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Course of Study:
(ACI700) Introduction To Digital Photography

Title of work:
Conceptual art; theory, myth, and practice (2004)

Section:
Almost not photography pp. 63--79

Author/editor of work:
Corris, Michael.

Author of section:
M Marino

Name of Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
 3 "Almost not photography"
Melanie Marino

Dating from around 1961, an early photograph by

Ed Ruscha features an obsolescent market sign on the corner of Alvarado Street
and Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. A steel base built on the roof of an anony-
mous building elevates the sign, Caught slightly offcenter, its ungainly entablature
spans almost the full horizontal extension of the photograph's frame, dwarfing
the negligible details of its setting that lie, cropped, at the foot of the image. It
is not to these contextual particularities that we attend, however. Rather, guided
by the vertical rise of the scaffold and the upward sweep of the telephone skeins
that join the upper and left perimeters of the black-and-white image, our atten-
tion is insistently drawn to the sign itself. Improbably crowned by a semicircular
icon of the sun, the sign is irregular and jigsawed in contour. Its zany swells and
angles summon associations not only with the patterned decals of advertising,
but with their siblings in the world of animation, the designs of cartoons and
the comics. These outlines allude as well to loftier sources that would insert the
now-defunct neon lettering between the orders of architecture and the book. Its
upper half evokes the schematic, flattened outlines of a voluted capital, the lower
left- and right-hand corners recall the ribboned borders that frame a book's vi-
sual illustrations to set image apart from text. In this instance, however, the words
themselves constitute the image, laid out in six lines - "Sunset Alvarado," "24
11
Hour" Market," "Reach for," "Barbara Ann," "Bread" - and set in various fonts,
styles, and sizes.
"A Los Angeles phenomenon," 1 Ed Ruscha, it has also been said, is the artist
11

of the city as Manet was the artist of Paris." 2 His casual snapshot holds the swift,
windshield scan of the flaneur in a car to fix the image of a derelict neon sign
that, no less than the scores of operative billboards and marquees that saturate
the metropolitan skyscape, invites us to see the city itself as a commodity. 3 As
such, it anticipates certain characteristics of Ruscha's subsequent photographic
production. Its subject matter at once vernacular structure and commercial ob-
114
ject exemplifies the quotidian iconography of "city life that would be central
to the artist's work More important, its references to mass-cultural systems of
representation indicate how Ruscha would conjugate the immense presence of
the culture industry in Los Angeles through a specifically antipictorial and anti-
hierarchical economy that would place generic consumption alongside aesthetic
experience.
Ruscha's radical interrogation of art's boundaries and hierarchies first com-
manded attention in the early 1960s, when the artist was received as a leading
exponent of Pop art. 5 Toward the end of that decade, his work was assimilated
to a very different context and included in several key exhibitions of Conceptual
art, such as Conception/Konzeption and 557,087 in 1969 and Conceptual Art and

63
64 CONCEPTUAL ART

Conceptual Aspects and Information in 19 7 0. It was his books in particular, as Ruscha

conceded, "that [were] viewed largely as a New York conceptual phenomenon." 6
Predicating medium as means, Ruscha's books drew on photography's more
utilitarian and commercial aspects. The artist once commented, "Some artists
use photography as a medium, which is almost not photography. I mean they're
not speaking to photographers." 7 How can the use of photography as a medium
be synthesized with the qualification that such an application was "almost not
photography"? .
Pairing mass communication - "above all, I would say, my inspiration comes
from mass communication" 8 - with aesthetic form - "my books were art ob-
jects to me" 9 - these photo-books articulated a shift toward artless photographic
reproduction and commercial distribution that would resonate with the con-
cerns of an emerging generation of Conceptual artists. This essay considers those
operations to probe the question of the relationship of photodocumentation to
Conceptual art. Crossing the "documentary style" of Evans and Frank with Marcel
Duchamp's readymade, Ruscha's photographic work, as I argue, began to delimit
the parameters of that hybrid practice to which we now give the name Conceptual
photography.

