MUSIC Luscious Jackson: City Song

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. Happy Friday, everyone. Halloween is in the rearview, Thanksgiving is on the horizon, and it has been a week since we set our clocks to fall back. We wanted to say from team All Of It, here's hoping your adjustment to Autumn has been a cozy one. Listeners, maybe the changing seasons have you thinking about some of the indoor activities the city has to offer. To that end, we're bringing you five conversations today about some of the great art you can catch around town for at least the next few months. From the big works of Manet and Dega to the small, the textile and felt-based still life portraits from local artist, Melissa Joseph.

First, let's get things started with a huge show at MoMA.

MUSIC - Luscious Jackson

Ed Ruscha's long career is getting a full treatment with his works currently taking up the entire sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art. Ruscha was a pioneer of the Pop Art movement in the '60s and '70s, and his words jump off the canvas, sometimes literally. They are layers of paint that make the words appear 3D, sometimes because they are just so big and bright and colorful, and sometimes because they are painted with materials like tobacco or gunpowder or even his own blood. Ruscha has an eye for spotlighting some of the quotidian aspects of American life. An abandoned mattress left on the side of the road. A standard oil gas station. An empty factory.

Also key to Ruscha's work, a sense of humor. In fact, hanging in this retrospective is a painting that says, I Don't Want No Retro Spective, but here it is anyway. Ed Ruscha / Now Then features more than 200 pieces of the artist's work, including paintings, drawings, photographs, and a whole room painted in chocolate. It's running at MoMA through January 13th. I talked about it with Christophe Cherix, the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art. I began our conversation by asking him where in the retrospective we can see Ed Ruscha's "waste retrieval method of working" as the artist himself calls it.

Christophe Cherix: It's a good question, and I think it's something that really help us to shape that exhibition. Retrospective over 65 years seems to be a very long time. What's fascinating, what we found working on that exhibition is how Ed Ruscha was really using time as almost one of his materials. Always creating those echoes, those rhythm between different decades. Sometimes using a technique and just almost planting a seed. It's only, like you mentioned, some of those pastels in '64 and it's only 10 years later that they come and bloom within his practice. Time is really part of his work and I do believe that his experiences in the 1960s, really right out of art school, really shaped his career.

Alison Stewart: When we look at this work together as a whole, what do we learn is important to Ed Ruscha?

Christophe Cherix: I think it looks at the world in a very singular way. I think what's fascinating with all this in general is they don't always look at what's around you the same way. We're confronted with the same thing, with same facts, the same events, and you have someone just looking, let's say, at outside views, at streets, at cars, at empty shop windows, at words, not for their meaning but how they sound and how they look. I think that's one of the things we learn is you have individuals around us looking at the world very, very differently than we do. I think that allow us to think about the world in different ways.

Alison Stewart: What are some of the themes that emerge from Ruscha's work?

Christophe Cherix: One of the very early themes is his fascination for words turning them into subject matter. We ask ourself, how did that come about? How does suddenly someone just instead of, as you say, instead of painting flowers, going to paint words? What amazed us is we realize that when just out of art school, when he started traveling in Europe with his mom and his brother throughout 16 countries in a little car, and suddenly that young man was confronted with languages that he wouldn't understand but he found it beautiful.

In fact, what he found beautiful is the power of things which have no meaning for him. Really, words come out into his world at that moment using words that he just almost collect in his trip, like Metropolitan, like the Gima subway station, or Espana. They become a subject, but not for what they mean, but how they look and what they carry almost as objects.

Alison Stewart: There's a series of eight works mostly from the '70s. They're lined up in two rows, pastel on paper, all word pieces, except for the last one, which is Orange Roller, which is this big orange orb. What is powerful about these as a collection and then what's powerful about them individually?

Christophe Cherix: I think that's something we ask ourself. How do you want to display the work? In that room, we felt, I think you can show those work either. You can imagine, I Don't Want No Retro Spective is one of them on its own, but I think mixing it up with other words, look, I live in Sun Valley, or-

Alison Stewart: Artists who do books.

