Ed Ruscha. Boss. 1961.

All images courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery.

Thermometers Should Last Forever*

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

I
I guess the idea of noise, of visual noise, somehow meant something to me,
and still means something to me.1 This remark by Ed Ruscha can be read in a variety
of ways. An obvious one is provided by the statements very context, an interview, in
which the artist defines his interest in making noise as a freedom to insult people or
assault people. But such an adversarial tone is rare for Ruscha. My work is not revolutionary, he often insists, just as he never ceases to depoliticize and dedramatize
one of his very few obvious assaults, Los Angeles County Museum on Fire of 196568.
Another way to take this notion of visual noise would be literally, as if
Ruscha were saying that he wanted to depict or render noise visually. There are in
fact grounds for such an interpretation: many of his early word canvases convey
a concern for violent shock (Smash, 1963), for the monosyllabic (Boss, 1961), for
the loud brand name (Spam, in Actual Size, 1962)not to mention the several
Noise paintings themselves (those where the inscription noise figures prominently). Yet one could say that a painting like Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap
Western (1963) is not really an attempt to depict or render noise visually but rather
that it toys with the excruciating difficulty of so doing. With the exception of
Actual Size, which has a more cartoonish and Lichtenstein-like overtone than any
other work by Ruscha, the noise in question in these early canvases is merely
named (Honk, 1962, for example). Of course, one could translate the notion of
visual noise into that of impact and say that the broad capital letters Ruscha first
*
This essay, dedicated to Benjamin Buchloh, first appeared more than a decade ago as the preface
to Edward Ruscha: Romance with Liquids, Paintings 19661969, the catalog of an exhibition at the
Gagosian Gallery in New York ( January 14February 27, 1993), published by Rizzoli International
Publications, Inc.
1.
Ruscha in Bernard Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, in Edward Ruscha, exh. cat. of the
traveling exhibition at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen (Rotterdam), the Serpentine Gallery
(London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), 199091, p. 130; reprinted in Ruscha,
Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 300308. The show also went to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and
the Fundacio Caixa de Pensions in Madrid, but with different catalogs.
OCTOBER 111, Winter 2005, pp. 6080. 1993 Yve-Alain Bois.

62

OCTOBER

Ruscha. Noise, Pencil, Broken

Pencil, Cheap Western. 1963.

used in the works just mentioned (but also in Ace [1961], Flash, L.A. Times [1963],
Damage [1964], and a host of others) look louder than the much more restrained
and classical lettering the artist adopted for his next series of canvases with capital
letters, begun in 1966 (Chemical, Automatic, Vaseline, Pressures, Rooster, etc.). But this
impression has more to do with size and scale than with anything else (in the later,
smaller, canvases, the letters are themselves much smaller and the words longer);
and given Ruschas insistence on the fact that he chose to paint words for the precise
reason that they have neither size nor scale, one would doubt that the visual
noise he is after in his work should be located there. At least not directly.
Another way of thinking about the notion of visual noise would be to treat
Ruschas word paintings as inscriptions to be read aloud, thereby focusing on
phonetic clutter and flutter: the alliterations and rhymes that characterize many of
them ever since the series of prints News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues (1970). Yet
not every one of his word images would fit such a category (they rarely do when a
single word is involved, as in the series of liquid words); furthermore, those that
do are more often than not a demonstration of the discrepancy between the
acoustic world of speech and the visual world of writing (in the words stews and dues,
a similar sound is transcribed differently). Sometimes it even seems that it is the
silent nature of writingthat which, in writing, resists phonetic performancethat
interests Ruscha, as in Another Hollywood Dream Bubble Popped, where the pattern of
repeated letters that Dave Hickey astutely noticed (double l, double o, double d,
double b, double p), does not register when the sentence is spoken.2
2.
Dave Hickey, Wacky Molire Lines: A Listeners Guide to Ed-werd Rew-shay, Parkett 18
(1988), p. 33.

Thermometers Should Last Forever

63

In fact, it is just this lack of coincidence between two linguistic codes (spoken
sounds of language, written words) that gives us a clue as to what Ruscha means by
visual noise: something is surreptitiously lost in the alphabetical transcription,
and it is the peculiar quality of what is lost to any kind of daily perception (that is,
not necessarily linguistic ones) that seems to be at the core of Ruschas art. What is
lost, forgotten, usually unseen, unheard, taken for granted, ignored as mere noise:
the size and scale of letters, the phonetic flutter, the grammatic alliterationsbut
also the pattern of oil droppings on parking lots, the vacant real estate opportunities
in the urban landscape, the metaphors in the robotized language of mass media.
In other words, the refuse, that which is destined for the gutter of oblivion. I have
always operated on a kind of waste-retrieval method, Ruscha has said. I retrieve
and renew things that have been forgotten or wasted.3
Noise as refuse. The main lead here is the theory of information elaborated by
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver and furthered by Norbert Wiener, although this
theory, which was once quite popular in aesthetic discussions, has long since gone
out of fashion in art criticism.4 It did not yield much when it was current, but its
concept of noise is worth revisiting. This concept has two entries, two levels. The
most immediate is the one defining noise as everything that constitutes not only an
obstacle but also an interference in the transmission of a message. In this instrumental conception of communication, not only lisping, say, but also the swirl of
connotations, constitutes noise. Thus everything that Ruscha plays with in his News,
Mews . . . portfolio is noise: the rhymes, the Gothic lettering, the odd ingredients used
for inksuch as a mix of caviar and axle-grease!the vague notion of Englishness.
But everything that does not convey information is also considered as noise; anything
that is not differentiated as a message (as form, as order) recedes into the formless
background as mere noise. Just as there is no message entirely devoid of noise, no
information can ever exist that does not have to rise above an ocean of noise.
It is at this juncture that the theory of information is most helpful, for its
definition of noise as undifferentiated background interacts with the notion of
entropy. Entropy is a concept describing the constant loss of energy in any thermodynamic system, including that of the universe. Having played a major role in the
historical nihilism of the nineteenth century,5 entropy became a key concept in
the science of statistics, and, through the latter, it conveyed a certain sense of
3.
Ruscha in Bernard Brunon, Interview with Edward Ruscha, in Edward Ruscha, exh. cat. (Lyon:
Muse Saint Pierre Art Contemporain/Octobre des Arts, 1985), p. 95; reprinted in Leave Any Information at
the Signal, pp. 25051.
4.
The most eloquent import of the theory of information into the field of aesthetics is Umberto
Ecos Opera Aperta, published in Italy in 1962. A French translation appeared in 1965 and an English translation in 1989 (The Open Work, trans. Anna Caucogni [Cambridge: Harvard University Press]). Ecos
book relies heavily on Abraham Moless Thorie de linformat ion et percept ion estht ique ( Par is:
Flammarion, 1958; English trans., Joel E. Cohen, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception [Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1966]), whose inflexible positivism he happily fends off.
5.
On this point, see Eugenio Donato, The Museums Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual
Reading of Bouvard and Pcuchet, reprinted in Josu V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 21338.