"Documentary Style"
Throughoutthe 19 50s and early 1960s, when Walker Evans worked as a writer,
editor, and photographer at Fortune, his work had fallen into relative obscurity.
It was not until 1962, with the publication of the second edition of American
Photographs, that Evans was reintroduced to the American public. 10 Fastening to-
gether the medium's historical contradictions, Evans's book traversed the gap
between the genealogies of art photography and applied photography to forge
a "documentary style," 11 which he defined early in his career as "non-artistic"
and "non-commercial" 12 and which he subsequently disconnected from the lit- 11

eral document." 13 In its second life, Evans's particular realignment of the pho-
tographic image between the axes of art and the document inspired diverse and
11
often disparate translations. This provided the matrix for a generation of new
documentarians" 14 such as Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. It also sug-
gested a lineage for the Pop appropriation of mass-cultural iconography, notably
in the works ofJim Dine and Andy Warhol, 15 while exemplifying for artists within
the Conceptual circle, beginning with Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson and con-
tinuing with Dan Graham, the practice of photography without operators." 16
11

It was an outsider, however, the Swiss-born Robert Frank, who most di-
rectly and powerfully developed Evans's reordered documentary idiom with The
Americans (1959), 17 which substantially conditioned the reception of Evans
throughout the following decade. In 1953, Frank met Evans, who encouraged
the younger photographer to apply for a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foun-
dation, reviewed a draft of his application, and provided him with a reference.
Two years later, Frank received the first Guggenheim fellowship to be awarded to
a non-American working with photography, enabling him to travel throughout
''Almost not photography" 65

the United States from the spring of 1955 through the spring of the following
year to produce "a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past
and present." 18
In its final form, The Americans comprised eighty-three photographs culled
from almost eight hundred rolls of film. Bound in black like Evans's book, it
was slightly taller in height and longer in width, with the title and its block
font bearing obvious resemblances to American Photographs. The book's layout
also echoes the spartan design of American Photographs. Each image is displayed
alone, uncaptioned and set opposite a glossy white left-hand page, numbered on
the lower left corner; the titles identifying the generic subject and place of the
photographs are located in an index at the back of the book.
The images are held together in aggregate sequences, structured around
the iconic motifs that drew Frank's attention as he reviewed ·his contact sheets
throughout the journey - the American flag, the automobile, and the jukebox;
places like diners, roadside bars, gas stations, and strip developments; as well
as the anonymous figures of bureaucrats, politicians, cowboys, couples, women,
and black Americans; nameless people at work, in transit, at leisure. Refusing the
storybook coherence of the photo-essay, whfch Frank condemned as "those god-
damned stories with a beginning and an end," 19 these cumulative fields cohere
through metonymic connection rather than linear flow, an editorial strategy rem-
iniscent of Evans's own predilection for montaged successions, those intricately
choreographed series that repeat and transfigure particular subjects, all the while
withholding any integrity of time and place and thus interrupting the forward
propulsion of diegesis.
One critic has argued that Frank used the work of Evans as a guidebook
not only "to what he might photograph in America, but as a vision of how he
might understand what he saw there." 20 A comparison of the two books dis-
closes not only an affinity for vernacular subject matter and a propensity toward
narrative indeterminacy but also a common sense of "irony and detachment,"
lauded by Evans as "part of the equipment of the critic." 21 For Evans, unsenti-
mental, uncompromising photographic description yielded the formal austeri-
ties of planar, frontal subjects irradiated by the clarifying grace of noon light.
Evans's classic, plain, straightforward style, shored up by the peculiar identifi-
cation induced between the photographic image and its light, had the effect of
absenting the presence of the photographer, as though the particular surfaces
and spaces of American life were self-evident, simply given to be seen by the
camera.
In a statement that accompanied the publication of a selection of Frank's work
in the 1958 U.S. Camera Annual, Evans praised the revelation of American scale
and space in Frank's photograph of a highway in New Mexico. Yet Frank's image
of this expansive vista - open and limitless - can neither be comprehended by
the vocabulary of transparency or its intimation of transc~ndence. U.S. 285 New
Mexico (1955-6) pictures a long stretch of road under a nighttime sky, vectored
by the painted white bands of the highway that point toward the immense, flat
66 CONCEPTUAL ART

