Ed Ruscha

 

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Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966)

Every Building on the Sunset Strip is an accordion book of black and white photographs that appear in two parallel continuous floating lines, near the upper and lower sections of what appears to be an ongoing, expanding page.  While the higher line of photographs faces upward, the ribbon closer to the bottom of the page appears upside down, placing the viewer in the center white space as though they are in the street, inside the car where the artist took many of his photographs.  The accordion style of this work in conjunction with the two suspended and continuous lines of buildings provides the viewer with a sense of space through frozen time.  As the page expands outward, the past, present and future are simultaneously present and the temporality of distance is reduced by the format of this book.  The horizontal expanse of the Sunset Strip, one building after the other, mirrors the minimalist grammar of repetition and linearity popularized at the time

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Essay by Alison Karasyk '12

 

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Crackers (1969)

Ruscha’s book Crackers is a photo-novel based on Mason Williams’ short story “How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers.” The book features over a hundred black and white photographs, each of which occupy their own individual page and sequentially illustrate Williams’ uncanny narrative.  The short story itself is included on the inside back cover of Crackers, a decision that some critics have disagreed with in relation to the detailed photographic account.  The series of images displays a stylishly dressed man at a grocery store, filling his shopping cart with peppers, lettuce, other salad materials and five gallons of dressing.  He then drives to a seedy motel room, removes the bed covers and creates a humungous sculptural mass of salad with the dramatic movement of an artist in their studio.  After concealing the conglomeration of vegetables, he drives down Sunset Boulevard with a beautiful female date that he eventually brings to the motel room.  Upon revealing the surprise beneath the covers, he insists that she lie in the bed amidst the salad, and promptly pours dressing over her body.  Suddenly, he realizes that he has forgotten an ingredient, and abandons his date in search of this addition at a night market.  The finishing images feature him lying in a bed in a lavish hotel room, eating a box of crackers alone contently.  Ruscha is known to include hidden motifs of food throughout many of his paintings.  He turned “Crackers” into a film titled “Premium” (the brand of the saltines displayed in the photographs) a few years after the book was published. 

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Essay by Alison Karasyk '12

 

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Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1969)

Ed Ruscha regarded the camera as a means of documentation rather than an artistic medium. “I like facts, facts are in these books,” he once explained in an interview. Twentysix Gasoline Stations functions as a work of Conceptual art as the images are not traditionally pleasing or artistically judicious. Ruscha does not allow his viewer to forget the medium by which these scenes are relayed; instead he uses the book form and his collection of subject-specific images to comment on photography as a self-conscious, imperfect medium. The environments the reader witnesses are neither a random sampling nor are they a carefully curated exhibition.  The photographs communicate an intimate and yet removed aspect of the artist’s autobiography and individual perspective. Ruscha took the unsystematic black and white photographs of twenty-six gasoline stations on a trip that he made frequently, driving cross-country, to visit his mother in his hometown of Oklahoma City from his adopted home of Los Angeles.

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Essay by Alison Karasyk '12

 

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Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1974)

For Thirty-Four Parking Lots, Ruscha commissioned professional photographer Art Alanis to take aerial photographs from a helicopter in Los Angeles while directing him where to shoot. The lack of color and shadows in Thirty-Four Parking Lots emphasizes a mood of indifference. The deadpan nature of the images leads focus away from the presentation of each individual lot, instead exposing a collection of similar environments.  Ruscha was strongly influenced by Dadaist Marcel Duchamp and adopted his readymade ideology, dignifying mundane objects and environments by framing them as art.

Essay by Conor Arpey '15 and Max Collins '13

 

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Real Estate Opportunities (1970)

Real Estate Opportunities is a book of black and white photographs, published in 1970, consisting of twenty-five images of sections of land on the market at the time in Los Angeles.  Empty sidewalks, untended shrubbery and the streets from which the artist took the photographs provide a sense of impersonalized removal; these compositional elements of the urban and rural landscape frame the deserted environments, causing the viewer to feel distanced from the generic atmospheres.  Below each photograph a caption states the address of the land parcel.  Although there are twenty-five different areas of terrain featured throughout this book, a distinct sense of monotony springs from the images.  The clear-cut and practically scientific way that Ruscha renders the parcels alludes to the artist’s use of the camera as a mechanic tool of documentation.

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Essay by Alison Karasyk '12