64

OCTOBER

dynamism to the otherwise rather static theory of information: from an entropic

continuum of probable, repeatable, banal, predictable noises, a message (an
event, a form) surges forth; the more differentiated (improbable, unrepeatable,
original, unpredictable) is this message, the more information (and the less
noise) it will contain. Yet as soon as the message comes to be repeated, banalized,
made predictable, expected, it too gradually retreats into the initial state of indifferentiation. The formation of linguistic clichs provides the best example of such a
constant drive toward entropy: In relation to the entropic curve, languagean
organization that has escaped the equiprobability of disorderis another improbable event, a naturally improbable configuration that can now establish its own
chain of probability . . . within the system that governs it. . . . In other words, the
information carried by the message is the negative of its entropy.6
Noise as entropy, as indifferentiated waste. But why visual?
II
Ed Ruscha insists that although he loves the language, he is not a poet; and
that despite the fact that [he] use[s] words, [he] work[s] in and on a nonverbal
world.7 Yet his almost exclusive pictorial interest in lettering wordsat least until
the silhouette paintings of the late 1980scannot but be considered in view of
the development of poetic theory. One poet in particular comes to mind,
Stphane Mallarm. At first sight there seems little in common between Ruschas
colloquial idiom and the French poets exquisite refinement of language (a comparat ive study would doubt less posit the t wo of them at opposite ends of the
spectrum).8 Yet Mallarm must be credited both for being the first to elaborate a
thermodynamic conception of language, and for having thought about that
conception, if not exclusively then at least most importantly, in visual terms.
We owe to Mallarm the sharp distinction we make between the instrumental,
daily language of mere communication (wherein the signification of a word is supposed as equal to its referent) and language conceived as a multifaceted reality open
to a myriad of transformations (where the split is manifest between the referent and
the significations of a word).
The language of the newspaper and of poetry are the poles of Mallarms
opposition. For Mallarm, the newspaper devitalized language, leaching it of its
riches and transforming it into a sum of commercial tokens. It was the poets task
6.
Eco, The Open Work, pp. 5051.
7.
Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 130.
8.
Mallarms famous Je dis: une fleur! [I say: a flower!] states the paucity of language, incapable
of translating, by sheer nomination, the effect of what it refers to (Avant-Dire au Trait du Verbe de
Ren Ghil [1886], reprinted in Oeuvres Compltes, ed. Henri Mondor and Georges Jean-Aubry [Paris:
Gallimard, 1945], p. 857). Compare to Ruschas comments on word paintings like Smash, Boss, or Eat :
Those words were like flowers in a vase; I just happened to paint words like someone else paints flowers (Ruscha in Fred Fehlau, Ed Ruscha, Flash Art 138 [JanuaryFebruary 1988], p. 70); reprinted in
Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 26268).

