’s pictures of Standard gasoline stations, busting up the criteria by which art was measured and freedom restricted was very much on his mind. Standards had become gassy.

There’s also a wonderful sense of mischievous self-deprecation in this work -- of knowing what’s at stake for an artist working in a culture that regards art so piously that it’s elevated into a High Church canon. Ruscha’s honking image blasphemes by speaking with the commercial tools of graphic design. By the established artistic standards of 1964, the drawing is indeed a honker.

Three-dimensional illusionism is something Ruscha played with throughout the 1960s, in various ways. He began drawing words in imitation of ribbons of paper, cut with scissors and pasted together like a late Matisse. To emphasize the material quality of art, he used substances other than graphite or pastel.

Gunpowder recognizes the explosive volatility of art. Crushed rose petals, wet lettuce leaves and tobacco juice make transgression a stain. All of them produced the incarnate word -- the word made flesh.

By the mid-1970s, Ruscha established a simple, inventive and powerful format that he has used most often. Tape is cut and applied to the paper in the shape of a letter, pigment is rubbed over the surface and the tape is then peeled away. The word appears in the white paper left behind, as negative space.

Negative space is an effective method for depersonalizing language. For drawing, it’s the equivalent of erasing the prominence of brushstrokes from a painting.

Negative space empties the words as signs of the artist’s unique and emotional inner being. The phrases appear to have been seen or overheard, at a party or on the radio or a billboard, and sometimes they’re rendered like monograms embroidered on the culture’s collective pillow. They’re not about Ruscha, except insofar as he is one of us.

Take “The End” -- the sign, now almost obsolete, for the finish of a Hollywood movie. The seven examples that close MOCA’s show range from 1993 to 2002 and employ a variety of specific typefaces. The styles recall different scenarios: dramas, cartoons, historical epics.

One even appears as if scrawled in lipstick on a mirror, torrid romance gone awry. All of them feature dust particles, scratches and other signs of cinematic wear and tear.

The familiar but unseen movie narratives that precede these final frames have been enacted a thousand times before. As a vernacular meditation on death and the void, pictures of “The End” are not what an Abstract Expressionist or a Catholic might expect. But they’re exactly right for the American millennium.

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‘Cotton Puffs, Q-tips®, Smoke and Mirrors:

The Drawings

of Ed Ruscha’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: Jan. 17

Price: General admission, $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222