Ed Ruscha: Turbo Tears

This two-color lithograph by Ed Ruscha depicts the phrase TURBO TEARS in red capital letters against a gray ground covered with a field of orange specks. The ink appears to have been smeared, lending an impression of rapid motion as if the words were speeding toward the right of the sheet—an effect appropriate to the subject’s evocation of Los Angeles’s automotive culture. The work was included in the group portfolio Tate 21st, released as a boxed set by Tate Modern, London, as part of a fundraising campaign for the museum’s twentieth anniversary.

The print belongs to a recent body of work that also includes paintings on linen and paper. “The point here,” writes art historian Lisa Turvey on these “swiped” compositions, “is that these phrases seem newly mobile and, in turn, newly charged.” Ruscha’s use of Garamond, a more classical typeface than his conspicuously plain Boy Scout Utility Modern, also establishes a mismatch between its formal refinement and the words’ playful disruption.