我一直在关注一些事情，我觉得这些事情应该被提升到更高的地位，几乎是哲学地位或宗教地位。这就是为什么断章取义对艺术家来说是一种有用的工具。这是一个概念，把一些不是主题的东西变成主题。——埃德·拉斯查There are things that I’m constantly looking at that I feel should be elevated to greater status, almost to philosophical status or to a religious status. That’s why taking things out of context is a useful tool to an artist. It’s the concept of taking something that’s not subject matter and making it subject matter.
—Ed Ruscha
埃德·拉斯查
Ed Ruscha
在他的艺术生涯开始时，拉斯查称自己是一位“处理主题的抽象艺术家”。他放弃了与抽象表现主义相关的学术内涵，转而关注广告中的比喻，并将文字——如形式、符号和材料——带到了绘画的前沿。他以幽默和智慧在不同的媒体中工作，在符号和实质之间摇摆不定，在自然和人工景观中寻找崇高。At the start of his artistic career, Ed Ruscha called himself an “abstract artist ... who deals with subject matter.” Abandoning academic connotations that came to be associated with Abstract Expressionism, he looked instead to tropes of advertising and brought words—as form, symbol, and material—to the forefront of painting. Working in diverse media with humor and wit, he oscillates between sign and substance, locating the sublime in landscapes both natural and artificial.1956年，拉斯查从俄克拉何马城搬到洛杉矶，在那里他就读于Chouinard艺术学院。在艺术学校期间，他一直以弗朗茨·克莱恩和威廉·德·库宁的方式绘画，并发现了贾斯珀·约翰斯的《四张脸的目标》（1955年）的复制品。被约翰斯使用现成的图像作为抽象的支持所打动，拉斯查开始考虑如何使用图形来暴露绘画作为对象和幻觉的双重身份。在他的第一幅字画《埃德·拉斯查（1959）》中，他故意误判了在画布上写第一个首字母和姓氏所需的空间，在上面插入了最后两个字母HA，并用箭头表示“错误”。毕业后，拉斯查开始为广告公司工作，磨练了他的平面设计技巧，并考虑了比例、抽象和视角等问题，这些问题成为他的绘画和摄影不可或缺的组成部分。1963年，他创作了他的第一本艺术家的书《二十六个加油站》，这是艺术家在从洛杉矶到俄克拉荷马城的66号公路上拍摄的一系列面无表情的照片。自那以后，拉斯查创作了十几本艺术家的书，包括25英尺长、手风琴折叠的《日落大道上的每栋楼》（1966年）和凯鲁亚克的标志性作品《在路上》（2009年）。拉斯查还绘制错号装订的书籍，并用绘画的文字改变书脊和内部：各种形式的书籍充斥着他对语言以及艺术和信息分布的研究。In 1956, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute. During his time in art school, he had been painting in the manner of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and came across a reproduction of Jasper Johns’sTarget with Four Faces (1955). Struck by Johns’s use of readymade images as supports for abstraction, Ruscha began to consider how he could employ graphics in order to expose painting’s dual identity as both object and illusion. For his first word painting, E.Ruscha (1959), he intentionally miscalculated the space it would take to write his first initial and surname on the canvas, inserting the last two letters, HA, above and indicating the “error” with an arrow. After graduation, Ruscha began to work for ad agencies, honing his skills in schematic design and considering questions of scale, abstraction, and viewpoint, which became integral to his painting and photography. He produced his first artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations—a series of deadpan photographs the artist took while driving on Route 66 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City—in 1963. Ruscha since has gone on to create over a dozen artists’ books, including the 25-foot-long, accordion-folded Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) and his version of Kerouac's iconic On the Road (2009). Ruscha also paints trompe-l’oeil bound volumes and alters book spines and interiors with painted words: books in all forms pervade his investigations of language and the distribution of art and information.拉斯查20世纪60年代的绘画探索了语言的噪音和流动性。像《OOF》（1962–63）这样的作品——在蓝色的地面上用黄色方块字母呈现感叹号——几乎不可能在不描述视觉的情况下看这幅画。自1993年与Gagosian合作举办第一次展览以来，拉斯查已与画廊举办了21个展，包括《定制的阴谋：绘画1974–84》（2017），其中包括十年来用粉彩、干颜料和各种可食用物质（从菠菜到胡萝卜汁）绘制的短语反向模板绘画。2004年，第一届拉斯查绘画回顾展在惠特尼美国艺术博物馆举行。拉斯查继续影响着世界各地的当代艺术家，随着技术和互联网平台改变人类交流的本质，他对美国本土语言的正式实验和巧妙使用在形式和意义上都在演变。拉斯查代表美国参加了第51届威尼斯双年展（2005年），展出了十幅绘画作品《帝国的历程》。这幅作品的灵感来自19世纪美国艺术家托马斯·科尔著名的同名绘画周期，暗示了现代主义进步愿景的陷阱。2018年，拉斯查的《帝国历程》与Cole的同时在伦敦国家美术馆展出。Ruscha’s paintings of the 1960s explore the noise and the fluidity of language. With works such asOOF (1962–63)—which presents the exclamation in yellow block letters on a blue ground—it is nearly impossible to look at the painting without verbalizing the visual. Since his first exhibition with Gagosian in 1993, Ruscha has had twenty-one solo exhibitions with the gallery, including Custom-Built Intrigue: Drawings 1974–84 (2017), comprising a decade of reverse-stencil drawings of phrases rendered in pastel, dry pigment, and various edible substances, from spinach to carrot juice. The first retrospective of Ruscha’s drawings was held in 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ruscha continues to influence contemporary artists worldwide, his formal experimentations and clever use of the American vernacular evolving in form and meaning as technology and internet platforms alter the essence of human communication. Ruscha represented the United States at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) with Course of Empire, an installation of ten paintings. Inspired by nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole’s famous painting cycle of the same name, the work alludes to the pitfalls surrounding modernist visions of progress. In 2018 Ruscha’s Course of Empire was presented concurrently with Cole’s at the National Gallery in London.
