Ed Ruscha b.1937
Self-published book
180 x 140
1970
Bequeathed by Audrey Melville Barker
£700.00
2013.018
The Getty Museum explains this book thus….
‘In Real Estate Opportunities, Ruscha presents, without
comment, pictures of various tracts of land for sale in different parts of L.A.
County’.
I’m tempted to leave it at that.
The Glassine cover is lightly damaged. I don’t know if it’s beginning
to disintegrate or if it has been helped along by mice, I don’t think so. It is
slightly browned.
There is a great interview with the artist and Dave Hickey. Ruscha is totally at ease, deadpan and dry. He is bang on the money and he knows it. Ruscha reminds me of
Bob Newhart a bit and the audience is eager to laugh, enough to say they are in on the joke. I’ve put it in
the link below but skip to 4:30 when the tedious introductions are over.
Actually there is something to say about it and that is to
do with cars and how the landscape is seen and accessible from them. The views
are all ‘driveby’ locations it’s somehow more noticeable in this book. In many ways the
subject isn’t there, what you see is the infrastructure, the power lines, the
commercial notices, the signs and the roads. They are all places of the same type
and so the archetype rather than the particular is what you end up with out of the
book, perhaps without really looking at any one of these banal photographs.
But its worth looking again. I saw a Ruscha show recently, one of the Tate gallery's artists rooms exhibits. In some of the photographs Ruscha had made the slightest scoring in some of the film plates to look a bit like chemical process film for movie projection as if his drive by photos were cut from a super eight film, they wern't. Now that it is rare to see film projected in this way it is also so much easier to read his intentions - to see the particular. Ruscha's gaze manages to be both staggeringly cool and tight at the same time. It made me look again at the photos in the book to see if there are any errors or slips? There are none, every photograph is perfect.
But its worth looking again. I saw a Ruscha show recently, one of the Tate gallery's artists rooms exhibits. In some of the photographs Ruscha had made the slightest scoring in some of the film plates to look a bit like chemical process film for movie projection as if his drive by photos were cut from a super eight film, they wern't. Now that it is rare to see film projected in this way it is also so much easier to read his intentions - to see the particular. Ruscha's gaze manages to be both staggeringly cool and tight at the same time. It made me look again at the photos in the book to see if there are any errors or slips? There are none, every photograph is perfect.
The provenance of this is the same as 2013.004 and 2013.017 in that all these books were collected by Audrey and Dennis Barker when sending $3:50 to an artist in California for a book like this was (in rural Cumbria at least) a rather rare activity.
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