In every sign there sleeps that monster, stereotype.
En chaque signe dort ce monstre, un stéréotype. - Roland Barthes
Ed Ruscha. NOW THEN. The Museum of Modern Art, September 10, 2023 – January 13, 2024 [closed]. https://press.moma.org/exhibition/ed-ruscha-now-then/
Interesting artists are interesting in their own way; mediocre artists are all alike; not because their art looks the same but because they all get to be mediocre by following the same predictable path.
I wish I could say I taught many mediocrities-in-the-making at the School of Visual Arts. I wish I could say taught, but you can’t teach a future mediocrity anything, least of all at SVA, where mediocrity isn’t the by-product, it’s the school motto.
There’s no way to teach Art to mediocrities because there’s no way to make them understand that technique is not the equivalent of craft. Craft: you learn how things are supposed to be done, and then you do them, more or less well. Technique: you’ve grasped what craft is for, and every time you hit the bull’s eye. In Art History the situation’s even more hopeless because the History of Art requires that we understand not merely what was painted in the past, not simply how, but why one painted as one did. That’s why some people find Ed Ruscha comforting: the kind of people who congregate in high-school bathrooms and New York City boardrooms. His paintings have the emotional connection of a hundred-dollar bill. Ruscha is the class ZAM, the Zero-Affect Male, the one who has no why and who’s down with that. The occasional acts of rebellion have all the cringelike feel of a teenager putting out a lighted cigarette on the back of their hand, just to assure themselves that they feel something.
The word “trivial” comes from Trivia, the name of the initial set of disciplines in Medieval education; grammar, logic rhetoric: you have to learn the rules before you play the game. With Ruscha there’s nothing beyond the rules—not even rules, just class assignments. Over and over again he runs through the same basic exercises: organize a representation of a three-dimensional object along orthogonals; make letterforms look like what they say. In the hands of an artist like Keith Haring (the only artist ever to come out of the School of Visual Arts) these tasks become hilarious sendups of themselves. In the hands of Ruscha we get a dim, bored awareness of how tedious they are. There’s no cathexis; no emotional attachment. The reverse, in fact.
Ours is a time when art criticism and teaching Art converge: neither is about helping artists and students to move forward because there is no forward, the game’s been tossed. Critics and teachers aren’t paid to help students, artists, and would-be appreciators of art become better at what they do, they’re paid to help pretend they’re not wasting their time, cf. Jerry Saltz. The best you can hope for is that brief moment when the student or artist produces something you’d call promising; then you can point out where the promise lies—the artist rarely knows it themselves—and hope they pick up on it. There is such a moment in Ruscha, a single painting:
What Ruscha’s done here, is to take a vaguely authoritarian statement and neutralize it by painting over the words to create a kind of pattern of resistance. As Barthes put it,
Language, the performance of any system, is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist. Fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech… All that’s left, if I may say so, is to cheat through language; to cheat with language. It’s within language that language must be contested, corrupted.
« La langue, , comme performance de tout langage, n’est ni réactionnaire ni progressiste ; elle est tout simplement : fasciste ; car le fascisme, ce n’est pas d’empêcher de dire, c’est d’obliger à dire… Il ne reste, si je puis dire, qu'à tricher avec la langue ; qu'à tricher la langue. C'est à l'intérieur de la langue que la langue doit être combattue, dévoyée. »1
Here Ruscha at last turns against his own practice to explore his own self-directed repression, not merely that of others; not merely to enforce the craft, but to rub against the grain. Too little, too late.
Too bad.
WOID XXIII-37
January 14, 2024
Roland Barthes, « Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France » (7 janvier 1977),