Alex Klein, Charlotte Cotton (eds.): Words Without Pictures (2009)

“Words Without Pictures was conceived of by curator Charlotte Cotton and artist Alex Klein to create spaces for discourse around current issues in photography. Every month for a year, beginning in November 2007, an artist, educator, critic, art historian, or curator was invited to contribute a short, un-illustrated, opinionated essay about an emerging or changing aspect of photography. Each piece was available on the Words Without Pictures website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum, which received both invited and unsolicited responses from a wide range of interested parties—students, bloggers, critics, historians, artists of all kinds, all of which were previously issued as a print-on-demand title.

Contributors include Walead Beshty, Paul Graham, Darius Himes, Kevin Moore, Penelope Umbrico, James Welling, George Baker, Sharon Lockhart, Shannon Ebner, Allen Ruppersberg, Allan McCollum, Carter Mull, Anthony Pearson, Mark Wyse, Sarah Charlesworth, Sze Tsung Leong, Harrell Fletcher, Leslie Hewitt, A.L. Steiner, Jason Evans, Charlie White, John Divola, and many more.”

Publisher Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 2009
ISBN 0875872034, 9780875872032
500 pages

WorldCat

PDF

Edward Ruscha: Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963)

“Twentysix Gasoline Stations is the first artist’s book by the American artist Ed Ruscha. Published in April 1963 on his own imprint National Excelsior Press, it is often considered to be the first modern artist’s book, and has become famous as a precursor and a major influence on the emerging artist’s book culture, especially in America. The book delivers exactly what its title promises, reproducing 26 photographs of gasoline stations next to captions indicating their brand and location. From the first service station, ‘Bob’s Service’ in Los Angeles where Ruscha lived, the book follows a journey back to Oklahoma City where he had grown up and where his mother still lived. The last image is of a Fina gasoline station in Groom, Texas, which Ruscha has suggested should be seen as the beginning of the return journey, ‘like a coda’.

Originally printed in a numbered edition of 400, a second edition of 500 was published in 1967 and a third of 3000 in 1969. Neither of these later editions was numbered. It has been suggested that these reprints were a deliberate attempt to flood the market in order to maintain the book’s status as a cheap, mass-produced commodity. The book originally sold for $3.50. Of the work, Johanna Drucker said:

‘Ruscha’s books combined the literalness of early California pop art with a flat-footed photographic aesthetic informed by minimalist notions of repetitive sequence and seriality….Thirty years later, with a quarter of a century of mainstream artworld activity between, the aspect of shock-effect and humor has diminished somewhat. But in 1962 (sic) this work read against the photographic landscape of highly aestheticized image-making work which carried photography’s claims to art status forward on the double engines of fine at imagery and/or humanistic critical vision (the Edward Weston, Ansel Adams tradition on the one hand and the Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans tradition on the other).'” (from Wikipedia)

Publisher The Cunningham Press, Alhambra/CA
Third Edition, 1969
[48] pages, 17.9 × 14 × 0.5 cm
via The DOR

Commentary: Rosalind Krauss (Under Blue Cup, 2011, 73-78).

PDF (33 MB, updated on 2023-3-23)

Susanne Knaller (ed.): Realität und Wirklichkeit in der Moderne. Texte zu Literatur, Kunst, Fotografie und Film (2013) [German]

An online anthology of 78 theoretical and philosophical texts from the last two centuries presenting a range of conceptions of the reality, in particular exploring the ambiguity of the German notions of Realität and Wirklichkeit. The website also allows reading of the texts through occurrences of 40 selected concepts.

Maintained by Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
Open Access

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Texts (HTML)
Themes
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