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Interscope, 2022. Vinyl record album issued with an original, museum-quality giclee print by Ed Ruscha as the album cover, housed in a custom Gucci box. Size: 11.5 x 11.5 inches. Limited Edition of only 100 prints individually numbered in the lower left-hand corner, and HAND-SIGNED by Ed Ruscha in the lower right-hand corner. CONDITION: Fine/As New. SIGNED. For this work, Ruscha employs a recent stylistic shift towards showing words in motion, combined with the sixteenth-century, classically-inspired typeface named Garamond to re-imagine Tupac Shakur s album cover, All Eyez on Me. In doing so, Ruscha gives the words a feathered, brushed, blurred and/or swiped appearance. As Lisa Turvey, editor of the catalogue raisonné of Ed Ruscha s works on paper, notes, this artistic choice and its effect are themselves intimately bound up with the technology surrounding us and the ways in which it manipulates words within the world we currently inhabit: "The skid mark works, by contrast, feel contemporary, even urgent. In registering a shift from static to mobile text, they evoke how many of us encounter words these days, in seemingly endless swiping and streaming as news scanned on a computer or running television ticker, as books scrolled on e-readers, as ads on phones or changing billboards. Their blurs conjure the farsightedness that can follow staring at a small screen for too long; it is not by chance that these works are intimately sized, while Ruscha s larger recent paintings and drawings show their subjects (mountains, mattresses) as if seen from a distance, in sharp, even focus. "It makes you dizzy," Ruscha said a few years ago, alluding to the glut and speed of text and image transmission that digital media has brought on, noting, "the information is so abundant today, there s so much of it, and it s very confusing." His bleary phrases mime the dizziness that information overload can induce, and so too its consequences, ones acutely felt over the past six months: that despite, or because of, their rapid profusion, read and especially screened words can distract even as they absorb, obscure even as they expose, deteriorate even as they proliferate, and numb even as they engage. Pessimistic as that sounds, and probably is, this is work made for its moment." See: " Things Fall Apart : Ed Ruscha s Swiped Words" in Gagosian Quarterly, Sept. 4, 2020.And perhaps it is with this in mind that we find Ruscha's world and his art overlapping with those of Tupac Shakur. We can ask is it mere coincidence or a conscious artistic act that Ruscha's downward swipe on "Me" in the re-imagined album cover moves towards and intermixes with Ruscha's own signature in the bottom right corner of the artwork? The artist's brushwork suggests that Ruscha, like Tupac, might see his own fame as shinning the bright light of a collective human gaze upon him. Indeed, Tupac chose to change the title of his album with precisely this idea in mind: Euthanasia was the initial title of the album before it was altered to All Eyez on Me; and as Shakur explained to MTV's Bill Bellamy in December 1995: "It's called All Eyez on Me. That's how I feel it is. I got the police watching me, the Feds. I got the females that want to charge me with false charges and sue me and all that. I got the females that like me. I got the jealous homeboys and I got the homies that roll with me. Everybody's looking to see what I'mma do now so All Eyez on Me." And we can be sure that, as one of the most famous, pioneering, prolific and iconic of living contemporary artists, Ed Ruscha, like Tupac Shakur, may likewise feel all eyes are indeed fixated on him, and his sly artistic gesture here may poignantly yet subtly hint at the reality these two artists share. Seller Inventory # 3936
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