Acrylic paint on canvas
Text and Language
Pop Art and its Legacy
Tate Modern
Tate Collection
Works with images
Works on display
General Collection
ARTIST ROOMS
National Heritage Memorial Fund
Art Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edward-ruscha-1882" aria-label="More by Edward Ruscha" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Edward Ruscha</a>
DAILY PLANET
ARTIST ROOMS
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
abstraction
inscriptions
landscape
mountain
non-representational
snow
symbols and personifications
text
title of work
weather
<p>The source for the text in <span>DAILY PLANET</span> is deliberately hard to pin down. It might connect with the natural imagery behind it. It is also the name of the newspaper Clark Kent writes for in the Superman comics. Ruscha has described the work’s title as ‘mysterious and teasing’. In an interview he claimed, ‘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.’</p><p><em>Gallery label, July 2019</em></p>
painting acrylic paint canvas
21 March 2009 – 13 June 2010
2010-06-13
21 March 2009 – 13 June 2010
2010-06-13
2009-03-21
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2009-03-21
Edward Ruscha
Collection based display
28 May 2011 – 29 October 2011
2011-10-29
28 May 2011 – 29 October 2011
2011-10-29
2011-05-28
Wolverhampton Art Gallery (Wolverhampton, UK)
http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk
2011-05-28
ARTIST ROOMS 2011: Ed Ruscha
Loan-out
30 June 2012 – 23 September 2012
2012-09-23
30 June 2012 – 23 September 2012
2012-09-23
2012-06-30
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (Bristol, UK)
http://www.bristol-city.gov.uk
2012-06-30
ARTIST ROOMS 2012: Raw Materials: Four American Artists, 1972-2007
Loan-out
22 February 2013 – 22 May 2013
2013-05-22
22 February 2013 – 22 May 2013
2013-05-22
2013-02-22
Hatton Gallery (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)
2013-02-22
ARTIST ROOMS 2013: Ed Ruscha
Loan-out
29 April 2017 – 29 April 2018
2018-04-29
29 April 2017 – 29 April 2018
2018-04-29
2017-04-29
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh, UK)
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/
2017-04-29
ARTIST ROOMS Ed Ruscha
Collection based display
22 July 2019 – 18 July 2021
2021-07-18
22 July 2019 – 18 July 2021
2021-07-18
2019-07-22
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2019-07-22
AR Ed Ruscha
Collection based display
27 February 2023
27 February 2023
2023-02-27
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2023-02-27
ARTIST ROOMS Texts
Collection based display
DAILY PLANET
support: 1529 × 1529 × 40 mm
<a href="/search?gid=999999788" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">ARTIST ROOMS</a>
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the <a href="/search?gid=999999967" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">National Heritage Memorial Fund</a> and the <a href="/search?gid=999999968" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Art Fund</a> 2008
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>Daily Planet </i>depicts a precisely detailed snow-capped mountain against a deep blue sky. The single jagged alpine peak forms a diagonal line across the canvas, with the apex in the top left, sloping down to the bottom right. Painted on top of this landscape is the seemingly unrelated phrase ‘DAILY PLANET’ in a clean modern font that is evenly spaced so that each word occupies a separate line in the centre of the picture. This work belongs to a large body of paintings, begun in the 1980s, in which the artist Edward Ruscha overlaid natural landscapes with texts (see also <i>Pay Nothing Until April</i> 2003, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ruscha-pay-nothing-until-april-ar00047" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00047</span></a>). Although, in this work, the legibility of the white text is reduced by the white expanse of the snowy mountain.</p>
<p>To create this work Ruscha sprayed a thin layer of paint onto the canvas, then worked the image up in acrylic paint using a medium-sized brush. The text was applied using stencils, and is presented in Boy Scout Utility Modern, a typeface created by the artist and described by him as a sort of ‘no-style’ (Richards 2008, p.82).</p>
<p>Unlike <i>Pay Nothing Until April</i>, which appropriates a common piece of advertising jargon, the source for the text in <i>Daily Planet </i>is difficult to pinpoint. With its natural imagery and evocation of ecological cycles, the work might call to mind the language employed by New Age and conservation movements, which had an important relationship to the genre of landscape painting in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Yet popular culture is also alluded to as Ruscha’s title is also the name of the newspaper for which Clark Kent is a reporter in the <i>Superman </i>comics. Ruscha has described the work’s title as ‘mysterious and teasing’ (artist’s talk, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 21 October 2011) and is traditionally reluctant to ascribe any definite meaning to the phrases he uses. In an interview he claimed, ‘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.’ (Quoted in Ruscha 2010, p.63.) This coolly detached approach to artistic inspiration is reflected in the neutral appearance of the Boy Scout Utility Modern typeface.</p>
<p>Ruscha has spent his career living and working in the southern Californian city of Los Angeles, and its film industry has had an important bearing on his work. Ruscha has commented that the backdrops for paintings such as <i>Daily Planet</i> are ‘not really mountains in the sense that a naturalist would paint a picture of a mountain. They’re ideas of mountains, picturing some kind of unobtainable bliss or glory […] tall, dangerous and beautiful’ (quoted in Richards 2008, p.100). Many of the images are appropriated from photographs and postcards or amalgamated from images of different mountain ranges. As such the scenes call to mind the mountainscapes of adventure movies like the 1969 James Bond picture <i>On Her Majesty’s Secret Service</i>, or the logo of Paramount Pictures – one of Hollywood’s biggest production companies – as much as they echo the sublime landscapes of European Romantic and American pastoral painting. By deflating awe-inspiring natural imagery with the imposition of banal text rendered in ‘no-style’, Ruscha’s painting reflects the city in which he lives, a place he once referred to as ‘the ultimate cardboard cut-out town’ (quoted in Ruscha 2004, p.244).</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Ed Ruscha and Alexandra Schwartz (ed.), <i>Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages</i>, Cambridge, MA 2004.<br/>Mary Richards, <i>Ed Ruscha</i>,<i> </i>Singapore 2008.<br/>Edward Ruscha, James Ellroy, Ralph Rugoff, <i>Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting</i>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 2010.</p>
<p>Luke Healey<br/>The University of Edinburgh<br/>March 2012 </p>
<p>
<i>The University of Edinburgh is a research partner of ARTIST ROOMS.</i>
</p>
</div>

Summary
2016-03-18T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div class="text">
<p>The source for the text in <i>DAILY PLANET</i> is deliberately hard to pin down. It might connect with the natural imagery behind it. It is also the name of the newspaper Clark Kent writes for in the Superman comics. Ruscha has described the work’s title as ‘mysterious and teasing’. In an interview he claimed, ‘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.’</p>
</div>

Display caption
2019-07-26T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
abstraction inscriptions landscape mountain non-representational snow symbols and personifications text title of work weather