Christophe Cherix: -artists who do books, artists who make "pieces". This idea of a language erupting into his work, the shape and the sound they create as much at what they mean, felt was an interesting moment for us to just bring them together and create almost a cacophony of language. You can't really grasp all those meaning, but you're almost bombarded by them. That was this moment for us in the show.

Alison Stewart: Then there's the final orb, I thought, "Is that a period?" Is that a big giant period at the end of all of these words or is it just to break up all of the language?

Christophe Cherix: Ruscha often likes to break up the meaning we can construct. He adds flames or fire to a building or is going to tweak something like write a word in maple syrup, let's say, to create what he calls a code out to the work. Suddenly the work is not about that word or that building, is something is going to disrupt your relationship to it. For those two works, it's really about what we did together with Anna Truro and Kiko Aebi, my two great colleagues, with whom I organized that exhibition.

We really asked ourselves to see every work in person before we'd bring it to the Museum of Modern Art. We looked at the work above, and when we saw it in the collector's home, it was together with that orb, and that was just so beautiful. Not something that I completely understand but something that I felt was fascinating to have that sphere levitating with those words. Also in a way outside of gravity, just floating in space and to bring them together we felt was a nice way to break up the series, as you say.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Christophe Cherix, he's the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints. We're talking about Ed Ruscha / Now Then currently at MoMA. We've been talking about all the words, which I think a lot of people immediately recognize. You see it and you go, "That's Ed Ruscha," but the first image we see, which is also the image on the cover of the catalog, is from 2003 Charles Atlas Landscape, pencil and ink on canvas, about six and a half feet by six and a half feet. It's these two intersecting pipes with a blue at the top fading into yellow gold back with a little bit of black on the bottom. Why is this the painting at the beginning of the exhibit?

Christophe Cherix: We wanted to start with the surprise. A lot of people think they know Ed Ruscha's work well, and we wanted to also think about an image that would be closer to now than then. We wanted to bring something that felt very intimate to the artist, and that painting, Charles Atlas Landscape, if you want to see it, you have to go to his studio in Culver City. He painted it and kept it all those years, showed it a few time, but this is the first time it's shown in New York City. We felt that would be a nice image to carry through the show.

To take the words out a second and to just tell people, just be careful, be attentive to details. Those poles, they're almost like [foreign language]. They seem to bend the painting. In fact, the canvas is a shaped canvas. It seems to stretch out even if those pole have nothing to do with the canvas being stretched. We wanted also people to pay attention to the backdrops. Backdrop sometimes is just a backdrop. For Ed Ruscha, it's as powerful and important than the subject matter, than the words or the object that are painted in front of that background. Those two things felt important to us for people to just be attentive to as they were going into the exhibition.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned that was in his studio in Culver City, and you mentioned a collector before. How many different institutions or entities were involved in putting together this show?

Christophe Cherix: It took really a large number of people. We really wanted the show to represent the best possible ways work throughout those six decades. At the end, we're able to do that through the help and the loan of 65 lenders, 25 of them being institutions in and around the world.

Alison Stewart: On the way we talked about the first thing in the exhibit, on the way out of the exhibit, you see one of the more recent in the collection, 2017, one which he's made, I should say, it's an American flag that seems to be deteriorating and disintegrating in the air. Is this a political painting? Was he political during his career?

Christophe Cherix: I think he wasn't, but this is a political painting. That might be the exception. As Ruscha said, this one felt a little bit different. That painting was commissioned to him by a friend who wanted a flag painting. Ruscha said, "I'm going to paint a flag painting, but it's not going to be the one you are really expecting, or maybe even want to." It was just after Trump election, and it just show a little bit the mood of the country and his own mood.