Thermometers Should Last Forever

65

to replenish language. One of the things Mallarm reproached the newspaper for
was its dull typography (he found it tragic that the only words to be distinguished
typographically, allowed to spring above the tight gray blocks of the text, should be
those of the advertisements). The newspapers reader (the user of daily language)
does not consider the shape of the letters as anything other than a neutral vehicle
any departure from the standard is felt as noise, as an obstacle to the clarity of the
informational content. For Mallarm, on the contrary, it was this standard itself that
was the noise, the entropic indifferentiation of the typography corresponding to the
senseless clichs that accumulate in the newspaper columns; conversely, everything
that the instrumental language of communication downplayed as trite noise (everything that is lost in translation, for example) could be retrieved as the core of
literature, as major features of what Roman Jakobson later called the poetic function
of language, a function that promotes the palpability of signs.
Although it is trivializing to reduce Mallarms concern for the revitalization
of language merely to the matter of typography, this issue did indeed play a major
role in the poets legacy, functioning as a marker of his position, one that has been
essential to the modernist conception of language. At this juncture, it is worth noting that the spark that initiated the critical school of Russian formalism (of which
Jakobson became the most prominent spokesman) is decisively linked to Mallarms
heritage. It was to scientifically back up Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir
Khlebnikovs 1913 manifestoes The Word as Such and The Letter as Such, essays
that launched the Cubo-Futurist movement in Russia, that Victor Shklovskii wrote
Resurrection of the Word in 1914.9 The latter, in turn, was no less than a first version of
Shklovskiis famous essay, Art as Device, of 1916, which itself can be termed the
birth certificate of Russian formalism (even though Jakobson tended to belittle it
somewhat at the end of his life). In short, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikovs texts were
to have an extraordinary aftereffect, now long acknowledged, although the importance they ascribed to typography is too often neglected. The Letter as Such, for
example, is addressed to the Russian Symbolist poets who are accused, so to speak,
of having eviscerated Mallarms position:
They no longer argue about the word as such, they even agree. But
what is their agreement worth? You need only recall that while talking
about the word, after the fact, they do not say anything about the letter!
The born-blind! . . .
Otherwise, why would they clothe it in a gray prisoners uniform?
You have seen the letters in their wordslined up in a row, humiliated,
9.
On this point, see Herbert Eagle, Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism, afterword to Anna
Lawton, ed., Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 19121928 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1988), pp. 281304. Lawtons anthology offers a translation of Kruchenykhs and Khlebnikovs essays.
Shklovskiis brochure has been translated into English by Richard Sherwood, in Stephen Bann and
John Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973), pp. 4147. On Kruchenykh
and typography, see Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments,
19001930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 3.

66

OCTOBER

with cropped hair, and all equally colorless, graythere are not letters,
there are brands! But ask any wordwright and he will tell you that a
word written in individual longhand or composed with a particular
typeface bears no resemblance at all to the same word in a different
inscription.10
Like Mallarm, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov felt that language had been
unnerved; like him, they complained about its growing meaninglessness and
concocted strategies destined to reinseminate signification in all its aspects (from
the letter to sound, from the word to syntax), thus retrieving them from their drab,
zombie life. Their enterprise was at first, like Mallarms, one of remotivation,
partaking of a dream as old as Platos Cratylus, according to which language should
resemble what it refers to (thus their graphological interest); like Mallarms, it
gave way to an exploration of the arbitrariness of the sign (hence their abstract
phonetic poetry). Like Mallarm, the Russians conceived their practice as a struggle
against the erosion of language.
It is from this standpoint that Shklovskii elaborated his concept of defamiliarization, of making strange (ostrananie). The function of art, he argued, is to
deautomate our perceptions; the function of literature, of poetic language, is to
distort, skew, divert, decontextualize what has become banal, giving it a new life
(Shklovskiis best example is that of metaphors that are suddenly taken literally).
Needless to say, his dynamic analysis of the gradual and ceaseless formation of
clichs (not only within the language of daily life but within literary production) is
in perfect agreement with that of the theory of information; and, against the
instrumentalist drive of this theory, it is in perfect accordance with Mallarms
impulse to free language from its enslavement to a function of communication. In
all of these cases, entropy is the key concept.
Clichs, typography, and defamilarization are also Ruschas turf (Isnt disorientation one of the best things about making art?).11 Although I would savor
the irony of being able to cast his work, in the wake of the poets and theoreticians
I alluded to, as that of a formalist, it could hardly be said, however, that his utmost
desire is to replenish a world of blighted signs. Mallarmin an increasingly
pessimistic mannerand his followers believed in the utopian possibility of resurrecting language (note the title of Shklovskiis 1914 brochure). But that was
before the industrialization of culture had taken its toll, before the global village.
Ruscha is more modest, more laconic; he registers both the thickness and the
shallowness of the forest of signs daily produced by the mass media, pointing to
the absurd poignancy of these lost messages.
Despite the fact that Ruscha has noted quite often a certain discrepency
between his pictures and his books, I would say that there, too, it is entropy that
10.
Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, The Letter as Such, in Lawton, Russian Futurism
Through Its Manifestoes, 19121928, p. 63.
11.
Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 134.

67

Thermometers Should Last Forever

constitutes his main theme. No information, no difference: the Twentysix Gasoline

Stations (1962) are there, inert, just as the letters of the alphabet before they
shape a word. No signification, nothing behind the facades of Every Building on the
Sunset Strip (1966). Nothing special in the some of Some Los Angeles Apartments
(1965). No event in Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), except maybe the glass of
milk at the end. The endless return of the same, the industrial serialitynot only
do Ruschas books explore the uniformity of our late-capitalist age, but they themselves mime the conditions whose effect they document (first as objects of
mass-production, with the professional polish and the advertising look that the
artist so relishes;12 second as a structure: I could see a thousand books, a thousand
titles. I thought that way from the very beginning. The format was part of that).13
Yet while Ruscha declares his fascination for the raw power of things that
made no sense, he clearly knows that one cannot escape signification.14 He knows
that however empty (that is, noisy) the message he will retrieve from the semiological
profusion of social refuse, it will always bounce back full of meaning. Which is why,
perhaps, his thermodynamics runs counterclockwise and point toward heat.
Words have temperatures to me, he has noted. When they reach a certain point
and become hot words, then they appeal to me. Synthetic is a very hot word.
Sometimes I have a dream that if a word gets too hot and too appealing, it will boil
apart, and I wont be able to read or think of it. Usually I catch them before they
get too hot.15 That is, before they melt back into the sea of noise.
III
Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup (1966) does not exactly belong to the series of
liquid words that Ruscha painted from 1967 to 1969 (nor do the few gunpowder
drawings like Grapes or Pool that are formally related to it). First, the title declares
the identity of the fluid represented in trompe loeil as being the ink with which
the word has been written; second, the inscription itself refers to an item of mass
culture that Ruscha had already retrieved in various collages and paintings from
1960 to 1962 (both the word Annie and its typographyfrom the cartoon Little
Orphan Annie are a well-established fact in American popular culture, and in
Ruschas previous oeuvre); third, the background is flat, plain. None of these
features applies to the subsequent liquid words, which tend to posit Annie, Poured
12.
Asked if he is interested in some notion of the readymade, Ruscha replies: No, what I am
after is a kind of polish. Once I have decided all the detailphotos, layout, etc.what I really want is a
professional finish, a clear-cut machine finish. . . . I am not trying to create a precious limited-edition
book, but a mass-produced product of high order (Ruscha in John Coplans, Concerning Various
Small Fires: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications, Artforum 5 [February 1965], p. 25);
reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 2427.
13.
Ruscha in Henri Man Barendse, Ed Ruscha: An Interview, Afterimage 8, no. 7 (February
1981), p. 10; reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 21019.
14.
Ruscha in Brunon, Interview with Edward Ruscha, p. 89.
15.
Ruscha in Howardena Pindell, Words with Ruscha, The Print Collectors Newsletter 3, no. 6
( JanuaryFebruary 1973), p. 126; reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 5563.

