I am wide awake when I see artist books. Here are people using actual ink on paper in the eventual age of total digital. For this reason I am retaining my hope and expectation of more books. — Ed Ruscha. Interview with Stephanie LaCava

Any collection of book art must recognize the presence and contribution of Ed Ruscha’s work. For Books On Books, this has been not only a financial challenge but a thematic one. Every Building on the Sunset Strip and the elusive Dutch Details certainly speak to the collection’s representation of the accordion book structure, but so do many others in the collection. Even if one of those works in pristine condition could be afforded, it would not be the most satisfactory way of recognizing Ruscha’s work in this collection. For Ruschavian reasons, OH/NO (2008) scratches that itch.

OH/NO (2008)

OH/NO (2008)
Ed Ruscha
Sculptural book with silver gilt covered printed fore-edge. H5.25 x W7.25 x D2.25 in. Acquired from Hess Fine Art, 14 November 2020. Photos: Courtesy of the gallery.

In an interview in Artforum in 1965, Ed Ruscha commented, “What I am after is … a mass-produced product … none of the nuances of the hand-made and crafted limited edition book”. Well, here is OH/NO, clearly not a hand-crafted work, but nevertheless a limited edition and signed by the artist. It is a tongue-in-cheek machine-produced, if not mass-produced, product. Production and structure draw all attention to an element peculiar to the codex – its fore-edge. It applies printing in the place of hand-crafted fore-edge painting, and the interior is blank. Here is Ruscha applying his deadpan approach to a physical aspect of the book not addressed by those more famous accordion works.

OH/NO is not Ruscha’s first foray into fore-edge printing. In 2002, there was Me and The. Neither work extends the technique per se, but unlike their historical predecessors, Ruscha’s two works, whose pages are otherwise blank, focus entirely on the fore-edge of the book form and depend on its interaction with facetious text.

OH/NO provides a distinctive “other end of the spectrum” to Ximena Pérez Grobet’s Around the Corner (2020). Other than its title, Around the Corner is textless. By progressively manipulating images across all of the book structure’s planes, Pérez Grobet makes a sculpture out of the relationship of the fore-edge to the rest of the book. With OH/NO and Around the Corner side by side, we have a useful and satisfying point of comparison and contrast for considering the breadth of artists’ books.

Around the Corner (2020)
Ximena Pérez Grobet
Japanese bound in slip case open at both ends. H200 x W175 x D70 mm. Edition of 20, of which this is # 2. Acquired from the artist, 1 December 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Another aspect of artists’ books and Ruscha’s work that OH/NO addresses is production by a third party. As he happily acknowledges, not all of his photographic works are of his own hand, and production is often handed over to a third party. In the various histories and commentary on book art, though, those early works like Every Building on the Sunset Strip are heralded for their cheap one-man-band, democratic production values. But listen to Ruscha himself in the video below about Every Building, and it is clear that the concept of his artist’s books does not lie in their production. OH/NO‘s high production values could not be further from Every Building‘s. Look instead to the interaction of the text with the structure. Given Ruscha’s sense of humor, the title and sculptural object itself might be commenting on the studio approach of high-concept artists as much as it might be on the absence of text in the pages.

Various

Even though they are not works of appropriation themselves, Every Building and Ruscha’s Various Small Fires have engendered a small industry of appropriation in book art. Various Small Fires lent itself to a Gulbenkian/Calouste exhibition’s placing it as a high-concept centerpiece “reflecting on” Bruce Naumann’s appropriation Burning Small Fires.

Display of Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) at “Pliure: La Part du Feu”, 2 February – 12 April 2015, Paris. Photo credit: Books On Books Collection.
Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit 451; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s La bibliotheque en feu (1974).

There is even an entire book devoted to the appropriation of Ruscha’s works.

Various Small Books : Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013) 
Edited by Jeffrey T. Brouws, Wendy Burton, and Hermann Zschiegner
Casebound, printed cloth over boards. H236 x W160 mm. 288 pages.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Beyond this brilliant collection of examples and commentary, additional appropriative works have appeared — so many that a second edition may be required.

Various Versions (2015)
Guy Bigland
Perfect bound soft cover. H190 x W190 mm. [158] pages. Acquired from the artist, 12 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Various Small Dicks (2013)
Hubert Kretschmer
Saddle stitched booklet. H149 x W105 mm. [8] pages. Acquired from the artist, 11 July 2019.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

It is fun to place OH/NO as an expression of mock horror in response to all that.

Further Reading/Viewing

“Fore-edge Printing and Painting: Book Art and the Book Arts Revealed“. 12 May 2013. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Guy Bigland“. 31 August 2023. Books On Books Collection. Updated 8 November 2024.

“Hubert Kretschmer“. 7 November 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Ximena Pérez Grobet“. 7 July 2021. Books On Books Collection.

Cain, Abigail. 27 September 2018. “Unpacking Ed Ruscha“, Aperture. This is Cain’s review of the Harry Ransom Center’s 2018 exhibition Ed Ruscha: Archaeology and Romance, which used 150 displayed items to focus on 16 of Ruscha’s books. It contextualizes Various Small Fires neatly. Quoting the Center’s photography curator Jessica S. Macdonald, Cain writes: “… lack of artistry is one of the hallmarks of Ruscha’s artist books. ‘The photographs of gas stations are bad photographs on purpose,’ McDonald noted. ‘He’s trying to do the opposite of what a photographer trying to make an artistic photograph would be doing.’ In a 1965 Artforum interview concerning his second book, Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), Ruscha explained that it didn’t even matter to him who took the photographs. ‘In fact, one of them was taken by someone else,’ he said. ‘I went to a stock photograph place and looked for pictures of fires, there were none.'” 

Coplans, John. February 1965. “Concerning ‘Various Small Fires’: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications”. Artforum. 3:5, 25.

Hoyle, Ben. 25 February 2017. “Ed Ruscha, the pop painter with ‘the coolest gaze in American art’“. The Times. London. Ben Hoyle’s easygoing interview with Ed Ruscha introduces his work as the heart of the British Museum’s exhibition “The American Dream: pop to the present” (9 March 9 to 18 June 2017).  That is a bold assertion as the show included Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg and others recognizable to anyone who was briefly awake in a college art history class — even as long ago as the 70s. But, back then, not so much “Ed Ruscha”. Hoyle’s article – with its paragraphs’ casual packing in of news, telling descriptive detail and sharp observations (whether his or others’) of Ruscha’s art – makes a persuasive case.   

LaCava, Stephanie. 20 February 2017. “Artist Books/Artist’s Novels (Vol. 5): Ed Ruscha”, The Believer.

Every Building on the Sunset Strip described by Ed Ruscha, courtesy of the V&A Dundee.

From his series Le Vite dei Libri (The Lives of Books), Giulio Maffei provides a clever catalog entry on the Sunset Strip.