What I love about this painting is to be political at that very precise moment, but also to go beyond that. Looking at this painting, it's a flag in tatters. It's almost 200 years encapsulated in one second, in one still. What you see, that painting, that flag being shredded in front of your eyes, bringing motion into something that usually is completely still.

That painting, I think, resonated in very different levels and, of course, attests to what happened in this country in 2017.

It's also something that brings hope, because when you look at this work very closely, and we're so happy that we can use the painting unframed and unglazed, you'll see every detail being painted with the greatest tenderness, very beautiful little piece of fabric becoming their own thing, in a way. It's the idea of after destruction, after something like that happening, hope can prevail. We felt it was a nice ending to the show.

Alison Stewart: Some of the work right before, sets that up a little bit, because there's a work that if you look at it quickly, it looks like black dashes on canvas, and then you realize, oh, it looks like redacted material. It involves one of Ruscha's favorite athletes, Jackie Robinson. What's the story behind this piece?

Christophe Cherix: In the mid-80s, he started, instead of writing words in his canvas, to use those blank rectangle, either white or black, and almost as a redacted sentence. He wouldn't hide the words because they would be present on the label in the title of the work. That painting is a little bit special for him for a number of reasons. One of them, Ed Ruscha, is a great baseball fan, and a lot of the theme that he brings, as we mentioned, come from his early childhood, like his really early moment as an artist.

He grew up in Oklahoma City, and he was lucky enough to attend an exhibition game with Jackie Robinson and to get an autograph from Jackie Robinson.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Christophe Cherix: That really shaped this admiration for that athlete. When he came to that painting, he wanted to make works that really was about redacted language that we would hide because maybe it's violent. He's going to use quote from the mafia, quote in our everyday language. This one is from a note that Jackie Robinson received as one of the first black baseball player working in Major League. He got death threat just because of the color of his skin, so if you read the title that I Can't Quit by memory, you'll see it's one of those death threats that he received.

That painting, for Ruscha, goes almost beyond any of those censorship paintings, as it's made of a recycled canvas that he painted over 10 years before. It's really something that intertwined time, his own childhood, and the current moment.

Alison Stewart: Later in his career, he moved towards unconventional materials. There's chocolate, tobacco-- We'll talk about chocolate room in a minute-- tobacco, gunpowder. What texture do these unconventional materials bring to the work?

Christophe Cherix: We wanted to draw out that more experimental side of Ed Ruscha that maybe we have lost sight a little bit. That really allowed him to keep making work in very different ways over six decades. At some point in the late '60s, he said that he got bored with painting. Painting is always all on canvas, always the same process.

One thought he had was, let's change the ingredients, let's change the material. Instead of using oil or acrylic or anything else, I'm going to go use things that are around me. Start with gunpowder instead of graphite powder for those beautiful drawings of the late '60s and quickly move to Bolognaire sauce to syrup, to all kind of things that are really not meant to make art but things that are going to be hard to control, are going to create a surprise, allow him to go further within his practice.

Quickly he's invited, as he's thinking those ideas through to the Venice Biennale and to show his work in the American Pavilion. He is going to have the opportunity to work with a workshop, a printmaking workshop, and he's going to build a room entirely made of chocolate that we have reconstituted in the shelf.

Alison Stewart: Yes. This entire room of chocolate. You can smell it when you're walking.

Christophe Cherix: From the third floor of the museum.

Alison Stewart: Yes, for-- Really? Oh. The New York Times described it as an oddity in Ruscha's influential oeuvre. Gosh. First of all, I don't know where to start. Let me start with the practical. How is this room constructed within the museum?

Christophe Cherix: Chocolate is a great color. However, it doesn't really adhere, stick to the paper, so you can't transport it. Every time you want to do it, you have to do it again. We hired a wonderful team from Sun Valley in Los Angeles, La Paloma Company. Then they came, and for two weeks, bringing their own tools, screen printing within the space, and of course, chocolate that they melted in order to print the various sheets. It's really done in situ. It's site-specific. We loved it because it turned the exhibition in a workshop, almost entering the artist's studio.