spaces beyond the low line of the horizon. The image of the road is forlorn:
shadowy, roughly textured, decentered, unevenly cropped.
The stillness of the desolate landscape is enframed by a structural instability
antithetical to the solid immobility of Evans's subjects; Frank reworked Evans's
eschewal of artful composition with a loose and agile manipulation of the 35-
mm Leica camera, employing lenses of different focal lengths and shooting from
low angles in a dynamic, conversational approach to its objects. Optical signifiers
of rapidity and motion abound, but these conventional metaphors of travel and
"the Road" do not emerge internally from the movement of the depicted subject -
the narrowing slice of concrete or the car that dots its grainy passageway, for
instance - they are, rather, projected from without by an autographic motion
outside of the frame that prompted one critic to describe Frank's pictures as "shot
on the run" or "from the hip." 22 This jogging style sometimes blurs and generally
infuses Frank's photographs with a palpable irresolution inspiring Jack Kerouac
to remark in his introduction to the book: "After seeing these pictures you end
up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin." 23
Dark and ambiguous, Frank's photographic vision seemed to render America
contiguous to deathliness.
At the time of its release, critics reviled the raw and bitter vision of The
Americans. While Evans admired Frank's "bracing, almost stinging manner," oth-
ers objected that the book was "filled with almost neurotic anger and slashing
judgments." 24 The editors of Popular Photography castigated its "warped objectiv-
ity," perceiving the "wart-covered picture of America," of "simple beer-drinking,
jukebox-playing, pompous, selfish, intolerant, money-worshipping, flag-waving,
sacrilegious, insensitive folks" as an intolerable derogation of Frank's adopted
country. While one described the book as "a sad poem for sick people," another
observed, "It is a world shrouded in an immense gray tragic boredom." 25
The notion of shrouding illuminates the density of Frank's disconcerting re-
alism, whose significance exceeds the book's iconography' of death and mortifi-
cation, its thematics of hiding and concealment, its distortions of scale and space.
Where American Photographs has the quality of an almost spiritual divination - the
book was bound with "bible cloth" - The Americans is relentlessly unclear. While
Evans's photographs are straight, obsessively focused, and illuminated, Frank's
charged images, captured in low light, both produce and screen their depicted
subjects.
Compare, for instance, Evans's Negro Barber Shop Interior, Atlanta (1936) with
Frank's Barber shop through screen door - McClellanville, South Carolina (1955-6).
Centered by a kind of cupboard, flanked by the two empty chairs, Evans's elegant
composition bares with economical simplicity the details of the dilapidated in-
terior, its peeling plaster, its cluttered signs of use and decay. Frank's image, on
the other hand, inhabits the indistinct, diffuse space of the dream. The penum-
bra! interior appears caught by surprise, off balance, off-kilter, as though upset
by the swiveled angle of the lone chair displayed in the middle of the room. It
 Almost not photography"
11
67

is not this object, however, but the faintly perceptible latticework of the screen
that clouds the transparency of the image, fuzzing its contours with hatched ge-
ometries. Transecting its grid is the shadow of Frank himself, propelled from the
other side of the door into the very scene of representation to become, like the
other objects, a model of vision's opacity.
This opacity encodes the modality of ambivalence that structures Frank's vi-
sual field, which doubled as a positivist faith in photography's promise to truth-
fully transcribe the real with a reflexive awareness of the medium's capacity to
construct that real. These photographs insist on the empirical veracity of the im-
age, its documentary intention, even as they make manifest their technique, the
operations of light and lens that mediate its reality. Cracking the compositional
equilibrium of Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment," 26 Frank deployed a
snapshot aesthetic that obscures the real with flawed exposures, flares, extreme
grain, and blur. Fissured by technical accident, Frank's images inhabit a condition
of in-betweenness, a wavering between proximity and distance, engagement and
estrangement for which so many divisions, the curtain, the flag, the shroud, or,
as we have seen, the screen, act as a kind of visual emblem.
For Frank's detractors, the perceived synonymy between the book's "wart-
covered picture of America" 27 and the artist's willful inattention to skill and craft
resonated as an indictment of American life. For Conceptual artists who began to
turn to photography at the beginning of the decade, the privilege Frank accorded
to seemingly casual execution, to the mistake and the error, allegorized a refusal
of mastery that found its sibling in the Conceptualist de-skilling of the artist.
Ironically, nothing could be more antithetical to Frank's sensibility than what
he dismissed as "photography without thought." 28 Nevertheless, as Frank mis-
read Evans's "documentary style," numerous photoconceptualists throughout the
1960s would develop Frank's ambivalence as a detraction of documentary truth,
extrapolating the disavowal of vision's porousness to reality into the impossibility
of transcendence through aesthetic experience, a divestiture of the promise of art
from photography.

