Ed Ruscha. Boss. 1961. All images courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery.

Thermometers Should Last Forever*

YVE-ALAIN BOIS

OCTOBER 111, Winter 2005, pp. 6080. 1993 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 varietyof ways. An obvious one is provided by the statements very context, an interview, inwhich the artist defines his interest in making noise as a freedom to insult people orassault people. But such an adversarial tone is rare for Ruscha. My work is not revo-lutionary, he often insists, just as he never ceases to depoliticize and dedramatizeone 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 ifRuscha were saying that he wanted to depict or render noise visually. There are infact grounds for such an interpretation: many of his early word canvases conveya concern for violent shock (Smash, 1963), for the monosyllabic (Boss, 1961), forthe loud brand name (Spam, in Actual Size, 1962)not to mention the severalNoise paintings themselves (those where the inscription noise figures promi-nently). Yet one could say that a painting like Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, CheapWestern (1963) is not really an attempt to depict or render noise visually but ratherthat it toys with the excruciating difficulty of so doing. With the exception ofActual Size, which has a more cartoonish and Lichtenstein-like overtone than anyother work by Ruscha, the noise in question in these early canvases is merelynamed (Honk, 1962, for example). Of course, one could translate the notion ofvisual 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 prefaceto Edward Ruscha: Romance with Liquids, Paintings 19661969, the catalog of an exhibition at theGagosian Gallery in New York ( January 14February 27, 1993), published by Rizzoli InternationalPublications, Inc. 1. Ruscha in Bernard Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, in Edward Ruscha, exh. cat. of thetraveling 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 andthe Fundacio Caixa de Pensions in Madrid, but with different catalogs.

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 restrainedand classical lettering the artist adopted for his next series of canvases with capitalletters, begun in 1966 (Chemical, Automatic, Vaseline, Pressures, Rooster, etc.). But thisimpression 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 precisereason that they have neither size nor scale, one would doubt that the visualnoise 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 treatRuschas word paintings as inscriptions to be read aloud, thereby focusing onphonetic clutter and flutter: the alliterations and rhymes that characterize many ofthem ever since the series of prints News, Mews, Pews, Brews, Stews, Dues (1970). Yetnot every one of his word images would fit such a category (they rarely do when asingle word is involved, as in the series of liquid words); furthermore, those thatdo are more often than not a demonstration of the discrepancy between theacoustic 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 thesilent nature of writingthat which, in writing, resists phonetic performancethatinterests Ruscha, as in Another Hollywood Dream Bubble Popped, where the pattern ofrepeated 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

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2. Dave Hickey, Wacky Molire Lines: A Listeners Guide to Ed-werd Rew-shay, Parkett 18(1988), p. 33.

Ruscha. Noise, Pencil, BrokenPencil, Cheap Western. 1963.

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 atthe Signal, pp. 25051.4. The most eloquent import of the theory of information into the field of aesthetics is UmbertoEcos Opera Aperta, published in Italy in 1962. A French translation appeared in 1965 and an English trans-lation in 1989 (The Open Work, trans. Anna Caucogni [Cambridge: Harvard University Press]). Ecosbook relies heavily on Abraham Moless Thorie de linformat ion et percept ion estht ique (Paris: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 ContextualReading of Bouvard and Pcuchet, reprinted in Josu V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 21338.

In fact, it is just this lack of coincidence between two linguistic codes (spokensounds of language, written words) that gives us a clue as to what Ruscha means byvisual 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 islost, forgotten, usually unseen, unheard, taken for granted, ignored as mere noise:the size and scale of letters, the phonetic flutter, the grammatic alliterationsbutalso the pattern of oil droppings on parking lots, the vacant real estate opportunitiesin 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 havealways operated on a kind of waste-retrieval method, Ruscha has said. I retrieveand renew things that have been forgotten or wasted.3

