Exhibit of the week: Ed Ruscha: Road Tested

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Through April 17

The five decades of work that appear in this new Ed Ruscha show in Texas “would have made Jack Kerouac proud,” said Jennifer Medina in the Dallas Observer. While Ruscha’s penchant for superimposing words and phrases on his paintings has been much examined and discussed, it’s taken until now for any museum to build a retrospective around the 73-year-old’s love of both driving and the road. The American road hasn’t been just a rich source of subject matter for the West Coast’s most prominent veteran of the pop art movement, said Lisa Turvey in Artforum. “Road testing”—an idea suggested by the exhibition’s title—supplies an apt encapsulation of his “half-century (and counting) of restless innovation.”

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Fittingly, Ruscha’s career began with a road trip, said Gaile Robinson in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 1956, when the Oklahoma City native was just 19, he and a friend answered the “siren song” of the highway by jumping into a 1950 Ford and heading west to seek their fortunes in L.A. Ruscha’s most famous series of paintings—which depicts a Standard Oil fueling station as a “temple-like” emblem of mid-century America—was created several years later. The series captures a moment when the gas station, especially on the prairie and in the desert, “was the most important thing on the road.” But Ruscha wasn’t interested only in casting highway architecture as “heroic.” He also photographed the various gas stations he passed, resulting in the first of a series of books that act like mute documentaries. He would soon mount a Nikon onto the back of a pickup to produce 1966’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

Like other pop artists, Ruscha was rejecting the intense subjectivism of abstract expressionism, said Scott Cantrell in The Dallas Morning News. He was looking outward, recording the “oh-so-concrete” around him. If we sometimes see a mood of celebration in these works, it may be because he had located a “promised land” that had little to do with the natural world that American painters celebrated a century earlier. The most striking features of this new heaven were man-made—the road signs, the gas pumps, “the commercial artifacts of modern life.” There’s a strong tendency, when viewing Ruscha’s images today, to interpret his attitude as mocking that era’s optimism. But “that says more about us” than it does about Ruscha. “I was hoping,” he has said, “not to have an attitude.”