Twentysix Gasoline Stations

Resident in Los Angeles since 19 5 6, Ed Ruscha returned regularly to his home-
town of Oklahoma City to visit his parents. It was during one of these road trips,
across the legendary Route 66, the artist recounts, that he was overtaken by a
"brainstorm in the middle of the night to do this little book called Twentysix
Gasoline Stations" 29 (Fig. 10). The limits of the project were set before its execu-
tion, anticipating a key strategy of Conceptual art: "The first book came out of a
play with words. The title came before I even thought about the pictures. I like the
word 'gasoline' and I like the specific quality of 'twenty-six.'" 30 After the layout
was determined Rusch a, accompanied by fellow Oklahoman Joe Goode, took "at
least fifty" photographs of gas stations, which were then edited to correspond to
the number designated by the title.
68 CONCEPTUAL ART

Published in 1963, Ruscha's first book presents a typology of filling stations

scattered throughout the now-fragmented Route 66, along the line that connects
California to Oklahoma City. Measuring 71/16 x 5 inches, the glassine-clothed,
softcover book is nondescript and commercial in finish. The title is printed in
red, in a generic serif typeface, and labels both the book's spine and its cover,
where its name splits into three symmetrical, evenly spaced, horizontal lines. The
book's forty-eight pages weave together blank sheets with twenty-six photographs
that, printed in halftone, appear as single square images on the upper-right-
hand corner of a page or occupy full-page spreads, identified on a facing page or
below the image by a terse, one-line caption listing the station's trade name and
location.
With Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha established a new category for
artist's books. In contrast to the meticulously handcrafted livre de luxe tradi-
tionally created by artists to illustrate literary texts, Ruscha's book constituted "a
mass-produced product ofhigh-order." 31 Ruscha not only intended the book "as
11
a mass-produced object" but opposed this modality to art photography: It is
not a book to house a collection of art photographs - they are technical data like
industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots." 32
Ruscha's pedestrian images baffled its audience with its peculiar admixture of
banal iconography, snapshot techniques, and commercial production. Recalling
his initial response, curator Henry Hopkins reminisced: "I admit I was puzzled by
this new direction. Books were supposed to be full of meaningful words and/ or
exceptional photographs. This funny little number had only identifying captions
(the trade name of the gasoline station and its geographical location) and run-
of-the-mill, self-made snapshots." 33 And speaking more directly to the book's
11
illegibility, JeffWall recently invoked its asocial disposition: Only an idiot would
take pictures of nothing but the filling stations." 34
In one of the book's earliest reviews, Philip Leider of Artforum likened Twen-
tysix Gasoline Staticms to a temporary exhibition, alluding unwittingly to its inno-
vative format: "It is perhaps unfair to write a review of a book which, by now, is
probably completely unavailable. But the book is so curious, and so doomed to
oblivion, that there is an obligation, of sorts, to document its existence, record
its having been there, in the same way, almost, as other pages record and doc-
ument the ephemeral existence of exhibitions which are mounted, shown, and
then broken up forever." 35 The book not only substituted art photography with a
version of amateur photography aptly suited to the book's deadpan, mass-cultural
iconography, but also revised the terms of distribution and display- by displacing
the fine-art print destined for the gallery or museum wall with the book designed
for mass distribution.
These alterations are indebted, as Leider also perceived, to the model set by
Duchamp's readymades, whose public life began to gather momentum at this
time, following the publication of the first monograph on the artist by Robert
Lebel in 1959 and the first retrospective exhibition of his work, By or of Marcel
"Almost not photography" 69