Alison Stewart: It's very funny to-- I sat and watched the guards for a little bit. They're very ready for people. I'm curious about what conversation did you have about that room and about how people might behave and misbehave.

Christophe Cherix: The conversation started with the artists. Our goal is to protect it and to keep it as much as what it is for the duration of the show, knowing that we're going to have to dismantle and destroy it at the end of the show, Ruscha has a different take. Ruscha feels if he's using organic material, it's because it's going to change. It might not last, it might bloom. People, like in Venice, might write graffiti on it. We do not want that to happen. He is going to accept what's going to come with that unusual process, so not to overfettishize it.

We are trying to keep the piece very accessible, not to hide it behind protection, but also tell people that we want to keep that experience to remain throughout the exhibition. I have to say, so far, people have been very, very respectful.

Alison Stewart: His painting, Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire looks like the title. What was the reception of this piece when it was first unveiled?

Christophe Cherix: I think people, it came at a very precise time in Los Angeles. That museum, that new building had been erected just at the moment where the painting really started. It took three years for Ruscha to complete that painting. The building was not overall always appreciated so I think it became a very provocative statement, the painting being almost like an entire museum statement anti that architecture, which was, I don't think, never the case. I think Ruscha never talked about that work in those terms.

I think there was a fascination for that new building, building on pool of water in Los Angeles. Even took a helicopter ride in order to better understand that building from the sky and spent almost three years for it. At the end of the process, he felt it needed something. The painting couldn't be just about that architecture, couldn't be just about that building, so he had those little flame on the left of the painting, almost as a cord out of the painting.

Alison Stewart: How involved was Ed Ruscha in the show?

Christophe Cherix: I think Ruscha wanted it to be our show, so he didn't want necessarily to be too involved. We wanted him to be involved, so five years ago when we started, we said, "We're going to do that together." We made sure that there was not one decision that he hadn't been, not really asked about, but actually informed.

As we started working on, the show started to shape itself, suddenly-- He knows his work best than anyone else. He could point us to works maybe we didn't know, to arrangement that we would not have done, to way of displaying his work that would allow it to be, really, the right way in relation to the way those pieces were conceived. It's been, really, a dialogue over those five years.

Alison Stewart: I'm guilty of this, taking a selfie with one of the pictures.

Christophe Cherix: Which one?

Alison Stewart: This is Radio.

Christophe Cherix: Radio. Hurting the word radio.

Alison Stewart: I couldn't help it. I'm wondering, how are you and your fellow curators feeling about all the Instagramming that's going on, people taking pictures with the paintings?

Christophe Cherix: I really enjoy it. I think that's what this accessibility of the work, that at the end there are different ways of thinking about those pictures, but you can also think about this picture as just words on Canvas. I think Ruscha really wanted us to be very light in terms of explanatory text. We have big catalogs coming with the show, but he wanted the show to let the work be. I think today the capacity of a new generation of visitors of taking that work and just sharing it with other in their own way is something we really like.

Alison Stewart: Do you have a piece or 2 you'd like people to spend an extra 5 or 10 seconds in front of?

Christophe Cherix: Maybe if you have a few seconds, just spend a bit of time with a painting called Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, and you'll see four objects, one sound and three object, almost trying to escape the Canvas. You faced with this kind of beautiful blue, the only painting where you used wax, very deep blue. That idea of work being both humorous, but also very, very serious what happened when suddenly everything fly out of a painting.

Alison Stewart: Christophe Cherix is the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of drawings and prints at MoMA. The exhibit is called Ed Ruscha / Now Then, and you can find it taking up the entire sixth floor at the Museum of Modern Art.

MUSIC - Luscious Jackson

Coming up after a short break, we'll head to another floor at MoMA to discuss the show Picasso in Fontainebleau, which is on display through February 17th. Stick around. This is All Of It.

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