Whenever a potato appears in famous fine art, it’s always a surprise and a delight—especially when you’ve been tracking potato art for years. After all, my blog is named Spudart. I’ve used the Spudart name for 28 years since 1997.
Artists like Vincent van Gogh, Jörg Immendorff, Sigmar Polke, Victor Grippo, and Claes Oldenburg have all elevated the humble spud, but discovering Ed Ruscha’s contribution feels like finding a hidden treasure. As far as I know, this is the only potato work by Ruscha. Thus, he’s not a huge potato artist. But hey, we’ll take this as an example of a potato artwork.
The Art Institute of Chicago holds “Potato” (1964), a work that captures everything essential about Ruscha’s vision. Not just any potato—the potato. Centered against a neutral backdrop, lit with the solemnity of a royal portrait, this humble tuber became art through Ruscha’s quietly revolutionary approach.
The Deadpan Genius
Ruscha built his career on a simple but radical premise: the mundane deserves the same visual treatment as the magnificent. His gas stations, apartment buildings, and parking lots weren’t just documentary subjects—they were America itself, stripped of pretense and rendered with stark honesty.
“Potato” follows this same logic. The composition is austere, almost ceremonial. The lighting is soft but deliberate. There’s no context, no story, no attempt to make the potato more than what it is. And that’s precisely the point.
Pop Art’s Quiet Cousin
While Warhol was silk-screening soup cans in electric colors, Ruscha chose restraint. His pop sensibility was drier, more ironic, less obvious. A potato carries the same cultural weight as a Coca-Cola bottle—it’s mass-produced, universally consumed, deeply American—but without the commercial glamour.
The genius lies in the treatment. By photographing this agricultural product with the formal rigor of fine art photography, Ruscha creates a gentle absurdity. The potato becomes both subject and object, elevated and ordinary, serious and ridiculous.
The Weight of Words (Unspoken)
Ruscha’s text paintings are famous for their bold, graphic words floating against solid backgrounds. “Potato” contains no text, but you can almost see the word hovering just outside the frame—blocky, matter-of-fact, as unpretentious as the vegetable itself.
This wordless approach forces the object to carry all the cultural meaning. The potato becomes a symbol of sustenance, simplicity, and working-class America. It’s food without romance, nourishment without glamour.
American Vernacular
The potato in Ruscha’s hands becomes a mirror for American identity. Like his gas stations and motels, it represents the everyday infrastructure of American life—not the mythology, but the reality. It’s humble, essential, ubiquitous, and utterly without pretension.
This isn’t nostalgia or celebration. It’s documentation with a twist of irony, a recognition that the ordinary objects surrounding us are worthy of attention, consideration, and perhaps even reverence.
The Art of Subtle Elevation
“Potato” succeeds because it never tries too hard. Ruscha understood that the best way to reveal the absurdity of something is to treat it with complete seriousness. The formal composition, careful lighting, and museum-quality presentation don’t transform the potato into something else—they reveal what it already was.
In three minutes, you can look at this photograph and see a potato. In thirty years, you might see America itself: practical, unadorned, substantial, and quietly magnificent in its ordinariness.
That’s the power of Ed Ruscha’s vision—finding the extraordinary hiding in plain sight, one perfectly ordinary potato at a time.
Ed Ruscha on the potato
A curator from the Museum of Modern Art in New York interviewed Ed Ruscha on January 24, 2012 (PDF). Here’s an excerpt about potatoes.
Christophe Cherix (CC), The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books of The Museum of Modern Art
CC: The next book you publish, I think, is the following year in 1964. I think it‟s a very important book, as well, in your work, Various Small Fires [MoMA # 707.2011]. One of the reasons for that is that it adds almost like a second part of the title, and Milk, and that’s something you’re going to do often, the following books, is to generate a collection of images on the same subject here, like small domestic fires — a lighter, oven, matches, and so on — and at the end of it, you have an image which is kind of hard to reconcile with, [Laughing] with the first series of photographs here, just a glass of milk. Could you talk a bit about the function of this almost disruptive image at the end which suddenly make it harder to understand as a book?
