Boss
Boss! Bawse! Boss! Bozz! Boss! Boss! Boss. Baaawss!
It’s funny isn’t it? That sometimes when you say a word many times it sounds so strange and alien you forget what it means. And then you remember!
Have you said your name over and over and over again?
Levar! Levar. Levar! Levar. Levar. Levar!
Weird, huh?
Ed Ruscha likes to play games like this when he paints words; And I don’t mean Scrabble!
The word in this work is painted in thick black letters. Those letters look like they could be from a sign, a shop, or on and advertisement. They’re painted on a thick dark brown background.
“Boss” was not chosen by accident. Ed wanted to use a common, one-syllable word that had a number of meanings.
We know that “Boss” means the leader of something, but when this painting was made, “Boss” also meant “cool” or “awesome.”
So, this painting, Boss, was [SOUNDFX: Jazzy Beatnik voice] boss, daddy-o.
[SOUNDFX: Jazz drum and bass notes, and finger snapping]
By making the word an object it makes you think about that word. A lot. Ed once said that he liked the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body and then coming back and being a word again.
That makes a lot of sense. I hope I spelled it out for you!
Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Oklahoma City. In 1956, he took Route 66 to California, which would become a central part of his story as an artist. Settling in Los Angeles, he studied art at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) and had an early job as a commercial illustrator. In the 1960s, inspired by artists like Raymond Hains, René Magritte, Jasper Johns, and Kurt Schwitters, Ruscha became a vibrant part of the art scene surrounding Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
Paramount to Ruscha’s work is that the changing nature of language —as its meaning shifts as a function of font, color, composition, and other visual effects—can be a subject for painting and drawing. He often repeats the same phrase or word in artworks over the course of many years. Often, his words and phrases have a vernacular, familiar tone, but an unfamiliar reference. Along the way, Ruscha teases out and accumulates new meanings from the expression. Though words typically take a secondary role in the history of art, Ruscha places language at the center of his practice, reflecting on contemporary life, especially in Los Angeles, with candor and humor.
Ruscha’s interest in language is frequently coupled with an interest in landscape, especially that of the American west. His words appear on road signs, buildings, and mountains, and across open skies and horizons. At times, words are strangely present through their disappearance. In early photographic work, Ruscha created documentary images and books full of swimming pools, parking lots, buildings on Sunset Boulevard, gas stations, and many other features of L.A. life. In his paintings and drawings, these same subjects combine with language to poetically evoke the changing fabric of the city through themes of evolution and destruction.
Ruscha has been living and working in the L.A. area for over sixty years. Through his innovative approach to painting, drawing, and photography, Ruscha has influenced artists worldwide and is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary art today.