Noise as refuse. The main lead here is the theory of information elaborated byClaude Shannon and Warren Weaver and furthered by Norbert Wiener, although thistheory, which was once quite popular in aesthetic discussions, has long since goneout of fashion in art criticism.4 It did not yield much when it was current, but itsconcept of noise is worth revisiting. This concept has two entries, two levels. Themost immediate is the one defining noise as everything that constitutes not only anobstacle but also an interference in the transmission of a message. In this instrumen-tal conception of communication, not only lisping, say, but also the swirl ofconnotations, constitutes noise. Thus everything that Ruscha plays with in his News,Mews . . . portfolio is noise: the rhymes, the Gothic lettering, the odd ingredients usedfor 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; anythingthat is not differentiated as a message (as form, as order) recedes into the formlessbackground as mere noise. Just as there is no message entirely devoid of noise, noinformation 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 itsdefinition of noise as undifferentiated background interacts with the notion ofentropy. Entropy is a concept describing the constant loss of energy in any thermody-namic system, including that of the universe. Having played a major role in thehistorical nihilism of the nineteenth century,5 entropy became a key concept inthe science of statistics, and, through the latter, it conveyed a certain sense of

Thermometers Should Last Forever 63

dynamism to the otherwise rather static theory of information: from an entropiccontinuum of probable, repeatable, banal, predictable noises, a message (anevent, a form) surges forth; the more differentiated (improbable, unrepeatable,original, unpredictable) is this message, the more information (and the lessnoise) 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 indiffer-entiation. The formation of linguistic clichs provides the best example of such aconstant drive toward entropy: In relation to the entropic curve, languageanorganization that has escaped the equiprobability of disorderis another improba-ble event, a naturally improbable configuration that can now establish its ownchain of probability . . . within the system that governs it. . . . In other words, theinformation 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; andthat despite the fact that [he] use[s] words, [he] work[s] in and on a nonverbalworld.7 Yet his almost exclusive pictorial interest in lettering wordsat least untilthe silhouette paintings of the late 1980scannot but be considered in view ofthe development of poetic theory. One poet in particular comes to mind,Stphane Mallarm. At first sight there seems little in common between Ruschascolloquial idiom and the French poets exquisite refinement of language (a compara-t ive study would doubtless posit the two of them at opposite ends of thespectrum).8 Yet Mallarm must be credited both for being the first to elaborate athermodynamic conception of language, and for having thought about thatconception, 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 sup-posed as equal to its referent) and language conceived as a multifaceted reality opento a myriad of transformations (where the split is manifest between the referent andthe significations of a word).

The language of the newspaper and of poetry are the poles of Mallarmsopposition. For Mallarm, the newspaper devitalized language, leaching it of itsriches and transforming it into a sum of commercial tokens. It was the poets task

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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, incapableof translating, by sheer nomination, the effect of what it refers to (Avant-Dire au Trait du Verbe deRen 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 flow-ers (Ruscha in Fred Fehlau, Ed Ruscha, Flash Art 138 [JanuaryFebruary 1988], p. 70); reprinted inLeave Any Information at the Signal, pp. 26268).

to replenish language. One of the things Mallarm reproached the newspaper forwas its dull typography (he found it tragic that the only words to be distinguishedtypographically, allowed to spring above the tight gray blocks of the text, should bethose 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 vehicleany departure from the standard is felt as noise, as an obstacle to the clarity of theinformational content. For Mallarm, on the contrary, it was this standard itself thatwas the noise, the entropic indifferentiation of the typography corresponding to thesenseless clichs that accumulate in the newspaper columns; conversely, everythingthat the instrumental language of communication downplayed as trite noise (every-thing that is lost in translation, for example) could be retrieved as the core ofliterature, as major features of what Roman Jakobson later called the poetic functionof language, a function that promotes the palpability of signs.

Although it is trivializing to reduce Mallarms concern for the revitalizationof language merely to the matter of typography, this issue did indeed play a majorrole in the poets legacy, functioning as a marker of his position, one that has beenessential to the modernist conception of language. At this juncture, it is worth not-ing that the spark that initiated the critical school of Russian formalism (of whichJakobson became the most prominent spokesman) is decisively linked to Mallarmsheritage. It was to scientifically back up Aleksei Kruchenykh and VelimirKhlebnikovs 1913 manifestoes The Word as Such and The Letter as Such, essaysthat launched the Cubo-Futurist movement in Russia, that Victor Shklovskii wroteResurrection of the Word in 1914.9 The latter, in turn, was no less than a first version ofShklovskiis famous essay, Art as Device, of 1916, which itself can be termed thebirth certificate of Russian formalism (even though Jakobson tended to belittle itsomewhat at the end of his life). In short, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikovs texts wereto have an extraordinary aftereffect, now long acknowledged, although the impor-tance they ascribed to typography is too often neglected. The Letter as Such, forexample, 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. Butwhat is their agreement worth? You need only recall that while talkingabout 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,