68

OCTOBER

Ruscha. Annie, Poured from

Maple Syrup. 1966.

from Maple Syrup as a tryout. It is as if the artist had found his purpose too obvious in this work, the message too clear, the decomposition too well shaped, the
noise not noisy enough. Whatever the case, the background of the liquid words
will henceforth always look like an abstract stage, an eerie gravitationless field
that darkens in value toward the upper side of the picture (the somewhat
mechanical graded color being a direct borrowing from the runs of color in
commercial paint catalogs, as Rosalind Krauss noted).16 In other words, while
the yellow field of Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup looks like a solid surface
against which its liquid letters can spread (such as a Formica kitchen counter
seen from above) we will never be able to attribute any definite place to the liquidificat ion of Desire, Adios, or Steel. As for giving the name of the depicted
ingredient, nothing could have counteracted more the state of slowly growing
deliquescence Ruscha wants to convey: naming is a way of giving form, of articulating, of constructing a dam against the endless return of the same, against
the sea of noises.
The uncertainty as to what are the meticulously rendered materials of all
the liquid words painted after Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup plays a most important role in the fascinating and disgusting effect of these pictures (Ill return
later to this semantic pair, fascination and disgust). Although we tend to identify
16.
Rosalind Krausss remarks on Ruschas liquid words appear in a review of the Corcoran Biennal
of 1971, organized by Walter Hopps. Differentiating Ruschas from Tanguys backgrounds, to which
they have been compared, Krauss notes that they are spreads of color unmediated by the artists
sensibility. . . . The grounds address themselves to nothing particularly inherent in picture-making,
and instead record the kind of manipulation of color that is common to commercial culture
(Washington, Artforum [May 1971], p. 85).

Thermometers Should Last Forever

69

Ruscha. Steel. 196769.

the painted liquidsas if solving the riddle would explain, or tame, the effect of
these workswe are bound to remain at the generic level of abstract qualities. We
can perceive various degrees of shininess, of viscosity, of stickiness, of oiliness, of
translucency; we can associate certain colors with sweetness (and the signal foodstuff is sometimes provided by beans, seeds, olives spilled along in the puddles);
rare are the occasions, however, where we can pin down the fluid (we are left with
theoretical monsters, such as sugary oil).
The most important change to occur after Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup, however, concerns the choice of words and their typography. Some of the words have a
somewhat literal connection to the described glueyness, rather unusual for Ruscha
(Im careful not to be literal),17 such as in Slug, Oily (paradoxically, one of the two
canvases bearing this inscription depicts one of the driest words), Air (translucent
and chubby, the letters are almost pneumatic), or even Ripe (the cluster of seeds that
float in the red sticky juice suggests a mashed fruit). Often, though, when involving
words connoting hardness and mineralization, as in Steel, Ruby, or City, the connection is by contrast. One can read a similar contrast in the two Mint pictures that cry
out more goo than freshness. Other words, like Lisp, plainly refer to the notion of
17.
Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 136. Ruscha: If I paint a picture of the
word COOL, I dont use a lot of blue or other cool colors; instead, I find myself deliberately taking
another route. Compare also this confession to Dave Hickey: There are these graphic guys back in
L.A., and you know, they are very skillful. Better than me, and I saw this one postcard. It was the word
wet formed by spilled liquid on a blue ground. . . . That is meaning torn free, and it is the opposite of
what I do, of what Im trying to do. Sometimes Ill accidentally let something slip, but Ive never
consciously tried to do a pun . . . except . . . except for the word damage on fire. Thats a pun I guess
(Ruscha in Hickey, Available Light, in The Works of Edward Ruscha, exh. cat. [New York and San
Francisco: Hudson Hills Press and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982], p. 29).

Ruscha. Top: Slug. 1967. Bottom: Air. 1968.

71

Thermometers Should Last Forever

Ruscha. Lisp. 1968.

noise as developed earlier. In one of the two Lisp canvasesand this is also true of
the extraordinary print done with the same wordthe depicted liquid is the shiniest and apparently most versatile of all, suggesting something of the speed of
mercury dropped from a broken thermometer. Or you have interjections like Hey
or Adios, referring to the least informative (thus the noisiest) function of language, baptized the phatic function by Jakobson, and characterizing messages solely
concerning the contact between sender and receiver.18
Interestingly enough, especially in view of the inveterate claim that Ruscha is
the essential L.A. artist, very few liquid words refer to the painters immediate
18.
See Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics (1960), reprinted in Jakobson, Language in
Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 6294.