TWENTYSIX

GASOLINE

STATIONS
10. Edward Ruscha, Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, 1962, cover, 55/s x 7 inches (14.3 x 17.8
cm). Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Duchamp or Rrose Selavy, held in 1963 at the Pasadena Museum of Art, where
Ruscha met the artist. As Ruscha once said, "I feel that the spirit of [Marcel
Duchamp's] work is stronger in my books than anything else." 36 For the artist,
the readymade's transposition of the industrial object into the realm of art chal-
lenged aesthetic conventionality- 11 [Duchamp] played with materials that were
taboo to other artists at the time; defying convention was one of his greatest
accomplishments" 37 - and his books intended the same surprise - If everyone11

knew what the books were about, the whole thing would be totally different.
That's why I was interested in the book form. Duchamp had already killed the
idea of the object on display. After what he did, it would be hard to surprise any-
one. So books, conventional books, were a way for me to catch my audience off
guard.'138 But if the books presented '1a readymade in photographic form/' 39 that
adjustment would not be quite so legible in their time. For it was not so much
70 CONCEPTUAL ART

11. Edward Ruscha, Union, Needles, California, 1962, Figure 3 in Twenty Six Gasoline
Stations, 7 x 11 inches ( 17.8 x 27.9 cm) . Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York

what the books disclosed as the peculiar language they deployed that continued
to vex their readers.

''Waste-Retrieval''
In retracing Ruscha's steps in se?rch of a beginning, we arrive at the title of his
book. Nothing would be more fitting to the logic of sequence than the alphabet
pronounced by the number twenty-six, Twentysix Gasoline Stations for the twenty-
six letters of the. alphabet. There is no hierarchy in this system: A is not worth
more than Z. But the passage from first to last affirms something else: this is a
series that does not run in order. Why else does the Fina station in Texas close
the book when the trip, we have been told, concludes in Oklahoma City? If these
are the letters of a language, their arrangement deranges the traditional order of
the alphabet, where there is a beginning and an end and a neat succession in
between. But the alphabet also denotes primary elements or principles, as of a
branch of knowledge. This book, as Ruscha attests, is "a training manual." 40 A
handbook, perhaps, to a new language, where transient letters, bounced back
and forth, reveal to us the holes of rational communication, the "words, which
having been passed from hand to hand like a buffalo nickel, have been rubbed
smooth of meaning." 41
As we turn to the twenty-six pictures of filling stations, we are led, through
their blank and dumb depiction, to the flattened uniformity of their struc-
tures. Employing the idiom of snapshot photography, then popular within
commercial art, Ruscha's images are strikingly homely rather than slick, replete
with the generic errors of the amateur. Each composition is framed casually, as
"Almost not photography" 71

12. Edward Ruscha, Standard, Amarillo, Texas, 1962, Figure 19 in Twenty Six Gasoline
Stations, 7 x 11 inches (17.8 x 27.9 cm). Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York.

though captured in passing - a glance through a window or windshield - awk-

wardly cropped, improperly lit; at times blurred, at others overexposed. Each place
looks the same, a squat structure, slung low, identified by generic signage. The
banal design of the individual units bestows a formal equivalence among them
that is evocative of the monotonous rhythm of the desert drive that these struc-
tures punctuate but do not alleviate. Rather than the singularity of each unit, it
is the homogeneity of these stations on which we remark Their standardization
exaggerates the elementary law of similitude that organizes books, whereby even
the most heterogeneous elements can be aligned into a relation and even a re-
semblance simply by virtue of sharing a common space. 42 This book, of course,
intensifies that rationalization, passing its language through the gears of mass
production.
It might be objected that numerous details set apart each of the twenty-six
elements in this eccentric typology. Union Station, Needles, California (Fig. 11)
and Standard, Amarillo, Texas (Fig. 12), to take two examples, are hardly identical.
The Standard can be distinguished by its diagonal orientation, or by so many
occasional, unremarkable details, such as the serial row of gas pumps lined up
before its sterile fac;ade, the clumps of foliage which frame its roof, or the standing
announcement ofSearey's motor tune-up, brake service, and wheel balance. One
might also speak of the peripheral objects around the Union station, the small
72 CONCEPTUAL ART