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9. On this point, see Herbert Eagle, Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism, afterword to AnnaLawton, 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 andJohn Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973), pp. 4147. On Kruchenykhand typography, see Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments,19001930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), chap. 3.

with cropped hair, and all equally colorless, graythere are not letters,there are brands! But ask any wordwright and he will tell you that aword written in individual longhand or composed with a particulartypeface bears no resemblance at all to the same word in a differentinscription.10

Like Mallarm, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov felt that language had beenunnerved; like him, they complained about its growing meaninglessness andconcocted strategies destined to reinseminate signification in all its aspects (fromthe 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 shouldresemble what it refers to (thus their graphological interest); like Mallarms, itgave way to an exploration of the arbitrariness of the sign (hence their abstractphonetic poetry). Like Mallarm, the Russians conceived their practice as a struggleagainst the erosion of language.

It is from this standpoint that Shklovskii elaborated his concept of defamil-iarization, of making strange (ostrananie). The function of art, he argued, is todeautomate our perceptions; the function of literature, of poetic language, is todistort, 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 ofclichs (not only within the language of daily life but within literary production) isin perfect agreement with that of the theory of information; and, against theinstrumentalist drive of this theory, it is in perfect accordance with Mallarmsimpulse to free language from its enslavement to a function of communication. Inall of these cases, entropy is the key concept.

Clichs, typography, and defamilarization are also Ruschas turf (Isnt dis-orientation one of the best things about making art?).11 Although I would savorthe irony of being able to cast his work, in the wake of the poets and theoreticiansI alluded to, as that of a formalist, it could hardly be said, however, that his utmostdesire is to replenish a world of blighted signs. Mallarmin an increasinglypessimistic mannerand his followers believed in the utopian possibility of resur-recting language (note the title of Shklovskiis 1914 brochure). But that wasbefore the industrialization of culture had taken its toll, before the global village.Ruscha is more modest, more laconic; he registers both the thickness and theshallowness of the forest of signs daily produced by the mass media, pointing tothe absurd poignancy of these lost messages.

Despite the fact that Ruscha has noted quite often a certain discrepencybetween his pictures and his books, I would say that there, too, it is entropy that

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10. Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, The Letter as Such, in Lawton, Russian FuturismThrough Its Manifestoes, 19121928, p. 63.11. Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 134.

constitutes his main theme. No information, no difference: the Twentysix GasolineStations (1962) are there, inert, just as the letters of the alphabet before theyshape a word. No signification, nothing behind the facades of Every Building on theSunset 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 ofmilk at the end. The endless return of the same, the industrial serialitynot onlydo Ruschas books explore the uniformity of our late-capitalist age, but they them-selves mime the conditions whose effect they document (first as objects ofmass-production, with the professional polish and the advertising look that theartist so relishes;12 second as a structure: I could see a thousand books, a thousandtitles. 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 thatmade no sense, he clearly knows that one cannot escape signification.14 He knowsthat however empty (that is, noisy) the message he will retrieve from the semiologicalprofusion 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 pointand 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 boilapart, and I wont be able to read or think of it. Usually I catch them before theyget 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 ofliquid words that Ruscha painted from 1967 to 1969 (nor do the few gunpowderdrawings like Grapes or Pool that are formally related to it). First, the title declaresthe identity of the fluid represented in trompe loeil as being the ink with whichthe word has been written; second, the inscription itself refers to an item of massculture that Ruscha had already retrieved in various collages and paintings from1960 to 1962 (both the word Annie and its typographyfrom the cartoon LittleOrphan Annieare a well-established fact in American popular culture, and inRuschas previous oeuvre); third, the background is flat, plain. None of thesefeatures applies to the subsequent liquid words, which tend to posit Annie, Poured

