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On the bag before the tag
“His [Hans Ulrich Obrist's] telephone is continually tinging and leaving twicks and tweets and all that,” Ed Ruscha told me, adding, “I’m like one little fragment of his interest.” Ruscha took Obrist out back to an open-air studio to show him new works in his “Psycho Spaghetti Western” series, which was inspired by roadside debris. Ruscha did not seem like Obrist’s kind of artist: his paintings have a deeply American irony that seemed destined to elude the earnest Swiss. But Obrist sought, as always, to make a connection. The strewn objects on Ruscha’s canvases, he declared, reminded him of “In the Country of Last Things,” a dystopian novel by Paul Auster.
The tour finished. Ruscha took a seat behind a cherrywood desk, and fixed Obrist with his blue eyes, a dog at his feet. Obrist asked where the new paintings would be exhibited, but it was not as easy to gain traction with Ruscha as it had been with Baldessari.
“In Rome. At the Gagosian gallery.”
Obrist, name-dropping, said that he’d once visited Cy Twombly at his studio in Rome. Ruscha didn’t seem to care. Obrist then expressed admiration for “Guacamole Airlines,” a book of drawings that Ruscha had made.
“That was forty years ago,” Ruscha said.
This must have been what it was like when Obrist was a youth, surrounded by taciturn Swiss. Obrist’s arms tend to go into motion when there is silence. He asked Ruscha about a show the artist had organized at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, in 2012. “What did you do, exactly?” Obrist asked.
Ruscha said that he had taken some “meteorites and stuffed animals and some Old Masters” and put them on display. He had included one of his own paintings.
“One no longer isolates so much of contemporary art,” Obrist said, sharing his latest epiphany. “The contemporary is now connected to the historical.”
Ruscha continued to smile. Eventually, he said, “They told me not to go throwing that word ‘curator’ around. I was told I was just assembling an exhibit.”
“Maybe we need a new word,” Obrist said.
“Yah.”
“I don’t want to take more of your time,” Obrist said, after a moment.
On his way out, Obrist asked Ruscha to contribute to his Instagram project. Ruscha told me later, “I gave him something that said, ‘On the bag before the tag.’ Some baseball announcer said that.” He added that he had no idea what Instagram was. Obrist, in turn, didn’t catch the baseball reference.
