Ed Ruscha

1000 WORDS

TALKS ABOUT HIS MOST RECENT PAINTINGS

PERHAPS THEY WOULD PREFER to forget the past and enjoy the present (whose transience they are so much more aware of than younger colleagues), but circumstances conspire to make successful artists of a certain age dwell on their history: retrospective exhibitions, monographs, compilations of writings and interviews, the queries of art historians for whom each speck of memory might be the one that yields a dissertation chapter-such things make it inevitable that, willy-nilly, the artist finds his own past increasingly occupying his attention. I DONT WANT NO RETRO SPECTIVE, an Ed Ruscha drawing once complained. But of course the …