Ed Ruscha

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show Toyotathon is on So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year-end deals on the cars, trucks, and SUVs known for their legendary reliability Like the stylish and efficient Camry The ready-for-anything RAV4 Or check out a rough-and-rugged Tacoma or Tundra all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit BuyAToyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios. I'm sitting here in L.A.

0:48with Dexter and Ed Ruscha. Ed Ruscha is the artist and Dexter is the dog. and I hope we're going to hear from them both in the next half hour. Did you bring the cactus omelette? Yeah. Yay! Great!

1:09There's a small work of art by my bed that I say hello to every morning and say goodnight to every night. I think of the day it arrived in the River Cafe from Los Angeles wrapped in layers of bubble wrap. I knew then, unwrapping it, that this was one I would never let out of my sight. The artist was Ed Ruscha, and the word in bright red says, yum. I've known Ed Ruscha's work since the early 70s. I followed, admired his work through his career. And in 2019 and 2020, he had shows at the National Gallery and Tate Modern. And it was then that we got to know each other well. dinners at the River Cafe, breakfast at Claridge's, and we became friends.

1:53First, I fell in love with the art, and then I fell in love with the artist.

2:00Would you like to read a recipe? Shall I read your recipe? I'd like to hear yours. You'll be the first person to read a recipe that is not a River Cafe recipe, and I think that's good. What is it? Cactus omelet, which I make occasionally. You have to get nopalitos, little cactus pads that they slice into little bits. And so it says utensils, omelet pan or similar type pan with rounded bottom, mixing bowl, wire whisk or fork. Instructions, break two eggs in bowls slightly under mix with whisk or fork. Heat butter in pan until it bubbles and begins to turn brown. Add the eggs and let them sit in the pan until the bottom begins to harden.

2:47As soon as this sets, but while the top is still moist, add salt and pepper, cottage cheese, sprinkle celery on top, followed by the nopalitos. Let the omelet set for about one minute over a low fire. Roll omelet out of pan and onto plate.

3:12Where does this recipe come from? I sort of made it up. Did you? Yeah, and I always like the taste of, they're kind of slimy of cactus, you know, no politos. But they have a flavor all their own, and I've always liked them. Yeah, because you know where we live, we don't get cactus, cacti. So was it when you came out here to L.A. that you had it? Yeah. Did you go in the desert? Well, Los Angeles I've talked to artists I've interviewed Damien and Tracy but I haven't had an artist or a painter we talk about food and how food in their life and food in their art but you actually painted with food you used egg yolk and you used was that a certain period that you started painting with actually food I like that idea maybe I was frustrated with art materials or felt like I had reached an apex or a stopping-off point, and then I thought about, well, you can make marks on paper or on canvas with any number of things.

4:26Why does it have to be pigments? Yeah. And so then I started using these things like axle grease and caviar. How's caviar? Well, it's a coarse egg and it's pretty stable and it hardens and it's proven to be pretty stable over the years. Yeah, so the paintings that you did with caviar are still there. They're still there. They've yellowed a little bit, but that's, what do we call that, entropy or something. Yeah, but you don't do any more? No, I haven't done that for a while. Maybe we should. But don't give me any ideas. I think I'm going to give you an idea. When I came to your studio, you have an orchard in the back.

5:16And I was wondering, what does that mean to you, to have fruit growing behind your studio? Well, fortunately, I got this building that had a large backyard I had no real use for. So I sort of divided the backyard in half and thought, well, I'll just put an orchard in here. And I've always wanted to grow citrus and other things too, figs, pomegranates, cherries. And then I've got some raised beds there that I was growing the world's hottest pepper, the butjilokia. It's like an Indian, called ghost pepper. Yeah. it measures out to be the hottest pepper in the world and how do you eat it well I mean how do you eat it nobody ever has the answer to that it's too powerful I guess so and make it so fine grind it so fine and I think there are people that are still working on it to get the get the blue ribbon for the hottest pepper I'd like to be the person that judges that competition having to try them.

6:29But you cook a lot, don't you? That recipe for an omelet is a really interesting recipe because it's using an ingredient that is so local. You go into great depth to tell how you fry the eggs, you season it, the heat of the pan. That's a chef's recipe. Well, it's sort of hit and miss, you know, and so that's fine since I'm usually cooking for myself. It doesn't matter. But the only other thing I really cook is chili, and I like to make chili, I make it without onions, without beans, and without tomatoes. That's fun to make, and that takes a few hours to do that, but it's worth it. When you're painting, how do you eat and paint?

