Cash For Tools 1 by Ed Ruscha (2014) is the Rusty Signs series at its most monumental. Three lines fill the square format completely — CASH / FOR / TOOLS — the blocky octagonal capitals pressed into the Mixografia surface and almost consumed by it, the rust-brown field so dense and textured that the letterforms emerge from it like relief carving in corroded metal. Three small holes punctuate the composition, two at the top corners, one in the centre, the hardware of an actual sign preserved in the print. The edges of the sheet are irregular, slightly buckled, the whole object reading less like a print and more like something recovered from a demolition site.

CASH FOR TOOLS is a phrase that has appeared on handwritten cards in pawnshop windows and on roadside placards across America for as long as there have been men with tools they need to sell. It belongs to the informal economy — the exchange that happens outside retail, between individuals, driven by necessity on one side and opportunism on the other. Ruscha had grown up in a America where that kind of transaction was visible everywhere, the roadside commerce of the post-war decades operating through hand-lettered signs and word of mouth, the whole system held together by the assumption that someone always needed cash and someone else always needed tools.

The Rusty Signs series, produced at the Mixografia workshop in Los Angeles in editions of fifty, applied the deep relief process to a group of phrases drawn from exactly that economy — Cash For Tools, Dead End, For Sale, Pay Nothing Until April — each one pressed into a surface that suggests the sign has already lived its useful life and entered a second existence as an object of contemplation. The corrosion is the point: these are phrases that have been out in the weather long enough to become something other than messages.

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