Thermometers Should Last Forever 67

12. Asked if he is interested in some notion of the readymade, Ruscha replies: No, what I amafter is a kind of polish. Once I have decided all the detailphotos, layout, etc.what I really want is aprofessional finish, a clear-cut machine finish. . . . I am not trying to create a precious limited-editionbook, but a mass-produced product of high order (Ruscha in John Coplans, Concerning VariousSmall 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 (February1981), 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.

from Maple Syrup as a tryout. It is as if the artist had found his purpose too obvi-ous in this work, the message too clear, the decomposition too well shaped, thenoise not noisy enough. Whatever the case, the background of the liquid wordswill henceforth always look like an abstract stage, an eerie gravitationless fieldthat darkens in value toward the upper side of the picture (the somewhatmechanical graded color being a direct borrowing from the runs of color incommercial paint catalogs, as Rosalind Krauss noted).16 In other words, whilethe yellow field of Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup looks like a solid surfaceagainst which its liquid letters can spread (such as a Formica kitchen counterseen from above) we will never be able to attribute any definite place to the liquid-ificat ion of Desire, Adios, or Steel. As for giving the name of the depictedingredient, nothing could have counteracted more the state of slowly growingdeliquescence Ruscha wants to convey: naming is a way of giving form, of artic-ulating, of constructing a dam against the endless return of the same, againstthe sea of noises.

The uncertainty as to what are the meticulously rendered materials of allthe liquid words painted after Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup plays a most impor-tant role in the fascinating and disgusting effect of these pictures (Ill returnlater to this semantic pair, fascination and disgust). Although we tend to identify

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16. Rosalind Krausss remarks on Ruschas liquid words appear in a review of the Corcoran Biennalof 1971, organized by Walter Hopps. Differentiating Ruschas from Tanguys backgrounds, to whichthey have been compared, Krauss notes that they are spreads of color unmediated by the artistssensibility. . . . 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).

Ruscha. Annie, Poured fromMaple Syrup. 1966.

the painted liquidsas if solving the riddle would explain, or tame, the effect ofthese workswe are bound to remain at the generic level of abstract qualities. Wecan perceive various degrees of shininess, of viscosity, of stickiness, of oiliness, oftranslucency; we can associate certain colors with sweetness (and the signal food-stuff 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 withtheoretical monsters, such as sugary oil).

The most important change to occur after Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup, how-ever, concerns the choice of words and their typography. Some of the words have asomewhat 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 twocanvases bearing this inscription depicts one of the driest words), Air (translucentand chubby, the letters are almost pneumatic), or even Ripe (the cluster of seeds thatfloat in the red sticky juice suggests a mashed fruit). Often, though, when involvingwords connoting hardness and mineralization, as in Steel, Ruby, or City, the connec-tion is by contrast. One can read a similar contrast in the two Mint pictures that cryout more goo than freshness. Other words, like Lisp, plainly refer to the notion of

Thermometers Should Last Forever 69

17. Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 136. Ruscha: If I paint a picture of theword COOL, I dont use a lot of blue or other cool colors; instead, I find myself deliberately takinganother route. Compare also this confession to Dave Hickey: There are these graphic guys back inL.A., and you know, they are very skillful. Better than me, and I saw this one postcard. It was the wordwet formed by spilled liquid on a blue ground. . . . That is meaning torn free, and it is the opposite ofwhat I do, of what Im trying to do. Sometimes Ill accidentally let something slip, but Ive neverconsciously 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 SanFrancisco: Hudson Hills Press and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1982], p. 29).

Ruscha. Steel. 196769.

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

noise as developed earlier. In one of the two Lisp canvasesand this is also true ofthe extraordinary print done with the same wordthe depicted liquid is the shini-est and apparently most versatile of all, suggesting something of the speed ofmercury dropped from a broken thermometer. Or you have interjections like Heyor Adios, referring to the least informative (thus the noisiest) function of lan-guage, baptized the phatic function by Jakobson, and characterizing messages solelyconcerning the contact between sender and receiver.18

Interestingly enough, especially in view of the inveterate claim that Ruscha isthe essential L.A. artist, very few liquid words refer to the painters immediate

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18. See Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics (1960), reprinted in Jakobson, Language inLiterature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 6294.