7:12Generally, I don't even eat lunch. I mean, I will maybe have a banana or some piece of fruit, and that's my lunch. I don't eat three meals a day like I used to. But I know in our artistic tradition it's always been a ceremony with artists to stop working at 11.45 a.m. and sit down and I don't drink wine. And then it's also a tradition to have wine with lunch. But in New York, in the kind of 60s, 70s, wasn't there the whole thing where artists would be in their studios all day, very solitary, and then go to Max's or to, you know, the culture of kind of being alone and then going out every night?

8:02Were you ever part of that culture or was LA? Well, yeah, it's the pandemonium of crowds of people in a place like Max's Kansas City or any of those kind of places. And it was almost ceremonial. You know, you'd go and have great fun and drink, and that was part of life, I guess. Did you live in New York? Never did live in New York, no. It was always too complicated or too expensive for me to live there. And just the idea of trying to take a two-by-four across town was such an issue that made California impossibly convenient. Yeah. We saw Frank Gehry yesterday, and we talked about the camaraderie between, for him, many more artists and architects.

8:52He just loved the feeling of the L.A. kind of artists being together here. Was that part of your world as well? Oh, yeah, yeah. Did he tell you that his favorite restaurant was the Pacific Dining Park? Yes, he did. And they closed it, I think. He loved that place. Did you ever go there? Oh, yeah, I went there with him, too. Mr. Chow? He was a friend, wasn't he? Tina Chow. Yeah, oh yeah. He's a great man, wasn't he? I went to her one time with a friend and he said, can I bring a friend along? And I said, yeah, who is it? And he said, Groucho Marx. No. And so we met at Chow's here and Groucho comes in and we all sit down and have a good time.

9:38but then the food comes and Groucho has his food sent in from Nate and Al's delicatessen. He didn't even have the... He said, I've heard about this place, I've heard about this place. And so he dined at Chow's restaurant without having its food. That's amazing. I've heard of people, you know, of course people bring their own wine at the River Cafe. People like to bring their own wine. and once somebody brought their own truffle they'd been to Italy and they brought a white truffle and asked us if we would grade it for them over their pasta but I never actually have heard of anybody actually ordering their own food but I suppose if you're Groucho Marx did you go to Chau's a lot?

10:23who would go there with you? oh lots of different people I mean used to go there with Tim Leary and his wife and they were regulars there for a good while and it's so good and so traditional. I mean, they opened, I think, 1975 or something like that. And they established a menu that they really didn't vary from. Yeah, in London they used to have a kind of cart that you could actually make the noodles. Yeah, they do that here too. Yeah, we should all go out. Are you going out much or are you trying to stay quiet? I'm happy to. You know, I love loud Hollywood parties, but I don't miss them one iota.

11:07You don't miss them. Why? You've just been there and done that. What do you do? You go to the desert. Yeah, I go to the desert. What do you eat there? You hunt? I used to do that, but I don't do that anymore. And I have a lot of quail out there. Oh, there. Where is there? Oh, it's out north of, it's east of Big Bear Lake. it's not the kind of desert that is like palm springs with palm trees no palm trees up there they have Joshua trees if you know what those crazy things look like beautiful they're very spiky spiky and they got called Joshua trees because the pioneers thought they looked like silhouettes of biblical figures so they called them Joshua trees and that grows out there.

12:02They're almost endangered because of the global warming. But then I get pinyon pines there and I harvest some of the nuts if you've got time to do that. How do you do that? Well, I'll just get the pine cones off the trees and very carefully take all the little seeds out of it. But usually the squirrels get them before you do. in order to get a little handful of pine nuts. It takes you about an hour, and then you have to get the sap off your hands, so wash your hands in gasoline, I don't know. But they're extremely delicious. Are they delicious? Yeah, they're far more delicious than the ones you actually buy in the market.

12:59Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Toyota-thon is on, and right now your local Toyota dealer is celebrating with can't-miss year-end deals on the vehicles that built Toyota's reputation for legendary reliability. Discover the stylish and efficient Camry and Corolla, both available with all-wheel drive, or go with a RAV4 or Grand Highlander. Versatile, adventurous, and ready to take you and your family wherever the road leads. Need muscle? Take it up a notch with a Tacoma or Tundra. Built tough and always ready for the long haul. And no matter which Toyota you choose, you'll find smart financing and lease options available to qualified customers, making it easier than ever to get behind the wheel of the Toyota you've been waiting for.

