Miracle

The painter Ed Ruscha is most often associated with paintings that depict words.
He is also well-known for his ‘car-seat view of the world’, concentrating on the landscape typical for Los Angeles. In 1963, Ruscha began a series of photographic art books that documented ordinary life in Los Angeles. For Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha mounted a motorised Nikon to the back of a pick-up truck and photographed every building he passed. Sometime in the summer of 1966, he decided to road-test a typewriter by hurling it out of a speeding Buick. He documented this as if it were a crash-site, where the automotive and the typographic collided, merging as it were the lines of the page with those of the road.
Equally important as typography to Ruscha was the impact of film. Many of his painted works reflect the way credits appear. His oeuvre includes a group of works that deal with the final words on a film: ‘The End’. In a series from the 1970s and 1980s the panoramic cinemascope format compounds the literal and the lateral in a sweep, landscaping the text into the form of a title credit. In the context of Hollywood, making a film about a car mechanic is not all that strange an intermezzo in the career of this ‘conceptual pop artist’. Ruscha has stated that film has had a strong impact on his artistic decisions; he actually directed two short films (Premium dates from 1971).