billboard advertisements of Hyatt Chalet motels and the Travelodge glimpsed

through the open extension of the canopy, the dry patch ofland in the foreground,
the parked vehicles strewn throughout the curiously depopulated scene. Yet these
visual incidents appear inessential, insignificant, merely supplementary to the
structures pictured before us. They are the incremental permutations essential to
serialized production, which does not eliminate difference so much as recharge
the mass product with a limited play of variation. What we consume, finally, is
no longer the material object but this symbolic difference, the object made over
into sign. Displacing the economic exchange of objects whereby commodities are ·
produced and evaluated in relation to the market hence is the similarly abstract
exchange of signs whose value, however, is now determined by its differential
relation to other signs.

In the year preceding the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Andy Warhol
exhibited his Campbell's Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Thirty-two
stenciled paintings, each measuring twenty by sixteen inches, pictured thirty-two
kinds of Campbell's Soup, the exact number of flavors available at the time. The
"products" were mounted to the wall and ranged along a thin white shelflike cans
sold in a supermarket: Cream of Vegetable, Vegetable Bean, Vegetarian Vegetable,
Chicken Vegetable, and so on. Almost simultaneous with one another - Ruscha,
as we know, conceived his book in 1962 - their coupling of serial composition
with the logic of product consumption unites the two projects.
As Ruscha is linked to Evans by his parallel efforts to document an American
vernacular and reconceive the image as sign - the young Ruscha was particu-
larly struck by the photographer's billboard images - the example of Evans was
also filtered through the practices of Warhot for whom the spectacle of America
could only reflect the transactions of the mass media. If Warhol lifted his photo-
graphic imagery from mass-cultural sources, he also recurved it into the venerable
medium of painting. Ruscha, by contrast, used photography directly and retuned
it to the context of printed matter.
If its methods of presentation and distribution set the work of Warhol apart
from that ofRuscha, their projects would rejoin on another level: in the analysis of
how artistic production is tied to the principles of serial repetition and commodity
consumption. On still another level, they would converge again in their inventory
of those objects that break out of the loop of sign-exchange. Twentysix Gasoline
Stations, as we have seen, keyed the conveyance of information to the standardized
cycles of production and consumption; but its willful disorder of syntax also
perturbed the logic of the commodity. We find its signs lack the luster of newness,
the sheen of the current commodity. As the artist commented, "I have always
operated on a kind of waste-retrieval method - I retrieve and renew things that
have been forgotten or wasted." 43
Indeed, his books are replete with images of the worn-out and left out - as
in the derelict land parcels of Real Estate Opportunities (1970) and the shabby
''Almost not photography 11
73

buildings of Twentysix Gas Stations - of the has-been - as in Every Building on

the Sunset Strip ( 1966) in which the formerly resplendent icons of Hollywood
glamour are reduced in the glare of high noon to "a store-front plane" 44 of the
Western ghost towns tucked away in studio backlots - or of the out of use, like
the oil droppings left exposed on the asphalt ground of Thirty-four Parking Lots
(1967). In other works, it is not the object's quality but its spatial position which
connotes marginal status, as in the stripped photographs of palm trees (A Few
Palm Trees, 1971) and cacti (Colored People, 1972) which decorate the interstitial
fringes of dirt between road lanes or between a sidewalk and building fac;:ade. At
times, the idea of the residue is articulated as structure; thus the "strange foldout"
of Thirty-four Parking Lots elongates the final image of the double-page spread
with a flap affixed to the edge of the right page quite literally like a lag, behind
and delayed. Similarly, tacked to the end of Various Fires and Milk ( 1964) or Nine
Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968) are a glass of milk and a broken drinking
glass, rather like slips that trip each book's sequence of fires and pools, punching
their self-contained logic with unlikely digression.
These iconographic and structural remainders draw out those elements that
have been passed over in the present. Capitalizing on the fluid circuitry of ex-
change in which signifiers, uncoupled from their referents, are susceptible to
endless rewriting, Ruscha's books rephrase the "waste" of mass culture and put
them back into circulation. If it is the logic of the commodity that enables this
reinvestment, it is precisely the values of accumulation and progress that are de-
nied by these pointedly pointless collections. However laced with the sentimental
affection of the collector-fan, Ruscha's recoding cannot be viewed through the
lens of nostalgia. Rather, it is through the model of entropy that the book's seem-
ingly empty profusion of signs can be made to signify, that the closed system of
the commodity they inhabit becomes subject to the subversive economies ofloss
and chaos.