Ruscha. Hey. 1969.

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OCTOBER

Ruscha. Adios. 1967.

linguistic surroundings ( just as for the depicted fluids, there is something

generic, nonspecific, in Ruschas choice of words: it is not so much that it is impossible to find out why such and such a word was then hot for him, but that it is
irrelevant now). Yet occasionally L.A. speech comes through, as in Adios, the first
of the liquid words proper, whose spilled population of small beans directly tie it
to Latino culture, or in the similarly Hispanic Rancho, whose letters are rounder
and better shaped, connoting more the public space of the billboard. In this category we can also fit Western with Two Marbles (an uncommon witticism in Ruschas
fantasy of a senseless language), or Cut (a paradox, for nothing could be more
removed from the idea of a cut than that of liquidity), both vaguely alluding to
the world of the movies. But those specifics are exceptions. The other words cover
a nonlocal, sometimes vast semantic territory (Desire, Eye).
One of the liquid words has a unique status, doubly unique: it is a single letter,
U. Of course it partakes of Ruschas interest in the discrepancy between speech
and writing (U can be read you), and one can perceive in it the echo of one of
Ruschas first word paintings (SU, 1958). But what distinguishes it most from the
other liquid word paintings is both the clearly defined substance, the only nonviscous one (soap bubbles), and the rather poor legibility (it is not that the letter

Thermometers Should Last Forever

73

is less well shaped than usual but that, being alone, its perception is not enhanced
by its context). This singular case, however, is what testifies best to what separates
the whole series from Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup.
Soap bubbles make an extraordinarily volatile material, always on the verge
of evanescence; in other words, the entropic future of the bubbled U is that of a
shapeless blob, such as those that Ruscha depicted in a series of soap prints in
1971 (Blue Suds, Green Suds, Grey Suds). Now, if we look at all the more sticky words
and compare their letters to that of Annie, we can infer a radically different event
on the trajectory of the entropic decline: in Annie, the body of the liquid word,
almost perfectly shaped, looks as if it had been mildly attacked from the outside.
The little specks of depicted syrup that are detached from the body of the letters
correspond to neighboring eroded areas, feeling paradoxically like wet crumbs.
The slow fluid seems ready to fill in the indentations, reinstating the identity of
the letters. (The only exception to this intuited happy ending is the capillary
attraction between the point and the trunk of the i ). In all the other liquid word
canvases, by contrast, the natural spread of the fluid does not appear to be in the
process of expanding so as to fill out the temporary defects (noises) in the contours
of the letters, but on the contrary tends to melt the distinctive traits of the alphabetic elements themselves. The initial E of Eye is on the point of closing up on
itself, the gruesome letters of Hey are on the point of fraying, the bombastic S of
Steel is about to gobble up the whole word. The liquid words are depicted in the
process of becoming blots, stains, spots. Ruscha is producing a Rorschach test in
reverse. Unlike the various animals Hamlet was perceiving in the clouds, or the

Ruscha. U. 1968.

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OCTOBER

battles and landscapes Leonardo was deciphering on old walls, Ruschas liquid words
do not owe their existence to the subjective action of a spectators projection. If our
imagination is at all called upon, it is to perform and to perfect the task of decomposition. Coming from indifferentiation (daily language as an ocean of noises), they
return eagerly to it (letters as blobs). Liquidity is another name for nonarticulation
it is, so far as language and thought are concerned, the medium of their annihilation.
IV
I reject the kind of art which self-consciously attaches itself to history. Im not
abstaining. . . . I simply cant relate to it, Ruscha says.19 Or again, The longer I am
at it, the less I want to look at my work historically.20 Perhaps this is the reason why,
unlike that of so many other artists of his generation, Ruschas art does not seem to
suffer from exhaustion: I view my art output as a simple variation on a theme. It is a
theme that was established for me early on, all I do is watch it unfold as I go.21
If, as I believe, the theme in question is entropy, it is not surprising that the
historical tempo of his work should be very slow. On the other hand, Ruscha never
denied having taken lessons from the history of art, readily mentioning Dada and
Surrealism, or Jasper Johns (whose Target with Four Faces, seen in reproduction in
1957, deeply impressed him). Although he objects to labels, he would be the last
to condemn an investigation of his art that relates it to other artists (my guess is
that he suffers somewhat from the loose but limited West Coast category in which
most critics have lumped his production).22 It is thus perfectly accurate to discuss
his paintings in terms of Pop art, Conceptual art, Surrealism, or even Cubism.23
19.
Ruscha in Ed Ruscha Discusses His Latest Work with Christopher Fox, Studio International 179
( June 1970), p. 281; reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 3033.
20.
Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 132.
21.
Ruscha in Brunon, Interview with Edward Ruscha, p. 96. In his interview with Barendse, however, Ruscha implies that he stopped making books because they had lost their surprising effect (blaming
the habit of art galleries to present them on the wall: You know what to think, everythings spelled out
for you. Its on a gallery wall so it must be art). It is interesting to notice that the question being asked
was ultimately about beauty (Duchamp limited the number of his readymades because, as he says,
anything can become very beautiful if the gesture is repeated often enough) and that Ruscha refused
to take it up at this level: Yes, the sheer number of the things waters it down, weakens it. When its an
established thing, and everyone understands it, its lost its original function. If everyone knew what the
books were about, the whole thing would be totally different. Thats why I was interested in the book
form. Duchamp had already killed the idea of the object on display. After what he did, it would be hard
to surprise anyone. So books, conventional books, were a way for me to catch my audience off guard
(Ruscha in Barendse, Ed Ruscha: An Interview, p. 9).
22.
Although I do not want to dwell on the issue here, it should be noted, at least in passing, that
Ruschas concern with entropy was shared by a number of artists of his generation, the most vocal
being Robert Smithson.
23.
A full assessment of Ruschas work in relation to Pop art is yet to come. For the importance of
his books in the development of Conceptual art, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Conceptual Art
19621969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions, October 55 (Winter
1990), pp. 10543. As for Surrealism and Cubism, Ruscha acknowledged the filiation, even if in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner: You could say if you want to categorize me that Im a Surrealist: but I
dont attach myself to a label (Ruscha in Fox, Ed Ruscha Discusses His Latest Work, p. 281; see also