Ruscha. Lisp. 1968.

Ruscha. Hey. 1969.

linguistic surroundings ( just as for the depicted fluids, there is somethinggeneric, nonspecific, in Ruschas choice of words: it is not so much that it is impos-sible to find out why such and such a word was then hot for him, but that it isirrelevant now). Yet occasionally L.A. speech comes through, as in Adios, the firstof the liquid words proper, whose spilled population of small beans directly tie itto Latino culture, or in the similarly Hispanic Rancho, whose letters are rounderand better shaped, connoting more the public space of the billboard. In this cate-gory we can also fit Western with Two Marbles (an uncommon witticism in Ruschasfantasy of a senseless language), or Cut (a paradox, for nothing could be moreremoved from the idea of a cut than that of liquidity), both vaguely alluding tothe world of the movies. But those specifics are exceptions. The other words covera 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 speechand writing (U can be read you), and one can perceive in it the echo of one ofRuschas first word paintings (SU, 1958). But what distinguishes it most from theother liquid word paintings is both the clearly defined substance, the only non-viscous one (soap bubbles), and the rather poor legibility (it is not that the letter

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Ruscha. Adios. 1967.

is less well shaped than usual but that, being alone, its perception is not enhancedby its context). This singular case, however, is what testifies best to what separatesthe whole series from Annie, Poured from Maple Syrup.

Soap bubbles make an extraordinarily volatile material, always on the vergeof evanescence; in other words, the entropic future of the bubbled U is that of ashapeless blob, such as those that Ruscha depicted in a series of soap prints in1971 (Blue Suds, Green Suds, Grey Suds). Now, if we look at all the more sticky wordsand compare their letters to that of Annie, we can infer a radically different eventon 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 letterscorrespond to neighboring eroded areas, feeling paradoxically like wet crumbs.The slow fluid seems ready to fill in the indentations, reinstating the identity ofthe letters. (The only exception to this intuited happy ending is the capillaryattraction between the point and the trunk of the i). In all the other liquid wordcanvases, by contrast, the natural spread of the fluid does not appear to be in theprocess of expanding so as to fill out the temporary defects (noises) in the contoursof the letters, but on the contrary tends to melt the distinctive traits of the alpha-betic elements themselves. The initial E of Eye is on the point of closing up onitself, the gruesome letters of Hey are on the point of fraying, the bombastic S ofSteel is about to gobble up the whole word. The liquid words are depicted in theprocess of becoming blots, stains, spots. Ruscha is producing a Rorschach test inreverse. Unlike the various animals Hamlet was perceiving in the clouds, or the

Thermometers Should Last Forever 73

Ruscha. U. 1968.

battles and landscapes Leonardo was deciphering on old walls, Ruschas liquid wordsdo not owe their existence to the subjective action of a spectators projection. If ourimagination is at all called upon, it is to perform and to perfect the task of decompo-sition. Coming from indifferentiation (daily language as an ocean of noises), theyreturn eagerly to it (letters as blobs). Liquidity is another name for nonarticulationit 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 notabstaining. . . . I simply cant relate to it, Ruscha says.19 Or again, The longer I amat 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 tosuffer from exhaustion: I view my art output as a simple variation on a theme. It is atheme 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 thehistorical tempo of his work should be very slow. On the other hand, Ruscha neverdenied having taken lessons from the history of art, readily mentioning Dada andSurrealism, or Jasper Johns (whose Target with Four Faces, seen in reproduction in1957, deeply impressed him). Although he objects to labels, he would be the lastto condemn an investigation of his art that relates it to other artists (my guess isthat he suffers somewhat from the loose but limited West Coast category in whichmost critics have lumped his production).22 It is thus perfectly accurate to discusshis paintings in terms of Pop art, Conceptual art, Surrealism, or even Cubism.23