Information Entropy
Entropy, so the expression goes, is the "arrow oftime," a reference to its ob-
durate directionality. There is not one, however, but at least two temporal modal-
ities that express entropic expenditure, the irreversible process of dissolution,
the tendency of an ordered system towards disorder, and a static condition of
inertia whereby disordered systems strive to remain that way. Ruscha's coordi-
nation of social and semiological refuse, I am proposing, conjugates the second
category, locating the place where time is compressed to a useless duration, infi-
nite, same, and still.
To take an example of Ruscha's "entropy made visible," 45 let us turn for a
moment to Nine Swimming Pools. Issued unsigned and unnumbered in 1968,
this book measures 71/8 x 5 x 3fi 6 inches when closed. Protected by a glassine
dust jacket, the book's cover displays the black serif title Nine Swimming Pools, in
three lines, which we find again in blue type, expanded in the title page to Nine
Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass. This odd distension is echoed by the book's
74 CONCEPTUAL ART

actual mass; although it features only ten four-color offset-printed plates - the
first instance of Ruscha's use of color photography- it comprises sixty-four rather
than the characteristic forty-eight pages, swollen by a profusion of blank pages.
The book's subject is swimming pools, selected arbitrarily by the artist: "I
like waking up in the morning and saying, 'Well, I guess it's swimming pools
today."' 46 Like a deck of shuffled cards, the shimmering shapes of blue fall in
no apparent order, interspersed here and there by the silence of white paper.
An image of a broken tumbler laid above a sheet of blue glass concludes this
arrythmic sequencing, the joker that would upset the book's binary alphabet of
blues and blanks only to recapit,ulate its chromatic code and confirm its non-
sensical language.
Photographed primarily in Los Angeles and around the Las Vegas area, these
inert oases, mingled with the voids of blank paper, impart something of the myth-
ical hedonism of Southern California culture and the brilliance and emptiness of
the surrounding desert. One writer observed that the white pages "serve to approx-
imate architectural environments for the randomly occurring pools." 47 Through
photographic reduplication and editorial arrangement, Nine Swimming Pools pic-
tures the "all-encompassing sameness" that subtends the suburban landscape:
"the flat surfacer the banal, the empty, the cool, blank after blank; in other words
that infinitesimal condition known as entropy," to borrow Smithson's words. 48
Its aphasic places give measure to the motionless intervals that condense what I
have called the second time of entropy: "This kind of time has little or no space;
it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian,
as well as being instant, and is against the wheel of the time-clock." 49
Ruscha's books convey this temporal stasis through a language of vacancy.
The pages bearing photographs, we remark, proffer little more information than
its unmarked counterparts. Each image manifests a prosaic dumbness that both
conceals and reveals nothing: "ultimately there is nothing to see." 50 Yet Ruscha's
books, as the artist attests, are for "information purposes." Referring to his first
book, the artist said, "I had a vision that I was being a great reporter when I
did the gas stations," adding that "I don't know why I picked the gas stations,
except that they had been unreported." 51 He has also referred to his projects
as photojournalistic "self-assignments." 52 But how do we reconcile the artist's
professed aim of reportage with the book's evident withdrawal of sense?