75

Thermometers Should Last Forever

Ruscha. Cut. 1969.

However, of all the historical and stylistic comparisons that eventually thread
through the Ruscha literature (amidst the usual L.A. cant), one of them seems conspicuously absent, despite the artists constant stress that the movement in
questionAbstract Expressionismwas his only horizon when he decided to be an
artist. When I was in school, I painted just like an Abstract Expressionistit was a
uniform. Except you really didnt have to wear it, you just aped it. It was so seductive:
the act of facing a blank canvas with a palette. I liked painting that way, but there
seemed no reason to push it any further. But I began to see that the only thing to do
would be a preconceived image. It was an enormous freedom to be premeditated
about my art.24 Every single time Ruscha mentions Abstract Expressionism it is
to say how he was trained and sort of programmed to think like an Abstract
Expressionist,25 and therefore to construct an oppositional paradigm in terms of
David Bourdon, A Heap of Words about Ed Ruscha, Art International 20 [November 1971], p. 25);
and, at the very end of an interview where the question of Cubism had not at all been addressed: Ive
got nothing against questions. But then Ive got nothing against Cubism either (Ruscha in Fehlau,
Ed Ruscha, p. 72). Also to be noted is that the only period of Picasso that Ruscha qualified as brilliant, when he viewed the Museum of Modern Art mammoth retrospective of the artist in 1980, was
his 1914 Cubism, electing Glass of Absinthe as his greatest work (Picasso: A Symposium, Art in America
[December 1980], p. 10). On those two last issues, I will leave the last word to Rosalind Krauss: The
irony congealed on the surface of Ruschas pictures is that the two ideals of twentieth-century painting, the modernist declaration of Cubist lettering (with coffee grounds and sand mixed into the paint
to affirm the meaning of the pictorial surface) and the Surrealist imagery shaped by an ultimate faith
in the internal resources of fantasy honestly mined and depicted, have both foundered on the shoals
of a commercial culture which can expropriate and devalue the meaning of everything within its
grasp (Krauss, Washington, p. 85).
24.
Ruscha in Fehlau,Ed Ruscha, p. 70.
25.
Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 128.

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OCTOBER

intentionality: So, it became a question of either loading the brush with color and
attacking a canvas that was pure white, or something else . . . something preconceived.
I took the second way.26 The irony, of course, is that Ruscha is speaking of a moment
when Abstract Expressionism had become a clich, when the push and pull had
indeed become a slogan, when Pollocks misleading posture of spontaneity (When
I am in my painting, Im not aware of what Im doing) had become trite. It was a
time when the theater of subjectivity that gave its name to Abstract Expressionism
was beginning to be perceived as not expressing anything anymore, as a fake pathos,
as a totally self-conscious rhetorical idiom.27
But the issue of preconception is not the only one at stake. In fact, Ruscha
does state that he learned a lot from Abstract Expressionism and that he continues
to find the paintings impressive (I still love it. So I dont find it foreign to me).28 I
would even say that he took it upon himself to address the question of the legacy of
Abstract Expressionism head on. Remember, when Ruscha began, Color Field
painting had come to the rescue and the abstract stains and misty surfaces of
Morris Louis and Jules Olitski were presented as the next historical plateau, as taking
the torch from the hands of the dead Pollock and carrying it further, above the
head of de Koonings misguided imitators. It is perhaps this particular turn of
events, with the historical determinism at work behind the claims then made, that
particularly distressed Ruscha (and, I see his refusal to use an airbrush, a tool associated with the Field painters, until recentlya fact that is often mentioned in the
literature and the artists interviewsas a symptom of his disaffection).
Whatever the case, Ruschas liquid words are engaged in a dialogue with
Pollocks drip paintings (note that they appear the same year as Pollocks major
retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, 1967), a dialogue that should not be
too swiftly read as governed by irony. (Contrary to most commentators, I do not
think that the castrating self-righteousness of irony is at the core of Ruschas art.)29
The job they perform vis--vis Pollock (that run counter to the Greenbergian sublimation reading, standard at the time) is on the same line as Warhols piss canvases
and Robert Morriss spreads of material on the floor, a cluster of works that Rosalind
Krauss has analyzed as not only a willful debasement of Pollocks then-academicized
oeuvre, but moreover a reading of this very oeuvre as debasement.30
26.
Ibid.
27.
It is no doubt to conjure the expressionist pretense to subjectivity that Ruscha, along with many
other artists of his Pop generation, stressed more than anything else the anonymity of his facture, of his
style, of his imagery, be it the anonymous look of his photographic books (what I was after was no-style or
a non-statement with a no-style [Ruscha in Barendse, Ed Ruscha: An Interview, p. 9]), as well as the
anonymous look of his backgrounds (Ive always believed in anonymity as far as a background goes
thats what I consider the ground or the landscape or whatever it is thats in a painting [Ruscha in Fehlau,
Ed Ruscha, p. 71]). Noises, unlike sounds, are anonymous.
28.
Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 128.
29.
Which is not to say that Ruschas work is devoid of humor, on the contrary. But as the artist himself acknowledged, it is more a question of black humor, and is thus of a far more nihilistic tone than
irony (see Barendse, Ed Ruscha: An Interview, p. 9).
30.
Rosalind Krauss develops this reading of Pollock in the final chapter of The Optical Unconscious
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, l993).

