Tradition and the Text/Image: Ed Ruscha's Word Paintings and the Multimodal Legacies of American Modernism

1959年，Ed Ruscha开始画文字。虽然他是20世纪60年代美国波普艺术运动的领军人物，但我将把这些作品重新定义为20世纪20年代文本/图像制作更广泛传统的核心。我们目前对媒体消费的态度，集中在文本和图像合作的期望上，没有严格的划分，这要归功于Ruscha开创性的多模式实践。重新安置Ruscha将建立一个更准确的文本/图像交互谱系，将现代主义前卫实验与我们现在的时刻联系起来。文本/图像是理解Ruscha绘画的一种方式，它优先考虑语言和视觉形式的共生关系。这也是一种将它们与其他类似的多模式艺术实例进行比较的方式，超出了他的作品通常包含的参数。我将使用Ruscha的原型文本/图像作为描述文本/图像制作传统的标准，从现代主义开始。这是为了充分理解文本/图像实践在上个世纪是如何发展的，而这反过来又将说明它今天是如何继续发展的。关于Ruscha的主要出版物（Benezra 2000, Marshall 2003）认为他的多模态是20世纪60年代激进主义的产物，是对所谓的现代主义单模态的决定性突破。然而，正是在现代主义中，文本/图像实践奠定了许多关键的基础。更有建设性的做法是将Ruscha定位为建立在这些基础之上，而不是反对这些基础。利用这一领域最近的几项研究（Albright 2000, Davis 2014, Lewis 2020），我将确定多模式现代主义的重要实例，包括关注视觉的诗人和关注文字的画家。然后，我将描绘出他们的影响，在拉斯查的绘画中找到这些早期作品的遗产。在现代主义中有三种不同的文本/图像实验，形成了我的论点的三个部分，每个部分都将诗人与画家配对。第一个体现在Ezra Pound和Charles Demuth的作品中，他们将文本/图像交互视为锻造新的混合符号系统的一种方式。第二个可以在William Carlos Williams和Stuart Davis的作品中找到，他们将文本/图像视为对象性和物质性的表达。第三种是ee cummings和Lee Krasner的作品，他们在文本/图像中只发现抽象，取消了符号学功能。每一条都对Ruscha的作品产生了沉重的影响，他的文字/图像延续了它们所产生的多模式传统。这条调查路线的影响是将Ruscha重新定位为20世纪多模式艺术的核心人物，现代主义先锋和我们自己的经验之间的管道。这些文字绘画深刻地改变了文本/图像交互的过程，最终导致了我们现在跨越媒介边界的自由访问。在将他的作品与现代主义中早期的文本/图像制作实例联系起来时，我将建立一个清晰的实践谱系，从它的试探性实验开始到Ruscha的完全成熟的模态共生。

In 1959, Ed Ruscha began painting pictures of words. While typically located in the 1960s American Pop Art movement, in which he was a leading figure, I will reframe these works as central to the wider tradition of C20th text/image making. Our current attitude towards media consumption, centred on the expectation that text and image function cooperatively, without rigid compartmentalisation, is indebted to Ruscha's pioneering multimodal practice. Resituating Ruscha will establish a more accurate lineage of text/image interaction, connecting Modernist avant-garde experimentation with our present moment.The text/image is a way of understanding Ruscha's paintings which prioritises above all else their symbiosis of verbal and visual modalities. It is also a way to compare them to other such instances of multimodal art, beyond the parameters within which his work is routinely contained. I will use Ruscha's archetypical text/images as the standard from which to delineate a text/image making tradition, from the beginnings of Modernism onwards. This is to fully appreciate how text/image practice developed over the last century, which in turn will illuminate how it continues to develop today.The major publications on Ruscha (Benezra 2000, Marshall 2003), regard his multimodality as a product of 1960s radicalism, as a decisive break from the supposed monomodality of Modernism. It was in Modernism however that many key foundations for text/image practice were laid. It is more constructive to position Ruscha as building on, rather than reacting against, these foundations. Using several recent studies in this area (Albright 2000, Davis 2014, Lewis 2020), I will identify significant instances of multimodal Modernism, both poets concerned with the visual and painters concerned with words. I will then chart their influence, locating the legacies of these earlier works in the paintings of Ruscha.There are three distinct strands of text/image experimentation in Modernism, forming the three sections of my argument, each pairing a poet with a painter. The first is embodied in the work of Ezra Pound and Charles Demuth, who saw text/image interaction as a way of forging new and hybrid sign systems. The second can be found in the work of William Carlos Williams and Stuart Davis, who saw the text/image as an expression of objecthood and materiality. The third consists of the work of ee cummings and Lee Krasner, who found only abstraction in the text/image, a cancelling out of semiotic functions. Each of these strands constitutes a load-bearing influence in the work of Ruscha, whose text/images continuedon the multimodal tradition that they engendered.The impact of this line of inquiry is to reposition Ruscha as a central figure in C20th multimodal art, a conduit between the Modernist avant-garde and our own experience. These paintings of words profoundly altered the course of text/image interaction, which ultimately lead to our current moment of unfettered access across medial boundaries. In making connections between his work and earlier instances of text/image making in Modernism, I will forge a clear lineage of the practice from its tentative experimental beginnings to the fully-fledged modal symbioses of Ruscha.