Ed Ruscha

Ruscha, Ed (1937– ). American painter, printmaker, designer, and photographer. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and studied at the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, 1956–60. His work has been varied and experimental, often using unconventional materials (such as blood and foodstuffs), but he is best known for his books of deadpan photographs of banal features of American life, which are early examples of Book art. The first was Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962). To many people, these books are exceedingly boring, but Ruscha's admirers see great depths in them: ‘Mimicking the way in which Americans use their cameras, these collections of snapshot-like pictures question the medium's artistic potential and raise broader issues about our society's strange affair with photography. Ruscha's books are so simple they become profound’ ( George Walsh, Colin Naylor, and Michael Held, eds., Contemporary Photographers, 1982). Some of his more conventional paintings and prints are representative of Pop art, depicting advertising signs in a bold, brash manner (Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, Whitney Museum, New York, 1962).

Ed Ruscha (Edward Ruscha), 1937-, American artist, b. Omaha, Neb. He is closely associated with Los Angeles, where he moved to attend (1956-60) the Chouinard Art Institute. Cooly inventive and extremely influential, Ruscha uses imagery and language familiar from popular media and typically mingles various styles including pop art , surrealism , photorealism , and conceptual art. He became known for his paintings of roadside buildings (e.g., Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963) and Southern California icons (e.g., the 20th Century Fox logo and Hollywood sign) executed in a hard-edged commercial style and for his painted words isolated from context and floating in deep space. He also produced a number of books, the earliest a series of affectless photographs of such architectural banalities as gas stations, apartment buildings, and parking lots. An accomplished draftsman and printmaker, he often incorporates food, blood, grease, gunpowder, or other unusual materials in his graphic works. Many of his later images feature archetypal American landscapes overlaid with apparently unrelated words and phrases.

Bibliography: See A. Schwartz, ed., Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages (2004); studies by S. Engberg, ed. (1999), N. Benezra et al. (2000), R. D. Marshall (2003), P. Poncy, ed. (2004), M. Rowell (2004), and S. Wolf (2004).

Book art. A term applied to books produced as a kind of Conceptual art, valued for the ideas they embody rather than for their appearance or literary content. This type of work originated in the 1950s ( Dieter Rot began issuing such books in 1954), although there are precedents for the making of one-off ‘book-objects’ or ‘object-books’ (see OBJECT) in the work of the Surrealists, and in 1920 Suzanne Duchamp received instructions for a proto-Conceptual work involving a book as a wedding present from her brother Marcel. The first exhibition devoted to books of the type defined above was probably ‘Book as Artwork’ at the Nigel Greenwood gallery, London, in 1972, and the term ‘book art’ began to be used soon afterwards. John A. Walker (Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design Since 1945, 1973, 3rd edn., 1992) writes that it ‘refers to publications by individuals or small groups of artists whose background and training is in the visual arts rather than literature. These publications are usually small in size, slim, white, often effete pamphlets, journals, or booklets issued in small editions and marketed via art galleries rather than via bookshops … Frequently the text and illustrations are minimal and the majority are not splendid examples of printing or binding.’ Other terms that have been used in the same way are ‘Bookworks’ and ‘artists’ books', although Walker writes that ‘the latter has more recently been used to describe publications which document a work executed in a medium which has an independent status (i.e. using the book format as a way of presenting a work, e.g. a set of photographs, which could be displayed separately), whereas “Book Art” has been used to denote artists' books in which the form is intrinsic to the work from its inception'. None of these terms is to be confused with livre d'artiste, a very luxurious type of illustrated book. Among the artists who have made something of a speciality of Book art is Ed Ruscha.