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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, how-ever, Ruscha implies that he stopped making books because they had lost their surprising effect (blamingthe habit of art galleries to present them on the wall: You know what to think, everythings spelled outfor you. Its on a gallery wall so it must be art). It is interesting to notice that the question being askedwas 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 refusedto take it up at this level: Yes, the sheer number of the things waters it down, weakens it. When its anestablished thing, and everyone understands it, its lost its original function. If everyone knew what thebooks were about, the whole thing would be totally different. Thats why I was interested in the bookform. Duchamp had already killed the idea of the object on display. After what he did, it would be hardto 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, thatRuschas concern with entropy was shared by a number of artists of his generation, the most vocalbeing Robert Smithson.23. A full assessment of Ruschas work in relation to Pop art is yet to come. For the importance ofhis books in the development of Conceptual art, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Conceptual Art19621969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions, October 55 (Winter1990), pp. 10543. As for Surrealism and Cubism, Ruscha acknowledged the filiation, even if in a some-what tongue-in-cheek manner: You could say if you want to categorize me that Im a Surrealist: but Idont attach myself to a label (Ruscha in Fox, Ed Ruscha Discusses His Latest Work, p. 281; see also

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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: Ivegot 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 bril-liant, when he viewed the Museum of Modern Art mammoth retrospective of the artist in 1980, washis 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: Theirony congealed on the surface of Ruschas pictures is that the two ideals of twentieth-century paint-ing, the modernist declaration of Cubist lettering (with coffee grounds and sand mixed into the paintto affirm the meaning of the pictorial surface) and the Surrealist imagery shaped by an ultimate faithin the internal resources of fantasy honestly mined and depicted, have both foundered on the shoalsof a commercial culture which can expropriate and devalue the meaning of everything within itsgrasp (Krauss, Washington, p. 85).24. Ruscha in Fehlau,Ed Ruscha, p. 70.25. Ruscha in Blistne, Conversation with Ed Ruscha, p. 128.

However, of all the historical and stylistic comparisons that eventually threadthrough the Ruscha literature (amidst the usual L.A. cant), one of them seems con-spicuously absent, despite the artists constant stress that the movement inquestionAbstract Expressionismwas his only horizon when he decided to be anartist. When I was in school, I painted just like an Abstract Expressionistit was auniform. 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 thereseemed no reason to push it any further. But I began to see that the only thing to dowould be a preconceived image. It was an enormous freedom to be premeditatedabout my art.24 Every single time Ruscha mentions Abstract Expressionism it isto say how he was trained and sort of programmed to think like an AbstractExpressionist,25 and therefore to construct an oppositional paradigm in terms of

Ruscha. Cut. 1969.

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26. Ibid.27. It is no doubt to conjure the expressionist pretense to subjectivity that Ruscha, along with manyother artists of his Pop generation, stressed more than anything else the anonymity of his facture, of hisstyle, of his imagery, be it the anonymous look of his photographic books (what I was after was no-style ora non-statement with a no-style [Ruscha in Barendse, Ed Ruscha: An Interview, p. 9]), as well as theanonymous look of his backgrounds (Ive always believed in anonymity as far as a background goesthats 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 him-self acknowledged, it is more a question of black humor, and is thus of a far more nihilistic tone thanirony (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).

intentionality: So, it became a question of either loading the brush with color andattacking 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 momentwhen Abstract Expressionism had become a clich, when the push and pull hadindeed become a slogan, when Pollocks misleading posture of spontaneity (WhenI am in my painting, Im not aware of what Im doing) had become trite. It was atime when the theater of subjectivity that gave its name to Abstract Expressionismwas 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, Ruschadoes state that he learned a lot from Abstract Expressionism and that he continuesto find the paintings impressive (I still love it. So I dont find it foreign to me).28 Iwould even say that he took it upon himself to address the question of the legacy ofAbstract Expressionism head on. Remember, when Ruscha began, Color Fieldpainting had come to the rescue and the abstract stains and misty surfaces ofMorris Louis and Jules Olitski were presented as the next historical plateau, as takingthe torch from the hands of the dead Pollock and carrying it further, above thehead of de Koonings misguided imitators. It is perhaps this particular turn ofevents, with the historical determinism at work behind the claims then made, thatparticularly distressed Ruscha (and, I see his refusal to use an airbrush, a tool asso-ciated with the Field painters, until recentlya fact that is often mentioned in theliterature and the artists interviewsas a symptom of his disaffection).

