so technically no, e_r, not the Ed Ruscha book you were hoping for but still one I really like. A copy of 'Every Single Building...' goes for somewhat north of a thousand dollars and a new copy of Then and Now will set you back a hundred and a quarter (I got mine used for about half that)...
Mystery Photograph
VANISHING
by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
Ed Ruscha gets it, and he’s made Los Angeles the subject of his art for decades. But these days, anyone living in L.A. gets it -- the city’s everyday landmarks have become expendable. It is not uncommon to round a corner and see that some beloved building has been eradicated, often in less than 24 hours. What has all this to do with Ed Ruscha? "Then & Now," his exhibition at Gagosian Gallery (which is also in Beverly Hills), on view Oct. 27-Dec. 24, 2005, is an extended meditation on this very subject. Inside the lush Richard Meier-designed space is a long white vitrine containing Ruscha’s photographs of every building along the main stretch of Hollywood Boulevard as he photographed them in black and white in 1973 and as he re-photographed them in color in 2004. The work references his ground-breaking 1966 artist’s book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Steidl Verlag has published these 142 Hollywood Boulevard photographs as Then and Now, the artist’s first book project in many years.
It is mesmerizing to see the ways that one of the city’s most notorious boulevards has been treated by time, like the proverbial movie star preserved in her youth on celluloid and then appearing in a matronly role at the end of her career. She is still fabulous in maturity but her sassy insouciance has been lost. It is not that the buildings on Hollywood Boulevard are less beautiful. In fact, they were tackier in the ‘70s. By now, they have been "improved" by the "good taste" that is being imposed on the city the way stylists now dress starlets for the academy awards. Bad taste is out, which is why the tasteful Montage Hotel must replace the tacky but authentically strange pseudo-mosque that charmed and intrigued for decades. Ruscha’s installation at Gagosian captures the upsetting nature of these developments. A serpentine vitrine leads a viewer from east to west or vice versa, with two sets of color and black-and-white photos, each facing opposite directions. No matter where one stands, one is faced with two lines of upright photos and two lines of upside down photos. Since one is looking down into the vitrines, as though reading the book, a sort of reverie of passing time takes hold.
The installation generates an intentional disorientation that mimics the effect of living in a city where entire blocks can be quickly transformed into malls or condominium complexes. Years of visual memories are roughly displaced, the character of funky neighborhoods is "improved" and one finds that the terra firma of one’s hometown is no more than the shifting sands of time. Ruscha’s photographs depict some losses: a 1920s Mediterranean apartment building was replaced by the hideous Galaxy movie complex; a modest ranch home is adorned by ridiculous columns and plaster statues on pedestals. Meanwhile, L.A. is greener today with towering trees and privet hedges wrapped around the most modest bungalows. Ruscha’s real theme is change and the bewildering pace of it.
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