You Will Eat Hot Lead (Country Cityscapes series)
- Artist: Edward Ruscha
- Date: 2001
- Medium: Photogravure with silkscreened text
- Dimensions: unconfirmed: 457 x 356 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “You Will Eat Hot Lead” by Edward Ruscha. Created in 2001, the work is a photogravure with silkscreened text. Ruscha takes a straightforward photograph of a North American landscape—think wide open prairie, a lone road, or a distant horizon—and then superimposes large blocks of blanked‑out text. The titles come from cowboy movies, phrases like “Be Careful…You Hear Me?” or “Its Payback Time,” turned into a kind of threat directed at the viewer. By erasing the text, the image feels both familiar and unsettling, as if an advertising billboard has been vandalized. The result is a playful critique of how we consume images of the American West, blending the calm of a landscape with the tension of an unread warning. It invites you to pause and question the stories we read in front of us, even when those stories are missing.
See it in person
You Will Eat Hot Lead (Country Cityscapes series) is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