Thermometers Should Last Forever

77

The key feature in all these works is that of gravitya feature that had been
deliberately ignored in all the interpretations of Pollocks drip canvases as a gate
opening onto something like pure opticality (that of Greenberg and his followers but also of the artists he defended at that time). Against this vision of
painting as sublimation, as a kind of hallucination that transcends matter, Ruscha
and the artists I just invoked propose a reading of Pollock that insists instead
upon the attack his canvases mounted against the traditional verticality of the
visual field of paintings, a reading best summarized by a notion coined by the
French writer and essayist Georges Bataillethat of the informe (formless, formlessness; shapeless, shapelessness).31
According to Bataille, words exist to perform jobs and the job of the word
informe would be to bring things down in the world, to deliver a low blow against
reason, to knock meaning off its pedestal. Informe is anything that cannot be
thought, that cannot be articulated, that cannot be classified. It is mud and filth,
those substances that seem ridiculous and that our hands touch, as Socrates
says in Platos Parmenides. In that dialogue, Socrates tells the eponymous hero not
to concern himself with such substances, since it would be indecent if they had a
corresponding form (eidos), a concept that would allow them to be discussed.
Informe is also laughter, which resists philosophical arguments (and is therefore
condemned by Socrates), and sexual pleasure, which we entrust to the night, as
Plato writes in the Philebus, as if the light of day must not see it. Or, to quote
Bataille, what the term informe designates has no rights in any sense and gets
itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. Informe is the dark side
of reason; it is perversion without metaphor; it is the infantile and obscene regression toward excrement, toward immeasurable chaos; it is puke.32
To be sure, none of these terms could apply directly to Pollock (No chaos,
damn it!), but in rotating the axis of inscription from the verticality of the wall or
the easel to the horizontality of the floor, and in making sure that this rotation
31.
The footnote in the original publication, at this point of the essay, referred to Denis Holliers
brilliant comments on Batailles notion of the informe in his La Prise de la Concorde (1974), translated
into English by Betsy Wing as Against Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), esp. the chap.
The Caesarian. This reference was followed by several others to Rosalind Krausss summoning of the
notion of the informe, prior to her work on Pollock, in essays on Surrealist photography (No More
Play in her Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1985], pp. 4385, and Corpus Delicti, in Krauss and Jane Livingstone, eds., LAmour Fou: Photography
and Surrealism [Washington, D.C. and New York: Corcoran Gallery of Art and Abbeville Press, 1985],
pp. 57100), as well as to my essay, Fontanas Base Materialism, published in Art in America in April
1989 (pp. 23848, 279). Since then, Krauss and I curated an exhibition on, or rather through, the
topic of the informe at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (Linforme, mode demploi, May 22August
26, 1996), in which four liquid words canvases by Ruscha, as well as several of his books, were prominently displayed. The book that functioned as the catalog for this exhibition has been published in English
as Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
32.
For this summary and the Plato references, I am indebted to Hollier (Against Architecture, pp.
98ff). The last quote is from the fundamental entry on informe in Batailles dictionary as it appears in
Documents, the short-lived journal he edited in 192930 (English trans. Allan Stoekl, in Bataille, Visions
of Excess: Selected Writings 19271939 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985], p. 31).

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OCTOBER

would be visible even after the finished painting has been re-verticalized
(absence of vertical runs of paint, presence of cigarette butts and other odd refuse
items), Pollock did strike a blow against the modernist and idealist hypothesis of a
pure opticality. He reminded us not only that if our heads are raised to the heavens
and heavenly things, our feet are on the earthy ground where well sooner or
later lay down,33 but also that among other things paint is a material, a liquid
whose entropic condition is that it drips and spreads.
Ruscha takes up this informe reading of Pollock at a thematic level. Unlike
Warhol or Morris, he is not tempted to perform the gravitational downfall literally.
But, truthful to his formalist method of deautomatization, he mimes it in his liquid
words (note that pictorially speaking, the series is very clean, like most of Ruschas
works-no texture, no material mark of the process). And he does so in activating
two contradictions: that between the messiness of the depicted spill and the professional finish of the trompe loeil rendition (clearly inherited from Surrealism),
which creates a hallucinatory effect of reality; and, more importantly perhaps, that
between the gravity-free ground and the letters spilled from above. Notice the way
the words never fuse in Ruschas abstract skies: there is a complete impenetrability
between the mock landscape backgrounds and the sticky letters that press against it.
The words themselves help consolidate the impression that Ruschas semantic field is
that of the informe, and I see in the liquefaction of Eye a direct response to the alloptical construct that constituted the mainstream theory of modernist art from
Adolf von Hildebrand and Konrad Fiedler to Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg.
33.
On this point, see Georges Bataille, Le gros orteil [The Big Toe], another entry in his dictionary
(English trans. in Visions of Excess, pp. 2023).

