American Art Collaborative

Ed Ruscha is famously reluctant to associate his art with a single medium. Since the early 1960s, he has made paintings, drawings, photographs, books, films, and prints, often going in search of new means of working soon after making inroads elsewhere. In 1969, when his paintings had become synonymous with West Coast Pop, Ruscha took a two-year hiatus from the reigning medium of high art, declaring, with charming impetuousness, “I can’t bring myself to put paint on canvas.”In the interim he turned to printmaking, favoring the techniques of screenprinting and lithography. The screenprint I’m Amazed, 1971, dates from this period. A sizeable work, it depicts hundreds of tiny, meticulously rendered flies swarming over and around the paired words that form the title. These words are printed in a gray so delicate that the block letters are barely legible against the off-white paper. Or rather, the words surface despite the clustered flies—with their green bodies and dark grey wings and legs—and then sink back into partial obscurity. Ruscha, who has made a career of treating words like found objects, transforms “I’m amazed”—a common expression of wonderment—into a road-kill attraction for nature’s preeminent recyclers.To date, Ed Ruscha’s fascination with insects as subject matter has been reserved for printmaking, save for a single montage, Insect Eating Paper of 1960, which incorporates a reproduction of an insect performing this feat. That early work by the artist, who made his solo debut at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963, constitutes an image of erasure, or consumption, not unlike works in the artist’s later Stains of 1969, a portfolio of 75 stains on paper in which some of the materials applied, such as bleach and spot remover, actually did damage to the artwork’s surface.1 A single trompe l’oeil fly graced the lower left corner of Ruscha’s 1967 lithograph 1984, like a newly grounded menace staking out territory. An extension of these early experiments, I’m Amazed dramatically multiplies the reality of “surface” and “thing” that flies so persistently objectify with their landings. Anyone who has defended a picnic from buzzing winged invaders knows the uncanny determination with which the insect kingdom can rival our own desires.Ruscha’s statements about why he chooses to use a certain word (or string of words), or a certain object (or being) over others always favor matter-of-factness over metaphor. Characteristically, in 1978 he has said he was drawn to include insects in his prints because “I have a jillion…around my studio. I love them, but I don’t want them around.” Nonetheless I would wager that, like the Surrealists, Ruscha has been drawn to insects, including flies, because of the primal realities hidden within their ordinariness, because of the inexorable ways they impact matter.A year after I’m Amazed was published, Ruscha produced Insects, a portfolio of six screenprints housed in a box outfitted with a plastic cover that encapsulates dirt from the schoolyard of the artist’s Oklahoma City elementary school. Ants (and the suggestion of an industrious ant farm) joined his swarms of flies as contaminators introduced to defend artistic license. In 1982, nearly ten years after Ruscha made I’m Amazed, he remarked, “I’m still amazed, really amazed that I can be an artist and that people will buy my work.” Key to this phenomenon is Ruscha’s consistent flouting of convention, which colors everything he chooses to be seen anew.Elizabeth Finch