Ed Ruscha is still playing word games

Ed Ruscha – pronounced ‘rew-shay’, as he once had it printed on a business card – will turn 88 in December. He’s still playing word games with his gallery, needling his public with mischievous phonetic experiments, and giving copyright permission-seekers a migraine. Hold tight: ‘Says I, to Myself, Says I’ (two commas) is the title of his display at Gagosian on Davies Street in Mayfair, which opened during Frieze Week in London, but Says I, to Myself Says I (one comma) is the title of the show’s central work; Says I to Myself Says I (no commas) is on display at the gallery’s rue de Castiglione space in Paris. Both paintings feature their respective title’s words on their canvases. Is Ruscha losing the plot, muttering repetitive nonsense or forgetting his lines? Not one bit. He knows each iteration of these words, like déjà vu, completely transforms his works’ meaning with the deftest of touches, just like he always has. These two bodies of work, which seem to ricochet with unexplained references and resonances between London and Paris, reveal an artist at the height of his powers; Ruscha has harnessed a late style made up of all the most brilliantly enigmatic ingredients of what has come before.

The words on the works in the London exhibition range widely, with some delighting in playful repartee and others obliterating coherence altogether. This is very much the Ruscha way: “Of course, the words I use come from every source”, he once said, and so “sometimes they happen on the radio and sometimes in conversations… I’ve had ideas come to me literally in my sleep and I tend to believe on blind faith, that I feel obliged to use.” For instance, ‘SPUTTERING SPIGOTS’ is sensuously sibilant, and makes a section of leaking pipe sound like a mute madman frothing at the mouth; ‘NAMES AND NUMBERS’ reminds me of some kind of tedious functionary logging a group of people’s identities on a spreadsheet; whereas ‘AND WHAT NOT’ simply does not make sense out of the context in which it is spoken because it can mean, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘anything whatever; everything’. What matters is a shared understanding between speaker and interlocutor over what is being described (e.g. ‘please bring the sandwiches and what not’). Ruscha was never going to give us the before or after to help us make sense. If nothing else, we say the words ‘and what not’ when we want to fill space, which is just what the acrylic words do on the surface of the linen; they are their own excuse for being there. “Sometimes found words are the purest because they have nothing to do with you”, Ruscha said: “I take things as I find them. A lot of these things come from the noise of everyday life.”

This sense of words filling space is apparent in the paintings on show in Paris, too, which opened during the melee of Art Basel. I went to see it as the technicians were still stencilling the information on the window in Gagosian’s custom headline font, with the artist – without doubt the most celebrated stencil-based artist in history – looking on in a pair of designer sunglasses that hid the glare of an unseasonably sunny October afternoon. The works in Paris were inspired, at least in part, by the still and sombre paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi, the closest Denmark has to a national artist. This might strike us as surprising, not least at the level of temperature. Ruscha’s most iconic works of the 1960s and 1970s sizzled with brash reds and vivid oranges; in the case of Burning Gas Station (1965-66) the titular scene is a petroleum-propelled inferno under an ominous sky. Hammershøi’s palette is equally reduced but more muted (greys, soft browns, gentle whites) and his usual stomping ground is a chilly apartment on Strandgade in Copenhagen, a world away from the dry heat of Southern California.

More significantly, Ruscha’s subject has always been the exterior world, and undeniably American at that – the billboard on the highway, the lettering of the Hollywood hills, the brutalist trade school on the edge of town – and decidedly not interiors. He is an artist of the open road and the vast West and not the spare bedroom, but in the Paris pictures he invites us into a quieter place indoors. You’ll find no windows nor ornaments nor furnishings, but there are doorways and skirting boards through and against which lines of text dart around like a prisoner passing the time with a tennis ball in his cell. There is a cartoonish element here, as the words and phrases take on the qualities of a moving object, or function like speech bubbles (well, lines) spoken by figures who are either entirely absent or hiding on the other side of the wall. “The word ‘cartooning’ had a powerful strength at around age eight”, Ruscha once said: “Whenever I saw the word I would get excited. I knew that I wanted to be a cartoonist, if not an artist. Oddly enough, the word itself kept me going. India ink somehow played a big part in the tools-of-the-trade instinct.” Of course, Ruscha’s text-based paintings have often spoken to our interior life. Think here about the ways he commandeered advertising slogans which tap into our deepest desire for something (love, security, to be desired ourselves), but the words on the Parisian pictures feel distinct in their disposition: these can only be intimate remarks for someone we know well, perhaps even ourselves.

Ruscha has apparently never seen a Hammershøi in real life. He was inspired to make these works when he received a copy of the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 2018. “What makes me choose a motif are … the lines, what I like to call the architectural content of an image”, the Dane once wrote, in words that could just as plausibly be Ruscha’s: “And then there’s the light, of course. Obviously, that’s also very important, but I think it’s the lines that have the greatest significance for me.” Like Ruscha, Hammershøi began with architectural lines and made the works flow from there. The most interesting thing to know about Hammershøi is that he was not, contrary to popular belief, in the least bit moody: he was quite deaf, and simply couldn’t hear what people were saying, so got written off as moody. He would wipe out people and street furniture from many of his pictures – such as those of the British Museum and Bloomsbury – which clearly reflect his experience as a deaf person. Even the pictures of his wife, Ida, with her back turned, can be understood in terms of his deafness too, as they reflect on the difficulties of communicating and the importance of unvoiced empathy. To be sure, Ruscha doesn’t have any trouble hearing – during Frieze London he was part of the Sound Service series of musical activations in Peter Doig’s exhibition, ‘House of Music’, at the Serpentine – but my point here is that the work in these two exhibitions feel like some of the most intimate and empathetic paintings. After a long career depicting the bombast and bluster of Americana’s loudest slogans, Ruscha turns and whispers to us through the doorway. As usual, it’s always great fun to work out what he’s actually saying.