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14:40And I have a beautiful poster that you sent me, which is a treasure that was enough. Oh, Enough. Can you tell me the story of Enough? I don't know where that came from. Well, Norman Lear asked me if I would do something, and so that was just some incentive to make some statement about the condition of America, where people sit on the subject. So expressing myself in that way in a poster was fun to do. You know, it was like enough of this kind of politics. We've got to move on from this to something better. And luckily it moved that way. Yeah. Maybe it would be nice to talk about from the beginning.

15:25Tell me about where you grew up. I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, very center of the United States. And then we moved to Oklahoma when I was like five years old. So then I grew up from there. and it was kind of a cultural wasteland in a lot of ways, food especially. I mean, there was no such thing as an artichoke or an avocado, barely. No such thing as sushi. Okay. There is there now, of course, because it's multidimensional. But I remember growing up there and having these kind of foods, like about the early 1950s is when pizza came to fashion. And we didn't call it just pizza. We called it pizza pie.

16:12Pizza pie. Pizza pie. It hits your eye. I like a big pizza pie. Because you originally came from Chicago or what? Upstate New York. Upstate New York. Yeah, we had real southern Italian food. Yeah, I thought Italian food was meatballs and spaghetti and eggplant parmigiana and pizza pie. Until I went to Italy 30 years later. Yeah. But go back to the pizza pie. When did that come? Well, that started coming around the time I was in high school, and it became a popular go-to type of food, kind of novel and unique. And there were, oh, half a dozen places in Oklahoma City that actually served pizza pie.

16:53And one place was called Sussies. That was the place you'd always go to. And who would cook in your house? Was it your mother? Yeah. Did your father cook? Mom cooked, no. Father didn't really cook so much. But Mom tossed everything together, and, you know, it was a, really, it was all meat and potatoes. I liked her pies, particularly, and she made a cherry pie that I always liked. Also, she made rhubarb pie, which was another thing. And so that was big. Do you think the cherries were fresh, or did she get them from the cans? She'd get them from a can, or sometimes when they were there, she would get them fresh.

17:34And the effort was not so much into absolutely fresh food back then. No, canned food was really exciting. Canned food was very big and exciting, yeah. And then came frozen food after that, and there's a big debate over those nutritional value of those foods. Did your mom work? So she would work all day and then come home? She was a housekeeper and prepared food for us. And no, she didn't have a job. And so I grew up in the Bible Belt there. And we were Catholics, so we were called mackerel snappers. Why? Is what people would call us. Really? Why? Meaning you don't eat meat on Friday, you eat fish on Friday.

18:19So mackerel snappers. But the kind of food that they served there, the only international food was called Chinese food. And every Chinese restaurant would always say on the outside of the building, Chinese and American food. To alleviate the fear of walking into a Chinese restaurant. And so you could get Chinese, yes, you could get chop suey, things like that. And then you could also get a hamburger. So they were going to offer you Chinese food. but also, just in case, please come anyway, because we can make a hamburger for you. We can make something familiar. Yeah. But did you go to restaurants?

18:59I mean, would your parents take you out for a meal in a Chinese restaurant? Occasionally, we'd go to barbecue, and that was popular then. The one food that was really hit it big was okra, fried okra. They grow it there. They were farmed. Yeah, they grow it in a big way there, and so there's lots of corn that you're given. Because you had good corn, did you? Almost every day, yeah. Also during the war, we had a victory garden. It was sort of pick yourself up by your bootstraps by growing your own food and participating in the war effort, World War II. So it was an extension of that that sort of went to your dinner table.

19:41Yeah. And other people would save metal and that sort of thing to recycle into the war effort. And so Victory Garden was a very popular thing then. What was in there? We'd grow tomatoes and corn and celery and various vegetables. and that was kind of a unified attitude at the time, to have victory gardens in your backyard. I had a paper route in Oklahoma, and I'd deliver my papers at like 4 in the morning and then come back and drink almost a half a gallon of milk. Yeah. And then... What age? Oh, about 12, 14, something like that. Yeah. And you said that you thought that Oklahoma was like a black-and-white movie.

20:31Do you think that? Do you think back on those days? I still do when I think back on it, but as I go back there occasionally, I see that it's more progressive than I allow my mind to make it be. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's caught up with the rest of the world. What's happened to your house there? Do you still have it? Still stands, yeah. When was the first time you went to Europe? About 1961, and I went there with my mother and brother, and we bought a little Citroën 2CV automobile in Paris and drove it around Europe. Was it your mother's first time in Europe? Yeah, it was her first time too.

