Edward Ruscha
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Edward Ruscha (born December 16, 1937 Omaha, Nebraska) is an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and filmmaker. His last name is pronounced "rew-SHAY".
Books
Between 1962 and 1978, Ruscha produced sixteen small artist's books:
- Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963
- Various Small Fires, 1964
- Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965
- Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
- Thirtyfour Parking Lots, 1967
- Royal Road Test, 1967 (with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell)
- Business Cards, 1968 (with Billy Al Bengston)
- Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968
- Crackers, 1969 (with Mason Williams)
- Real Estate Opportunities, 1970
- Babycakes with Weights, 1970
- A Few Palm Trees, 1971
- Records, 1971
- Dutch Details, 1971
- Colored People, 1972
- Hard Light, 1978 (with Lawrence Weiner)
Later book projects include:
- Country Cityscapes, 2001
- ME and THE, 2002
- Ed Ruscha and Photography, 2004 (with Sylvia Wolf)
- OH / NO, 2008
- Dirty Baby, 2010 (with Nels Cline and David Breskin)
In 1968, Ruscha created the cover design for the catalogue accompanying a Billy Al Bengston exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the “Documenta 5" catalogue in 1972, he designed an orange vinyl cover, featuring a “5” made up of scurrying black ants. In 1978, he designed the catalogue "Stella Since 1970" for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Leave Any Information at the Signal, a volume of Ruscha's writings, was published by MIT Press in 2002. In 2010, Gagosian Gallery and Steidl published Ruscha's version of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road in an edition of 350.
Ruscha's artist books have proved to be deeply influential, beginning with Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires (1968), for which Nauman burned Ruscha's Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) and photographed the process. More than forty years later, photographer Charles Johnstone relocated Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations in Cuba, producing the portfolio Twentysix Havana Gasoline Stations (2008). A recent homage is One Swimming Pool (2013) by Dutch artist Elisabeth Tonnard, who re-photographed one of the photographs from Ruscha's Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) and enlarged it to the size of a small swimming pool, consisting of 3164 pages the same size as the pages in Ruscha's original book. The pages of this ‘pool on a shelf’ can be detached to create the life-size installation.
