Tucked away on the second floor of McCabe Library is Cratsley Lounge, a relatively nondescript arrangement of armchairs and glass display cases. When passersby stop for even just a few seconds, however, they see that the cases are often filled with artwork and artifacts from the library’s collection. If said passersby were to stop between Jan. 17 and Mar. 30, they would see first- and second-edition works by Ed Ruscha (pronounced roo-SHAY) alongside an assortment of contemporary homages.
Ruscha, who turns 88 this year, began crafting his artistic voice at the Chouinard Art Institute (now The California Institute of Arts) after high school. Upon graduating from the Institute, Ruscha travelled through Europe for seven months and worked at various commercial art jobs, experiences that pushed him toward his involvement in the Pop Art movement. One of his most significant contributions to the movement was the publication of sixteen artists’ books over the course of fifteen years, a few of which are included in the McCabe exhibition.
[insert Twentysix Gasoline Stations]
While the exact definition of an artist’s book is contested in the art world, they are generally considered to be a medium of expression that is more accessible and inexpensive than other forms of two-dimensional art such as prints and paintings. Some are viewed by merely turning a page like a traditional book, while others, such as Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” fold out into an extended page.
[insert Every Building]
The Ruscha artists’ books on display are part of the Libraries’ Book Arts & Private Press Collection, which is located in the Rare Book Room on the third floor of McCabe. Ruscha’s books were first added to the collection by late Humanities and Books Arts Librarian Anne Garrison, which is now overseen by Associate Director for Collection Management and Discovery Amy McColl. Garrison initially acquired a first-edition, second-print copy of “Every Building,” which is part of the current display, but McColl and co-curator Susan Dreher, visual initiatives & exhibitions librarian, stated in email communication with The Phoenix that “very few of the real Ruscha books are first editions.” The books have become highly sought-after works, with some first-edition, first-print copies of “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” fetching over $12,000.
McColl and Dreher said part of the reason they curated the current exhibition during this semester was because they wanted the works to be on display for students in the Art History Honors seminar: Modern Architecture and Urbanism. Chair of Art History Brian Goldstein, who teaches the course every spring, sat down for an interview with The Phoenix to discuss the significance of Ruscha’s work as it pertains to his students, his research, and the community.
Although he was not involved in the curation of the exhibition, Goldstein spent a week of the course focusing on “the moment in the 1960s when people, from a variety of disciplines, including architects and artists and cultural critics and others, became interested in the everyday urban landscape in a very notable way.” Ruscha is a part of this story, which is why Goldstein takes his students on an annual visit to the collection to observe the artist’s works in person. As “one of the most important American artists of the last 50 years,” Ruscha has been featured in major national museum exhibitions, so for the community to have access to such a culturally valuable collection is “a special resource that tells all sorts of interesting stories.”
In email communication with The Phoenix, the curators said they decided to supplement the exhibition with contemporary homages to the artist and selected pieces “that are inspired by the specific Ruscha works” in the library’s possession. For example, a second-edition copy of “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” (1967) is displayed alongside “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” by Takashi Homma (2017) and “Twentysix Wawa Stores” by Eric Weeks (2022). Both of the later works are not only aesthetically similar to Ruscha’s but also contribute to the same project of documenting ordinary urban landscapes. According to Goldstein, Ruscha’s work inspired a generation of artists to view urban landscapes as subjects worth documenting through an artistic lens by bringing ideas that were popular among urbanists to the art community. “Artists have always looked at cities as models, but for an artist to look at the gas stations of Route 66 or the commercial landscape of Sunset Strip is just simply very different,” Goldstein said.
His familiarity with Ruscha comes from a shared interest in urban change, which the artist conveys through photographs of the same location but separated by time. Ruscha answers the same questions an urban historian might ask, but his art is “a different way of answering those questions.” Goldstein also touched on how artists like Ruscha contribute to the construction of the “ordinary landscape” in ways that differ from architects and academics “because artists often see the world differently” than them. Furthermore, as Ruscha’s own prestige increased, the evolution of ordinary landscapes such as the streets of Los Angeles arguably followed a similar trajectory. “It is interesting to think about how [the upscaling of properties] is partly a result of L.A.’s changing reputation on the global economic stage … and probably interrelated with Ruscha’s own emergence as an extremely blue chip artist,” he said.
Goldstein’s own research and projects trace the development of Ruscha’s artists’ books over time and offer another way to view the artist’s work.
“Sunset over Sunset” is “a collaborative digital humanities project” created by Goldstein alongside Francesca Russello Ammon of the University of Pennsylvania, Garrett Dash Nelson of the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, and the Getty Research Institute. Ruscha visited Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles eleven additional times after publishing “Every Building,” taking panoramas each time that “provide an unmatched record of small-scale urban change”; yet, until the Getty Research Institute acquired and digitized them, the photographs had remained largely unknown. Goldstein and his collaborators added Census records and newspaper articles to complement the panoramas, but emphasizes that “photographs actually communicate quite a lot without even those other things.” He brought up key details such as changes to storefront signage that would normally go unaccounted for in traditional records that are in fact a crucial component of the cultural history of the area. The project is a clear example of how “there’s all these really interesting ways that the types of sources work together.”
In general, an important takeaway of the Ruscha exhibition for Goldstein is that the Swarthmore community has unique access to a wide range of sources that are often overlooked and underutilized. Even as the creator of a digital archive, Goldstein emphasizes the importance of interacting with physical objects. “ It’s really exciting to stand in front of a document like [“Every Building”] and try to puzzle it out in a way that you wouldn’t maybe if it was on a computer screen,” he says. “Ed Ruscha: Books and Homages” is on display until March 30. Students can also view the books more closely by making an appointment.