Whatever the case, Ruschas liquid words are engaged in a dialogue withPollocks drip paintings (note that they appear the same year as Pollocks majorretrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, 1967), a dialogue that should not betoo swiftly read as governed by irony. (Contrary to most commentators, I do notthink that the castrating self-righteousness of irony is at the core of Ruschas art.)29The job they perform vis--vis Pollock (that run counter to the Greenbergian subli-mation reading, standard at the time) is on the same line as Warhols piss canvasesand Robert Morriss spreads of material on the floor, a cluster of works that RosalindKrauss has analyzed as not only a willful debasement of Pollocks then-academicizedoeuvre, but moreover a reading of this very oeuvre as debasement.30

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31. The footnote in the original publication, at this point of the essay, referred to Denis Holliersbrilliant comments on Batailles notion of the informe in his La Prise de la Concorde (1974), translatedinto 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 thenotion of the informe, prior to her work on Pollock, in essays on Surrealist photography (No MorePlay 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: Photographyand 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 April1989 (pp. 23848, 279). Since then, Krauss and I curated an exhibition on, or rather through, thetopic of the informe at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (Linforme, mode demploi, May 22August26, 1996), in which four liquid words canvases by Ruscha, as well as several of his books, were prominent-ly displayed. The book that functioned as the catalog for this exhibition has been published in Englishas 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 inDocuments, the short-lived journal he edited in 192930 (English trans. Allan Stoekl, in Bataille, Visionsof Excess: Selected Writings 19271939 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985], p. 31).

The key feature in all these works is that of gravitya feature that had beendeliberately ignored in all the interpretations of Pollocks drip canvases as a gateopening onto something like pure opticality (that of Greenberg and his follow-ers but also of the artists he defended at that time). Against this vision ofpainting as sublimation, as a kind of hallucination that transcends matter, Ruschaand the artists I just invoked propose a reading of Pollock that insists insteadupon the attack his canvases mounted against the traditional verticality of thevisual field of paintings, a reading best summarized by a notion coined by theFrench writer and essayist Georges Bataillethat of the informe (formless, form-lessness; shapeless, shapelessness).31

According to Bataille, words exist to perform jobs and the job of the wordinforme would be to bring things down in the world, to deliver a low blow againstreason, to knock meaning off its pedestal. Informe is anything that cannot bethought, that cannot be articulated, that cannot be classified. It is mud and filth,those substances that seem ridiculous and that our hands touch, as Socratessays in Platos Parmenides. In that dialogue, Socrates tells the eponymous hero notto concern himself with such substances, since it would be indecent if they had acorresponding form (eidos), a concept that would allow them to be discussed.Informe is also laughter, which resists philosophical arguments (and is thereforecondemned by Socrates), and sexual pleasure, which we entrust to the night, asPlato writes in the Philebus, as if the light of day must not see it. Or, to quoteBataille, what the term informe designates has no rights in any sense and getsitself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. Informe is the dark sideof reason; it is perversion without metaphor; it is the infantile and obscene regres-sion 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 orthe easel to the horizontality of the floor, and in making sure that this rotation

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 refuseitems), Pollock did strike a blow against the modernist and idealist hypothesis of apure opticality. He reminded us not only that if our heads are raised to the heavensand heavenly things, our feet are on the earthy ground where well sooner orlater lay down,33 but also that among other things paint is a material, a liquidwhose entropic condition is that it drips and spreads.

Ruscha takes up this informe reading of Pollock at a thematic level. UnlikeWarhol 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 liquidwords (note that pictorially speaking, the series is very clean, like most of Ruschasworks-no texture, no material mark of the process). And he does so in activatingtwo contradictions: that between the messiness of the depicted spill and the profes-sional finish of the trompe loeil rendition (clearly inherited from Surrealism),which creates a hallucinatory effect of reality; and, more importantly perhaps, thatbetween the gravity-free ground and the letters spilled from above. Notice the waythe words never fuse in Ruschas abstract skies: there is a complete impenetrabilitybetween the mock landscape backgrounds and the sticky letters that press against it.The words themselves help consolidate the impression that Ruschas semantic field isthat of the informe, and I see in the liquefaction of Eye a direct response to the all-optical construct that constituted the mainstream theory of modernist art fromAdolf von Hildebrand and Konrad Fiedler to Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg.

