‘MONUMENTAL AND ICONIC’
Ruscha, now 86, is still at it every day in his Culver City studio. When I once asked him about his daily routine there, he said, ‘Well, sometimes I’m fumbling. And sometimes I have a vague idea.’ Yet, across the decades, Ruscha has continued to explore modern life with mordant wit, exquisite technique, and probing attention to picture-making. In the stuff of the everyday — conversational snippets, a pothole in Sepulveda Boulevard, a nondescript gas station in west Texas — he has found deep reservoirs of meaning, or, at least, opportunities to stop, look, consider, appreciate, laugh, or scratch your head: ‘Huh?’ Like, say, Bob Dylan and Don DeLillo, he has shown Americans who they are. And his impassive gaze on the bland surface of things has imbued them with unmistakable aura and hum.

‘Once you pick the object and reproduce it faithfully’, Ruscha has said, ‘you want the thing to glimmer. You want it to have inner power. You want to instill a thing with some earth-shaking religious feeling. You want to hear organ music.’ When you look at a painting like Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half you hear it loud and clear.