四月之前不支付

Pay Nothing Until April expresses a cool, detached world-view in keeping with Ruscha’s conceptual works such as his photo-book (Every Building On) The Sunset Strip 1966 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Roughly the size of a poster that might be displayed in a shop window, the picture’s alpine setting and eye-grabbing lettering call to mind an advertisement for a bargain ski holiday. Despite its ready-made appearance, however, the pairing of text and image was conceived by Ruscha who executed the montage with a high degree of finish. Nevertheless Ruscha claims to be indifferent to the eclectic source material that he amasses: ‘I’m empty headed in many ways, and don’t know why I follow what I follow. Like most people, I operate on an automatic mode, and everything is an involuntary reflex. Logic flies out of the window when you’re making a picture, at least it does with me. And thank God it does.’ As with the aforementioned photo-book, which brings together images on the basis of somewhat arbitrary categorisations, Pay Nothing Until April appears to have been created in accordance with a pointedly superficial sensibility.