Ruscha. Eye. 1969.

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Thermometers Should Last Forever

Let us note in passing that such a liquefaction would have no doubt appealed
to Bataille, not only because of his fascination for the eye-splitting images that preface Buuels film Un chien andalou but also because it seems akin to the metaphoric
permutation, in his Histoire de loeil, of eye, egg, milk, sperm, and urine, among other
things (all liquids that Ruscha used literally as inkthat is, not through the distance
of depiction any morein the Stains portfolio that he assembled in 1969).34 Once
again, however, it is the typography that performs most visibly the operation of the
informe, matching at once the semantic and the iconographic level: it presents the
words themselves as spat, spewed, ejaculated. Desire remains as a blob of unnameable
body fluids improbably sprinkled with blueberries.
V
The reader of this essay may by now have become a bit uneasy, feeling that
Ive gone too far. After all, did Ruscha not say that what he is interested in is illustrating ideas?35 But what does it mean to say that about a print portfolio (News,
Mews . . .) whose most remarkable feature, apart from the senseless nursery
rhymes, is the strange combination of materials used as ink? What does it mean to
say that one of the main qualities of words is that they have no size, and yet to
spend ones artistic life giving them flesh, either illusionistically, in case of the
liquid words, or literally, by painting them with vegetable juice?
Ruschas pictorial obsession with food plays an important role in the liquid
words where we have noticed, among the viscous skeins, unlikely juxtapositions such
as beans and cocktail olives.36 This assimilation of language to muck points again
toward the direction of the informe, and stresses a relationship that, oddly enough,
seems to have escaped even that champion of debasementFreud. The latter
underlined the importance of food in the libidinal development of the infant,
conceiving sucking as providing both pleasure and nourishment at a time when the
sexual drive is not yet directed toward an object. But he did not mention the congruence, in the mouth, of the function of speech (even if it is inarticulate babble) and
nutrition.37 This is the more surprising since Freud was particularly astute in pointing out such confluences, building his theory of art as the sublimation of libido on
the repression of the double anatomical role of the male sexual organ. This initial
34.
On Batailles circle of metaphors in his Histoire de loeil, see Roland Barthes, The Metaphor of
the Eye, trans. Richard Howard, in Barthes, Critical Essays (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1972), pp. 23947.
35.
Ruscha in Fox, Ed Ruscha Discusses His Latest Work, p. 281.
36.
It must be noted, however, that in the liquid words as well as in the words printed or drawn with
edible inks, food is being portrayed/used as savorless. On this point, see Andrew Bogle, Introduction,
Graphic Works by Edward Ruscha, exh. cat. (New Zealand: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1978), p. 19.
37.
At least as far as I know, and it seems to have been also the case for the other pioneers of psychoanalysis. Sandor Ferenczi noted the analogy between laughter and vomiting, a very Bataille-like
association, but I am not aware of any canonical psychoanalytical essay on the speech/puke relationship (Ferenczi, Laughter, in Final Contribution to Psychoanalysis, ed. Michael Balint, English trans. Eric
Mosbacher [London: The Hogarth Press, 1955], p. 181).

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disgust, according to Freud, explains why, despite the fact that the concept of
beautiful has its roots in sexual excitation, and that the genitals themselves
produce the strongest sexual excitation, we never regard those organs as really
beautiful.38 If we transpose this hypothesis to another part of the body, it gives
us a hint as to the origin of the strangely repulsive/attractive effect of Ruschas liquid
words: given the artists thematics of waste-retrieval, given the concomitant linguistic
and ingestive function of the mouth, given the rather frequent appearance of
food in those paintings, is it so far-fetched to read them, at least metaphorically, as
vomited utterances?
Fo one thing, the fascination/disgust duality is at the root of Ruschas journey in entropia. (I was exalted at the same time that I was repulsed by the whole
thing, said the artist about the photo session for Real Estate Opportunities.)39
Surveying the saturated and stale profusion of signs of our current culture, he
adopts a position that is radically different from that of Mallarm (And the dirty
vomit of Stupidity / Makes me hold my nose before the azure).40 But it is also different from that of Roland Barthes, an heir to Mallarm and to the Russian
formalists, who, long after having explored in great length the mythologies of
mass culture, admitted that stupidity fascinated him.41 Ruscha neither rejects
nor marvels in irony. Exalted and repulsed, he keeps track, he records, and he
leaves to others the task of reordering the universe, knowing all along that his
thermometer points toward a future decomposition.

38.
Sigmund Freud, The Sexual Aberrations, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York:
Basic Books, 1962), p. 22, n. 2. The first part of Hubert Damischs The Judgment of Paris, trans. John
Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), consists essentially in a lengthy and rigorous
analysis of this footnote that Freud added in 1915 to his 1905 essay.
39.
Ruscha in David Bourdon, Ruscha as Publisher (or All Booked Up), Art News 71 (April 1972), p.
34; reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 4045.
40.
Et le vomissement impur de la Btise / Me force me boucher le nez devant lazur (Stphane Mallarm,
Les fentres [1863], reprinted in Oeuvres Compltes, p. 33). I use the translation provided by C. F.
MacIntyre, although obtuseness would be more appropriate for Mallarms word here (btise). See
Mallarm, Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 11.
41.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday Press,
1977), p. 51. The remark made above about obtuseness applies just as well in Barthess case.