Among Ruscha's text works, Main Street (1990) takes on one of the most freighted addresses in American life. MAIN above STREET below, both in large serif capitals with soft dimensional shadows that give the letters a slight elevation from the pale ground — the typography of a civic monument rendered at modest scale, in an edition of two hundred and fifty, on paper. The shadowing suggests embossing or signage, the kind of lettering that appears above a bank or a post office in a town that still believes in those institutions.

Main Street is the name that appears in virtually every American town of any size, the civic spine around which everything else organises itself — the hardware store, the diner, the barbershop, the five-and-dime. It is the street that Sinclair Lewis satirised in 1920 as the embodiment of provincial conformity and intellectual stagnation, and the street that Frank Capra celebrated in 1946 as the repository of everything worth fighting for. By 1990, when Ruscha made this print, Main Street had acquired a third identity: the thing that was disappearing. The out-of-town mall, the interstate bypass, the big-box retail park — the commercial logic that had built Main Street was the same logic that was now emptying it, the small businesses that gave the street its character unable to compete with the scale and price of what had arrived on the edge of town.

Ruscha had documented the commercial landscape of America with the neutrality of a surveyor since the early 1960s, and Main Street sits within that project as its most compressed form — not a photograph of a specific street but the name itself, the idea of the street stripped of any particular location and held up for examination. The serif type and the dimensional shadowing give it a slight nostalgia, a sense of something that was once substantial and is now, in some towns, mainly a memory.

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