21:16What was that like? What was it like food-wise? Well, food-wise, well, we were kind of on a budget, so there wasn't nothing particularly fancy.

21:30but just the idea of having you know stumbling on to wild strawberries which I'd never had before those tiny little wild strawberries was great that was in France we drove all over Europe and for about four or five months four or five months yeah yeah we went as far south even when we went to Yugoslavia went to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, British Isles, went to Ireland, tried to find my mother's heritage and never, we struck out there, we couldn't find it. Did you do drawings? Did you paint or draw? Yeah, I took a little homemade kit, a package that I would carry around, you know, allow me to do something on about an 8x10 format and brought paints along with me and worked like that.

22:31And my mother came back to the States after about two months, and then I stayed over there by myself for a while.

22:48Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Toyota-thon is on, and right now your local Toyota dealer is celebrating with can't-miss year-end deals on the vehicles that built Toyota's reputation for legendary reliability. Discover the stylish and efficient Camry and Corolla, both available with all-wheel drive. Or go with a RAV4 or Grand Highlander. Versatile, adventurous, and ready to take you and your family wherever the road leads. Need muscle? Take it up a notch with a Tacoma or Tundra, built tough and always ready for the long haul. And no matter which Toyota you choose, you'll find smart financing and lease options available to qualified customers, making it easier than ever to get behind the wheel of the Toyota you've been waiting for.

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25:03If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. One of the things that I think is very moving about your studio, apart from the garden and the trees and the fruit, is there seems to be a very strong community there. and that when you come to London for your shows, when we went out to dinner afterwards, it probably was the Tate, and then there was the dinner at the National Gallery, because you had two shows.

25:52You were the first contemporary artist to show singularly in the National Gallery, weren't you? I was told that. I found it hard to believe, but it's true. And then I think Bridget Riley maybe had something recently there. Do you bring everybody with you? Pretty much. That's so nice. People that work with me, travel with me, yeah, it's good. Your animals, your dogs, do you have any idea of how many dogs? Dana has five other dogs besides Dexter. Yeah. So, you know, she's got her handful. I mean, she needs a kennel license. When you travel, do you take a dog? He goes with me everywhere. Dexter goes everywhere.

26:39there. So, have you ever had a painting called Dexter? Again, don't give me any ideas. I, um, can I just tell the story about Ruby? I, I've had such a kind of passion for the Ruby painting. I didn't know, I, Ruby meant to me, it filled me with kind of imagination. And I kept thinking, who is Ruby? So I just dreamt about who Ruby could be. I thought she might be a woman that you were in love with when you were a teenager in Oklahoma. I thought she might be your mother's name I thought she could be a disappointment somebody who left you and I thought she could be a tragedy of someone who died and I just kept thinking about because the way you wrote the ruby on the painting just means so much to me and I've been trying to find a ruby painting but when we spent that time together in London over days and nights I tried to I wanted to find a moment that was quiet where I could ask you who she was and what she meant to you And Dana was there, and I thought maybe I should wait, and we were at a party, so I should wait.

27:42But as I was saying goodbye to you that night, I said to you, Ed, can I just ask you one question? Who was she? Who was this Ruby? Who was the inspiration for these beautiful, beautiful paintings? And you said, um, Ruby was a dog. Is that right? That's right, that's right. But it was not the inspiration for that painting or that work. It wasn't the Ruby I did came long before the dog. Oh, it did? Yeah. Oh, this is a relief. And so I'm not really sure where that name came from. It didn't come from a person in my life. It didn't? No. But I liked Ruby as a feminine name, and it's just got a really good sound to it.

28:27And also it has a double meaning, too, with the gem Ruby. and so it just meant that to me and kind of was an excuse to make a work. It's a beautiful work. It's a beautiful, beautiful work. Thank you. I have one last question. So you've described food as a journey across Oklahoma to California. You've described it as an explosion of wild strawberries in France. You've used it in your work, used actually paint made out of food. But if you were feeling that you needed food as comfort, would you say there's a food you turn to in comfort? I would say that some kind of soup might be the answer. It's kind of traditionally a healing kind of food.

29:19So soup of almost any kind. Maybe your chili? Would your chili be a comfort? Could be, although chili might make you hop up and down. Yeah. It may not be so restful, but comfort food might be in the form of some kind of vegetable soup, maybe. I get that. Good. So are you staying here for a bit, or are you going...? Actually, I am going to the desert, yeah. Today? Yeah. Well, I hope I'll see you soon. Yeah.