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Western, with Two Marbles

Edward RUSCHA

1969

In a trompe L'œil style, the painting presents some kind of transparent liquid, water or oil, trailing upon the blue ground. Looking carefully at the shapes made by this liquid, the viewer will notice that they barely form the word "Western," which is the work's title. Besides the liquid, we see that there are two bright colored glass marbles on the right, casting clear shadows, and that the shade of the blue ground grows darker toward the upper end of the painting. But nothing explains why the word "Western" is here. Edward Ruscha has consistently explored since the earliest days of his career what happens when letters and words are presented as figures. Figures and images are the outermost level of letters and words, hulls to allow these conceptual elements to exist in the material world. But when their hulls are aesthetically enhanced and presented in a work of art, the letters and words suffer loss in the area of their function as signs that bear meanings. In his series featuring letters written in liquids, which include this work and date mainly from the latter half of the 1960s, Ruscha shows how image and sign are mutually exclusive―when you try to see one of them, the other disappears from the picture. In these works, he has realized a pure superficiality that is not disrupted by deeper levels of meaning, and has aptly expressed the detached distrust for both images and language that has dominated the late 20th century.