EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET STRIP
Edward Ruscha
Edward Ruscha: EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET STRIP. Los Angeles: Edward Ruscha [Heavy Industry Publications], 1966 / 1970. Second edition of 5000 copies [originally published 1966 in an edition of 1000 copies. It is possible another 500 copies were published in 1969; however, records have been destroyed]. Small octavo [leporello]. White wrappers with silver titling to spine and front panel. Publisher's silver mylar cardboard slipcase. [52] pp. Accordion-folded and glued. White spine lightly sunned and worn midway along the front joint from handling. Spine lightly creased. A couple of slight smudges on front panel. Slipcase mylar lightly curled along top edge of front panel. A very good or better copy housed in a nearly fine example of the publisher's slipcase. [Folded: 7.25 x 5.75 x 0.25". Unfolded: 7.25 x 296.5". Slipcover: 7.25 x 5.75"]. Printed by Cinema Center Printing Co., Hollywood; chipboard slipcases made by Hollywood Bindery, Hollywood. When unfolded, the second printing is 2 7/8 in. (7.3 cm) shorter in length than the first because the artist decided to eliminate a small, folded flap that was part of the first edition (at 9176 and 9171 Sunset Boulevard).
Starting in 1963, with the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha began a series of photographic art books that documented ordinary aspects of life in Los Angeles. For Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha mounted a motorized Nikon to the back of a pick-up truck and photographed every building he passed. The resulting book, with the pictures printed in order and labeled with their street numbers, achieved an effective non-judgemental and almost anthropological record of previously unexplored details and aspects of the urban experience. Ruscha exercised control over each step of the bookmaking process and with the use of inexpensive offset printing, standard paper, and simple, paperback bindings, he created a new genre of art book designed for commercial distributors rather than art galleries. Ruscha's books, which became a staple of Conceptualism, were extremely influential to younger generations of artists.
The black and white reproductions on the fold-out show every building on Sunset Blvd., between Hollywood (Crescent Heights Blvd) and Beverly Hills (Doheny Drive). The result is seen in this elaborate accordion fold-out with continuos photographs on both sides of Sunset Strip (South-side of Sunset running along top, north-side along bottom of fold-out). Includes street numbers and cross streets.
"The Sunset Strip satisfied one of Ruscha's early ambitions: 'In Oklahoma City, I delivered newspapers riding along on my bicycle with my dog. I dreamed about making a model of all the houses on that route, a tiny but detailed model that I could study like an architect standing over a table and plotting a city.' As a result of his subsequent fascination with the Sunset Strip, this unrealized youthful idea resurfaced in a different form. Ruscha reportedly photographed the Sunset Strip with a motorized camera in a pickup truck in the time that it took to drive the two miles and back, but the piecing together of the photographs and the folding and gluing of the printed sheets by hand took more than nine months. Moreover, this was not a one-time photo shoot, for in 1979 Ruscha said that he had photographed all of the Sunset Strip in each of the previous five years. 'I begin early on a Sunday morning when no one is around. I use a 250 Nikon, change the film real fast, and just go along and document [it].' Indeed, the artist has continued to document the street to the present."
Richard Prince: "I hear you're doing Every Building on the Sunset Strip again [published by Steidl as Then & Now]. What's there right now?"
Ed Ruscha: "I photograph it every year or so. Anytime I get up to the Strip I'm confronted by two things: How many buildings still do exist, and how much things have changed. But they will soon be doing plenty of Rambo-Vegas-style projects that will span Sunset Boulevard with skywalk bridges and mirrored escalator malls that will be cruel to the eyes. It's cancerous and ultimately fatal. I wish time would stand still." -- excerpt from Ed Ruscha: the original master of California cool has never been hotter, an interview with Richard Prince, Interview magazine, July, 2005
"Ruscha's book nailed something that, for my generation, needed to be nailed: the Pop-Minimalist vision of the Road. Jack Kerouac had nailed the ecstatic, beatnik Road. Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady were, at that moment, nailing the acid-hippie Road, and now Ruscha had nailed the road through realms of absence - that exquisite, iterative progress through the domain of names and places, through vacant landscapes of windblown, ephemeral language . . . " -- excerpted from Dave Hickey, Edward Ruscha: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Artforum, Jan. 1997
[Cited in Andrew Roth, ed., The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. (New York: PPP Editions in association with Roth Horowitz LLC, 2001), in Andrew Roth, ed., The Open Book. (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center in association with Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2004), in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume II. (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006).]
out of stock