Author: Grace Marston
As a recipient of Pitt’s Archival Scholars Research Award (ASRA), I had the opportunity to spend the semester working with the Frick Fine Arts Library Artist Book Collection in the University Library System. I curated the mini-exhibition, Artists, Photographs, and Ed Ruscha the Artist/Photographer, which explores the artist books of Ed Ruscha and a 1970 collaborative art project called Artists and Photographs.
For an ASRA project, you start by spending as much time as possible with the archival materials, i.e. the primary sources. Secondary sources come later. Although I have spent many years researching art, this approach was new to me. As an arts educator at The Andy Warhol Museum, part of my job entails compiling research about upcoming exhibitions or future rotations within the permanent collection galleries. This means that I start by looking at a list of artworks that mainly consists of the title, date, and medium of each piece; the artworks themselves appear only as small thumbnail images. I then compile information from Warhol biographies, auction catalogue essays, past exhibition reviews, and other similar secondary sources. In the end, I usually don’t see the art in person until after I have finished researching it.
My research experience with Ruscha’s artist books was completely different. I began by traveling to New York City to see the Ed Ruscha / Now Then exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The show helped put some of Ruscha’s books in context with his other work, including drawings, paintings, and installations. I also got a chance to see exactly how MoMA displayed and interpreted his books. It was useful to have this insight since artist books are not usually intended to sit in glass cases in museum exhibitions. Artist books are made to be handled; artists expect people to hold them, open them, turn the pages, and have interactive experiences. MoMA actually did provide opportunities for visitors to peruse two of his books, but for most of the books, they displayed multiple copies—both open and closed—or produced facsimiles of pages within the books.
Once I returned to Pittsburgh, I got to spend hours with Ruscha’s books every Tuesday. The Frick Fine Arts Library holds nine of Ruscha’s books; most of them have less than sixty pages, and in several of the books, at least half the pages are blank. Despite the fact that most of Ruscha’s paintings emphasize words, his books contain minimal amounts of text. Although his books do not require much reading per se, they offer plenty to look at.
Ruscha’s artist books present banal images from our daily lives: the small fires we encounter when cooking or smoking, abandoned mattresses found in back alleys, cakes, cacti, and commercial real estate lots for sale. For his photobooks, he adopts a vernacular style of photography, choosing to emulate the perspective of a tourist or amateur rather than a fine artist. The brief texts often consist of technical data such as the addresses of the real estate lots or the weights of the cakes. Rather than use the books to express narratives, he creates taxonomies, compiling seemingly random examples from any category of objects or locations that captures his interest.
For the first few weeks, I “read” Ruscha’s books but did not read about his books, although I did read multiple books about the photobook medium in general. But instead of reading Ruscha biographies or exhibition catalogues, I spent most of my time looking at his books themselves and writing down my observations. I described the formats of the books and the fonts he used on the front covers. I noted how many blank pages each book had. For his shorter books, I tried to record details about every single image so that I could form a mental picture of it after I left the library. In a sense, I made taxonomies of Ruscha’s taxonomies. This tactic felt appropriate for Ruscha’s approach to his bookmaking.
After about a month, I finally started delving more into secondary sources, reading books and scholarly articles about Ruscha’s photography or artist books. For some texts, it actually felt like I didn’t really learn anything new. I just read another art historian summarize what I had already observed firsthand. But of course, it still felt reassuring to see that someone else agreed with me. Overall, the most compelling information I gleaned from these sources was about how the images Ruscha included in his books connected to his life.
Despite his deadpan, unsentimental style of presentation, his books often contain subtle references to his personal life. The book Records (1971) consists of a sample from Ruscha’s own record collection. His wife Danna contributed photographs to the book Babycakes (1970), and that book starts off with a portrait of their son, Eddie Ruscha Jr. And all of his outdoor photography captures the streets of Los Angeles, a city which has obviously had a profound influence on him ever since Ruscha moved there for art school in the 1950s.
It also took about a month for me to get to the Artists and Photographs collection. Artists & Photographs includes work by nineteen different artists including Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Christo, and Robert Rauschenberg. The project coincided with a 1970 exhibition at the Multiples, Inc. gallery in New York and constitutes an exhibition in a box. Initially, I wanted to look through Artists and Photographs to find supplementary material for my exhibition. I had no idea whether the creations by Ruscha’s contemporaries would align with the content of his artist books, and I felt some anxiety about how to curate a cohesive exhibition. Once I began looking through the artworks, I noticed many aesthetic and conceptual connections.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Ruscha and his peers challenged the standards of modern art photography by pointing their cameras at mundane, unremarkable subjects or by using photography as an intermediate step in a larger artistic endeavor. For example, some of Ruscha’s contemporaries used photographs to document happenings or works of performance art. You could similarly argue that Ruscha’s own photobooks document his somewhat absurd actions of photographing every building on the Sunset Strip or concluding his taxonomic study of various small fires with a glass of milk. These artworks can provoke many interesting questions, including questions about what is beautiful, what is valuable, and what is worthy of being captured on film. While Ruscha’s books are certainly groundbreaking, they are not outliers within his body of work or in the trends of photography at the time. He participated in a broader phenomenon of using photography for purposes beyond aesthetic pleasure; he used photography in conjunction with bookmaking to explore and illustrate concepts.
By the end of the semester, I had learned a lot about Ruscha and about eighteen of his fellow artists/photographers. I had also studied the history of photobooks and gained an understanding of Ruscha’s contributions to the art form. Just as importantly, I developed a new method of art research which prioritizes slow looking and positioning artworks as primary sources. ASRA gave me an experience unlike any of my other accomplishments at Pitt, one where I had a unique level of independence as a scholar and unparalleled access to works of art.