ER: There’s no — there was no attempt to reach a higher plane of wisdom [Laughter] with this. At the same time, I wanted to make, I wanted to bring — what do you’say — unlike things together, and so it’s no different than maybe a piece of music that might have a coda at the end, or some other element that is unlike the text or the rest of the work. And so I felt like these images were kind of prosaic in a way, or very usual, things that you might see in the form of bad photographs, or pictures taken without much thought. And yet the thought comes together in these with the idea of fires. And I had been playing with other things, even within the realm of painting, where I might put something, add sometime to the main theme to somehow antagonize the main theme.
CC: There’s this painting I think you do maybe the following year or the same year, of a bird looking at some kind of, what seems to be a glass of milk on the side, and the title, like “Is It Milk or Plaster?” or something. [Laughing]
ER: Yeah. Yeah, well, and I guess I saw a glass of milk as some kind of symbol of purity, without thinking too much about it. It became… Maybe I liked the physical characteristics of a glass, a clean glass filled with milk, and it had some connotations to it that I wanted to utilize. And so it came out of the sky, I guess you might say, and I, at the same time, didn’t want to think too much about it, so I was not tortured over my creation here. I got onto a theme, and in a procedure that wouldn’t allow too much concentration or too much justification, [00:25:06] and so I wanted the thing to be spontaneous, and more or less official at the same time. Emphatic, I guess, is maybe what I want to say. And so that, I find, still goes through with all my work, no matter what I do, is have — sometimes there’s little oddities that I welcome. And then it just goes from the next, and then I’ll do something like this and forget about it.CC: But what’s interesting, that if you are not tortured by it, a lot of people are for you; because that relationship between the glass of milk and the small fires, was a lot discussed in the last forty years, at least, and someone who thought a lot about it is someone who worked here for a very long time, was Head of the Library, Clive Philpott.
ER: Oh, yeah.
CC: And Clive had great love and interest for your books, and he’s really one of the main scholars who made us understand how important they were, not only in relation to your work but to a broader scene, as well. And I talked to Clive last week, and I said, “Do you have any, any unanswered question from Ed, you know, that maybe I could ask him for you?” And he said, “Oh, in fact, one of the questions I have that” — he saw your show at the Jeu de Paume, which has most of your photography show, and he said in that show you had photograph of Various Small Fires [MoMA #707.2011], and instead of putting a glass of milk on the sign you put, I think, a photograph of a potato.
ER: Oh.
CC: [Laughing] So how did that…?
ER: Yeah, the…
CC: Can the potato play the same role as the glass of milk, or is something that you thought at the time, or is it something that you…?
ER: Well, that choice, I think, maybe was the curator, Margit Rowell, and she may have decided to do that, and I liked it when it finally happened. But exhibits of books are different than the books themselves, and so the exhibit takes on more or less a life of its own, and things can change, so perhaps that potato that I took a photograph of could be thought of as a, almost like a metaphor for the milk. [Laughing]
CC: For the milk, yeah.
ER: Yeah.
Ruscha’s response reveals several key aspects of his artistic philosophy:
Curatorial Flexibility: He notes that the substitution was likely the curator Margit Rowell’s decision, and he “liked it when it finally happened.” This shows his openness to reinterpretation of his work by others.
Exhibition vs. Original Work: Ruscha makes an important distinction, explaining that “exhibits of books are different than the books themselves, and so the exhibit takes on more or less a life of its own.” This suggests he sees exhibitions as separate artistic entities that can transform and recontextualize the original work.
Metaphorical Equivalence: Most intriguingly, he suggests the potato could function “almost like a metaphor for the milk.” This is fascinating because both the milk and potato serve as disruptive elements that don’t obviously relate to “small fires.”
Consistency of Artistic Strategy: The potato substitution actually reinforces what Ruscha described earlier about his artistic method – his desire to bring “unlike things together” and add elements that “antagonize the main theme.” Whether it’s milk or potato, both serve this same disruptive function.
The potato comment, delivered with his characteristic casualness (note the laughter), demonstrates Ruscha’s comfort with ambiguity and his willingness to let his work evolve beyond his original conception. It suggests that for him, the specific object matters less than its conceptual role as an unexpected, incongruous element that complicates easy interpretation.