[Ed Ruscha]
I’m gonna play this tune called ‘Goodnight My Love’
and this represents everything
that I felt about California when I
first came out here…
Ed Ruscha’s been making work in Los Angeles
for the better part of a century
People often talk about Ed’s work —
his paintings, his books, photos or films
as being ‘about’ Los Angeles, California, or The West
When they talk about Ed they describe him as ‘cool’…
and yes, he’s cool
and yeah, the places he paints
or photographs are usually in Los Angeles
he’s lived her for over 60 years after all
I’m not going to try to explain Ed’s work —
we’ve only got a few minutes here
but I am gonna show you as much as I can
and there’s a lot, so buckle up
[Reyner Banham]
Ed? What should people see?
[Ed Ruscha]
Maybe… Gas stations maybe
They're streamlined… Everything about it
is streamlined, that's what I like
In the early sixties, Ed was making
the thousand-mile drive
from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City a lot
The thing I really noticed were gasoline stations
So he took photos of them
and published 26 of them in a little book
[Irving Blum]
Ed said to me at the time, "it's a diary"
sold the books at three bucks a pop
…and I went home and thought about that
When he ran out,
he printed more
[Kim Gordon]
It was kind of a punk move
[Jim Ganzer]
It looked like anybody could've done that
if they had their eyes open
One photo in particular stuck with Ed:
a Standard station outside Amarillo, Texas
He borrowed a composition from the movies…
When the Lumière brothers first show this in 1896,
audiences jumped out of their seats
Standard Station's an image
Ed revisited many times
Here it is on fire in 1966,
burning in '68
with a 10-cent western being torn in half…
an olive
An olive?
[Ed Begley, Jr.]
Does that mean 'olive oil'?
Whatever the joke is, I love it
Here's what the buliding looks like today 
It's called K&T Automotive Transmission
He used this format on a few
paintings from that time
Here's Norms Diner, also on fire
They tried to tear the building down last year
You know, architects are into it for it
what they can do with a space
I'm into it for something else…
I'm still trying to understand what that is
Apartment buildings caught Ed's attention next
There weren't that many in Oklahoma at
the time
He started photographing them
Gee, look at these apartment
buildings are just totally square
— The buildings have a name
— like it was a car
and then the name is in a font
He made another book, then started
drawing some of these pictures
It was like a nervous compulsion
I remember growing up thinking how tacky they were
and now they look actually sort of quaint
He used a motorized camera to shoot
a long picture of the Sunset Strip
Two and a half miles became a book
that folded out for 27 feet
25 years later, Ed was still painting buildings
He called these five black and white ones
his 'Blue Collar' series
10 years after that, when when Ed was invited to
represent the United States at the Venice Biennale
he updated those five with five new color ones
[Ed Moses]
He looks at them directly, without any beauty or mystery
although, the paintings are great to look at
yeah, they are great to look at
Maybe we should have started with the word paintings
Let's try that…
Word paintings. Ed Ruscha. Go.
[Billy Al Bengston]
He's more interested in words than he is in architecture
You know, it's where Ed started after all:
one word knockouts, straight out of school
Prior to Ruscha, how many of you took the
opportunity to consider the word 'Oof'?
Something about these felt inspired by
his childhood love of comics
These early paintings got Ed his first big break
Walter Hopps included 3 of them in his
breakthrough exhibition at Pasadena Art Museum
and Ed was the youngest artist included
He also made the poster
In the next few years, he started tweaking his text
…claiming it
making it his word
pulling it apart
first literally, then in his kerning
By the late '60s, Ed was making it
look like as text was made of maple syrup
jelly, beans, water
[Larry Bell]
He had an enormous amount of skill for a young guy
in terms of handling paint
…and also, it's funny
In the early '70s, Ed started
painting with actual foods
chocolate, cilantro, catchup, caviar, hot sauce
Anything that he could use to leave his mark
Here's Ed with some chewing tobacco
So, I just picked tobacco
just because of the marks it makes
How can you get romantic about prune juice?
You can taste it, and see it
or see the stains…
He likes the stains
Who would've ever done something like that?
Ed Ruscha—
that's what he do
He started making drawings
using gunpowder a few years prior
and made these prints out a squid ink,
daffodils, and axle grease and '69
[Joe Goode]
How's the word 'jelly' look with jelly?
Try putting that your hat before
you've seen somebody else do it
A few years later he made a movie about a car mechanic that goes from grease-covered to pristine
The movie that I was in is
about a mechanic who forgets
that he made a date with a girl
He starts out in a small dirty little garage,
ends up in a great big clean garage
Words were all spoken in this one
save for this great-looking title
I mean, sometimes when you finish a
painting you feel clean
By the late '70s, he'd worked clouds into the background
and in '82, he standardized his type with a
font he calls 'Boy Scout Utility Modern'
It looked like it was done by a lineman
for the telephone company
and he's asked to make the poster
for the annual picnic
in the '80s, the phrases got longer… You could
kinda make sense of little stories here and there
You right away, when you hear a phrase 
like that, you want to know
Who is she and why did they call her 'Styrene'?
'85 brought about the first of these city lights
and the first appearance of censor strips
kind of like redacted government documents
In 1997, he started painting these majestic mountains
As much as I like Ed's words, and he's got a few
he's just as good without them
1997, Picture Without Words
He'd been making sketches of it for over 25 years
you can kind of look at it forever
It's a godlike painting
So what's the secret? What makes Ed Ruscha keep painting every day over 50 years later?
I think he came from a different place
He had a different source
the direct source of reality
Like a person from another planet would come in here and see this stuff directly
That's it
Ed Ruscha — amen
