Ed Ruscha

Arts & Photography

Karma and Gagosian Gallery

Between 1963 and 1978, Ed Ruscha produced 18 small artists' books. Usually self-published in small print-runs, these publications have become seminal works in the history of Conceptual art and the photography book. Then &amp; Now is the first artist's book that Ruscha has made since 1978. One of the most famous of Ruscha's books from that early period is Every Building on the Sunset Strip--a famous stretch of real estate along Sunset Boulevard--published in 1966. In July, 1973 he followed the same procedure when he photographed on Hollywood Boulevard. Loading a continuous strip of 30 feet of Ilford FP-4 black &amp; white film into his Nikon F2 and then mounting it on a tripod in the bed of a pickup truck, he drove back and forth across the 12 miles of street shooting both the north and south sides of its entire length. The negatives were developed, contact sheets were made, and the materials placed in storage. 30 years later, in 2003, a digital record of Hollywood Boulevard was created and it served as a reference guide for the traditional film/still documentary of 2004. For this shoot, the same type of camera equipment was used to re-photograph the street on 35mm color-negative film. The resulting material of both shoots--4,500 black &amp; white and 13,000 color images--have been scanned and digitally composed into four panoramics of the complete 12 miles. In Then &amp; Now, the original 1973 northside view is shown along the top of the page and juxtaposed with its 2004 version. The panoramics face each other and they are aligned. The result is what Ruscha refers to as “a piece of history... a very democratic, unemotional look at the world.” Whilst it is a significant historical document which succinctly conflates and renders the passage of time, it is also a project which spans the career of one of the truly original artists of our time and brings his work full circle.

Ed Ruscha: Then & Now, Hollywood Boulevard 1973-2004

Individual Artists

Steidl

From the publisher: "DIRTY BABY presents a provocative trialogue between the paintings of Ed Ruscha, the music of Nels Cline, and the poetry of David Breskin. The title refers to the fact that when different art forms mate, there is never a purebred offspring, but rather a muttish and raunchy one: gloriously dirty. The sixty-six pictures in the book are drawn from two bodies of work, the Silhouettes and the Cityscapes. In these works, Ruscha uses censor strips in place of the words or phrases which characteristically occupy a prominent place in his pictures. Their very obfuscation gives the missing words a powerfully subversive presence: language is emphasized even as it is obscured. Breskin has divided the book into two 'sides' in the manner of a vinyl record. Side A presents a kind of 'time-lapse' history of Western Civilization. Side B returns to the cradle of that civilization, charting the American misadventure in Iraq. For his poetic form, Breskin uses the ancient Arabic ghazal, a perfect foil and fencing partner for Ruscha's language-sensitive strategies. To this mix, Cline adds music for a large ensemble: at once lyrical and edgy, heartfelt and raucous, his music ranges from acoustic impressionism to dense, dark electronica."

Dirty Baby: Ed Ruscha, Nels Cline & David Breskin

Nels Cline

David Breskin

Ed Ruscha. Fifty Years of Painting

D.A. P. , Hayward Publishing

One of the most consistently inventive artists of recent times, Los Angeles-based Ed Ruscha has been a pioneer in the use of language and imagery drawn from the popular media. From his early powerful word paintings to his influential artist books of the sixties and seventies to his recent colorful views of generic mountains, Ruscha has investigated the spaces between highways and journeys, images and words, abstraction and representation, public imagery and the contemporary landscape. In this publication, which accompanies a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Neal Benezra, Kerry Brougher, and Phyllis Rosenzweig focus on all aspects of Ruscha's career, revealing him not merely as an artist closely linked with Los Angeles, but as an important international figure in contemporary art.

Neal Benezra

Kerry Brougher

Phyllis Rosenzweig

Scalo Verlag Ac

Ed Ruscha mixmaster. Ediz. italiana e inglese

et.al.

Colombo, Paolo

Rizzoli

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Books by Ed Ruscha