Leave Any Information at the Signal

Ed Ruscha is among the most innovative artists of the last forty years. He is also one of the first Americans to introduce a critique of popular culture and an examination of language into the visual arts. Although he first made his reputation as a painter, Ruscha is also celebrated for his drawings (made both with conventional materials and with food, blood, gunpowder, and shellac), prints, films, photographs, and books. Though often associated with Los Angeles as a Pop and Conceptual artist, Ruscha tends to regard such labels with a satirical, if not jaundiced, eye. Indeed, his work is characterised by the tensions between high and low, solemn and irreverent, and serious and nonsensical, and it draws on popular culture as well as Western art traditions. Leave Any Information at the Signal not only documents the work of this influential artist as he rose to prominence but also contains his writings and commentaries on other artistic developments of the period. The book also includes more than eighty illustrations, selected and arranged by the artist.

Author Biography

Alexandra Schwartz is the editor of a collection of Ed Ruscha’s writings, Leave Any Information at the Signal- Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (MIT Press, 2002) and the coeditor of Modern Women- Women Artists in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Ed Ruscha is an internationally acclaimed artist based in Los Angeles.