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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.

Let us note in passing that such a liquefaction would have no doubt appealedto Bataille, not only because of his fascination for the eye-splitting images that pref-ace Buuels film Un chien andalou but also because it seems akin to the metaphoricpermutation, in his Histoire de loeil, of eye, egg, milk, sperm, and urine, among otherthings (all liquids that Ruscha used literally as inkthat is, not through the distanceof depiction any morein the Stains portfolio that he assembled in 1969).34 Onceagain, however, it is the typography that performs most visibly the operation of theinforme, matching at once the semantic and the iconographic level: it presents thewords themselves as spat, spewed, ejaculated. Desire remains as a blob of unnameablebody fluids improbably sprinkled with blueberries.

V

The reader of this essay may by now have become a bit uneasy, feeling thatIve gone too far. After all, did Ruscha not say that what he is interested in is illus-trating ideas?35 But what does it mean to say that about a print portfolio (News,Mews . . .) whose most remarkable feature, apart from the senseless nurseryrhymes, is the strange combination of materials used as ink? What does it mean tosay that one of the main qualities of words is that they have no size, and yet tospend ones artistic life giving them flesh, either illusionistically, in case of theliquid words, or literally, by painting them with vegetable juice?

Ruschas pictorial obsession with food plays an important role in the liquidwords where we have noticed, among the viscous skeins, unlikely juxtapositions suchas beans and cocktail olives.36 This assimilation of language to muck points againtoward the direction of the informe, and stresses a relationship that, oddly enough,seems to have escaped even that champion of debasementFreud. The latterunderlined the importance of food in the libidinal development of the infant,conceiving sucking as providing both pleasure and nourishment at a time when thesexual drive is not yet directed toward an object. But he did not mention the congru-ence, in the mouth, of the function of speech (even if it is inarticulate babble) andnutrition.37 This is the more surprising since Freud was particularly astute in point-ing out such confluences, building his theory of art as the sublimation of libido onthe repression of the double anatomical role of the male sexual organ. This initial

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34. On Batailles circle of metaphors in his Histoire de loeil, see Roland Barthes, The Metaphor ofthe Eye, trans. Richard Howard, in Barthes, Critical Essays (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UniversityPress, 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 withedible 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 psy-choanalysis. Sandor Ferenczi noted the analogy between laughter and vomiting, a very Bataille-likeassociation, but I am not aware of any canonical psychoanalytical essay on the speech/puke relation-ship (Ferenczi, Laughter, in Final Contribution to Psychoanalysis, ed. Michael Balint, English trans. EricMosbacher [London: The Hogarth Press, 1955], p. 181).

disgust, according to Freud, explains why, despite the fact that the concept ofbeautiful has its roots in sexual excitation, and that the genitals themselvesproduce the strongest sexual excitation, we never regard those organs as reallybeautiful.38 If we transpose this hypothesis to another part of the body, it givesus a hint as to the origin of the strangely repulsive/attractive effect of Ruschas liquidwords: given the artists thematics of waste-retrieval, given the concomitant linguisticand ingestive function of the mouth, given the rather frequent appearance offood in those paintings, is it so far-fetched to read them, at least metaphorically, asvomited utterances?

Fo one thing, the fascination/disgust duality is at the root of Ruschas jour-ney in entropia. (I was exalted at the same time that I was repulsed by the wholething, said the artist about the photo session for Real Estate Opportunities.)39Surveying the saturated and stale profusion of signs of our current culture, headopts a position that is radically different from that of Mallarm (And the dirtyvomit of Stupidity / Makes me hold my nose before the azure).40 But it is also dif-ferent from that of Roland Barthes, an heir to Mallarm and to the Russianformalists, who, long after having explored in great length the mythologies ofmass culture, admitted that stupidity fascinated him.41 Ruscha neither rejectsnor marvels in irony. Exalted and repulsed, he keeps track, he records, and heleaves to others the task of reordering the universe, knowing all along that histhermometer points toward a future decomposition.

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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. JohnGoodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), consists essentially in a lengthy and rigorousanalysis 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). SeeMallarm, 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.