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Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Ed Ruscha’s legendary artist books together with books and works of art by more than 100 contemporary artists that respond directly and diversely to Ruscha’s original project. Organized by Bob Monk, “Ed Ruscha Books & Co.” has been drawn from private collections, including Ruscha’s own. Most of the books are installed so that viewers can interact with them and browse their pages.

Inspired by the unassuming books that he found on street stalls during a trip to Europe, in 1962 Ruscha published his first artist book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations under his own imprint, National Excelsior Press. A slim, cheaply produced volume, then priced at $3.50, Twentysix Gasoline Stations did exactly what its title suggests, reproducing twenty-six photographs of gasoline stations next to captions indicating their brand and location. All of the stations were on Route 66, the road mythologized by the eponymous TV series and in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Ruscha’s book traveled more or less west to east, from the first service station in Los Angeles, where he moved as a young man, back to Oklahoma City, where he grew up.

Initially, the book received a poor reception, rejected by the Library of Congress for its “unorthodox form and supposed lack of information.” However, during the sixties it acquired cult status, and by the eighties it was hailed as one of the first truly modern artist’s books. Ruscha followed up Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) with a succession of kindred publications, including Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968), and Real Estate Opportunities (1970), all of which combined the literalness of early California pop art with a deadpan photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist sequence and seriality.

As the prolific and playful examples in the exhibition attest, Ruscha’s artist books have proved to be deeply influential, beginning with Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires (1968), for which Nauman burned Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) and photographed the process. More than forty years later, photographer Charles Johnstone relocated Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations in Cuba, producing the portfolio Twentysix Havana Gasoline Stations (2008). The most recent homage is One Swimming Pool (2013) by Dutch artist Elisabeth Tonnard, who re-photographed one of the photographs from Ruscha’s Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) and enlarged it to the size of a small swimming pool, consisting of 3164 pages the same size as the pages in Ruscha’s original book. The pages of this ‘pool on a shelf’ can be detached to create the life-size installation. Between these early and recent examples are a wealth of responses to Ruscha’s ideas by artists from all over the world, gathered here in this celebratory exhibition:

ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative, Noriko Ambe, Edgar Arceneaux, Eric Baskauskas, Luke Batten / Jonathan Sadler (New Catalogue), Erik Benjamins, Victoria Bianchetti, Doro Boehme, Jeff Brouws, Denise Scott Brown, Wendy Burton, Stephen Bush, Corinne Carlson, Dan Colen, Julie Cook, Jennifer Dalton, Bill Daniel, Claudia de la Torre, Joshua Deaner, Jen DeNike, Eric Doeringer, Stan Douglas, Harlan Erskine, Frank Eye, Kota Ezawa, Robbert Flick, Jan Freuchen, Jochen Friedrich, Thomas Galler, Anne-Valérie Gasc, Steve Giasson, Simon Goode, Oliver Griffin, Daniel S. Guy, Dejan Habicht, Marcella Hackbardt, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Karen Henderson, Mishka Henner, Kai-Olaf Hesse, Taro Hirano, Marla Hlady, Dominik Hruza, Steven Izenour, Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson, Taly and Russ Johnson, Charles Johnstone, Rinata Kajumova, Henning Kappenberg, Jean Keller, Shohachi Kimura, Julia Kjelgaard, Joachim Koester, Sowon Kwon, Tanja Lažetic, Gabriel Lester, Jonathan Lewis, Jochen Manz, Michael Maranda, Scott McCarney, Mark McEvoy, Jerry McMillan, Daniel Mellis, Martin Möll, Dan Monick, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, Audun Mortensen, Brian Murphy, Toby Mussman, Maurizio Nannucci, Bruce Nauman, John O’Brian, Stefan Oláh, Performance Re-Enactment Society, Michalis Pichler, Tadej Pogačar, Susan Porteous, James Prez, Clara Prioux, Robert Pufleb, Joseph Putrock, Jon Rafman, Achim Riechers, David John Russ, Mark Ruwedel, Tom Sachs, Joachim Schmid, Andreas Schmidt, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, David Schoerner, Yann Sérandour, Travis Shaffer, Gordon Simpson, Paul Soulellis, Tom Sowden, Kim Stringfellow, Derek Stroup, Derek Sullivan, Yoshikazu Suzuki, Chris Svensson, Eric Tabuchi, Elisabeth Tonnard, John Tremblay, Marc Valesella, Wil Van Iersel, Louisa Van Leer, Robert Venturi, Reinhard Voigt, Alex Von Bergen, Emily Wasserman, John Waters, Henry Wessel, Keith Wilson, Charles Woodard, Theo Wujick, Mark Wyse, Hermann Zschiegner.

“Ed Ruscha Books & Co.” will coincide with the publication of MIT Press’s Various Small Books: Referencing Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013), which documents ninety-one of the books inspired by Ruscha’s own, reproducing covers and sample layouts from each, along with a detailed description. Various Small Books also includes selections from Ruscha’s books and an appendix listing most of the known Ruscha book tributes.

Issue 110 includes Mark Clintberg’s essay Hungry Eyes: Feasting on Food Photography from elBulli and Beyond, Nicole J. Caruth’s Kitchen Studio: A Recipe for Disaster, Leah Modigliani’s Collaborating on Conceptual Art: An Aesthetics of the Impossible and Swapnaa Tamhane’s The Performative Space: Tracing the Roots of Performance-Based Work in India. This issue also include an interview by Pandora Syperek with Fiona Kinsella and artist projects by Keesic Douglas and Aislinn Thomas. The reviews section includes writing about exhibitions and projects by Karen Azoulay, Marcel Dzama, Jessica Eaton, Sean Martindale, John Monteith, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland and Diane Arbus, Douglas Scholes and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

Since the 1960s, Los Angeles has been a hub for groundbreaking art. This slim volume features work by Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Raymond Pettibon, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams.

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter — to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art — but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or “research” art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider “an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions,” and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each “a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going.” In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians — among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.