"It's open, it's puffy. It has no connection to logic." 53 As they configure photog-
raphy according to the model of discourse - and rupture the medium-specificity
that would open onto the Conceptual practice of art-in-general - Ruscha's books
also evince a kind oflinguistic attrition, an atrophy of signification. In this sense,
they might be grasped through the terms ofinformation entropy. It was within in-
formation theory, 54 which married the laws of physics to theories of probability,
that Claude Shannon uncovered a formula for the quantification of information
"Almost not photography" 75

linked to the measure of disorder given by entropy. 55 In fact, his arithmetic cal-
culates an intimate but inverse relation between entropy and information such
that the growth of entropy within a system only increases our ignorance about
its actual, molecular state: "In other words, the information carried by a message
is the negative of its entropy." 56
Significantly, Shannon's theory of information, which began as a mathemat-
ical analysis of general systems for the communication of intelligence, like the
radio or telegraph, developed out of the research he conducted at Bell Labs on
cryptology and anti-aircraft gunfire. The analytic model developed by Shannon's
pioneering work on information theory was hence directed toward the prevention
of communication, that is, by the cryptographic effort to encode messages that
11
blocked enemy interception. In their refusal to inform - Ruscha's non-statement
with no-style" 57 is involuted and patently nonsensical - his images speak in a lan-
guage that is related to such communicative paradigms, except that they deploy
noise to improve rather than impede communication. 58
To protect a given message as much as possible from obstruction, it is nec-
essary to resort to redundancy. Hence, the addition of vowels to the consonant
11
sequence bldg" to form the word building makes it that much more legible. But
the very reiterations that are supposed to guarantee the production of meaning
also banalize a statement, returning it to the original state of de-differentiation
that the codes of language sought to elude. This elemental drive toward entropy
is epitomized in everyday language by cliches. It is also the conceptual territory
inhabited by Ruscha's books, the subjects of which - pools, buildings, parking
lots, and land for sale - deliver meanings worn down by redundancy, instantiat-
ing a repetition pushed to the point of surcharge. As Ruscha observes, "The sheer
number of the things waters it down, weakens it." 59
Ruscha's model, as we have seen, both descends and diverges from that of
the documentary genre. While Evans and Frank transformed the status of the
documentary photograph in part by opposing transparent communication, they
did not mimic its mundane and standardized language. But Ruscha's practice,
as we know, also evolved from the example of technical or informational books
11
( I think photography is dead as a fine art; its only place is in the commercial
world, for technical or information purposes" 60 ) but they are equally at odds
with their functional purpose and rationalist, linear, analytic knowledge ( "You
don't necessarily learn anything from my books" 61 ). As such, they might be said
to inhabit the gaps of our "one-dimensional world," to point to those places in
rational communication where messages are lost and forgotten.
By inscribing the refuse of the mass media, the noise of our information
culture within its very terrain, they appeared devoid of meaning, like figures that
blend into their ground. But by miming the very indifferentiation that produces
the failure of meaning, these blank signs give form to what is unseen in every-
day perception, the background static we ignore. In this way, they also aim at
communication, introducing "elements of disorder in dialectical tension with
 76 CONCEPTUAL ART

the order that supports them (the message challenges the code)." 62 Lifted from
the periphery, these elements are both preserved and reanimated, set within the
galvanizing parentheses of each book's covers, as though to enjoin us "to [see]
the electric vibrancy in something that's so dead." 63
If Ruscha's photographs go against the grain of documentary information,
they subscribe all the same to the tradition of truth telling so central to the history
of that genre, but do so differently. They recognize, however tacitly, that they
cannot speak outside of language and that its "truth" cannot be spoken through
its system, and so they rely on its waste or what the artist calls its "visual noise."
We, as its readers, are inducted into a space of disorder and emptiness that is as
much an ideological commentary on the banality of our postindustrial landscape
as it is an aspect of photographic style.

In "Art after Philosophy," Joseph Kosuth declares Ruscha a proto-Conceptual

artist. 64 Here, I have argued that his books must be apprehended not merely as
proto-Conceptual but rather as properly photoconceptual. Conceptual photog-
raphy insisted on the contingency rather than the priority of the visual, obeying
the injunction to supplant medium-specificity with the plurality of media to
· become merely one medium like another. Yet as Conceptual art harnessed the
documentary conventions of photography to carve out an index of social reality,
it also traduced the medium's mythical realism, its putative transparency to the
world. For its documents ultimately cut through the integrity of photographic
evidence, no longer recording so much as incarnating an alienated social reality
with images that are evidential and blank, instrumental and purposeless. These
contradictions punctured the ontological security of the photographic medium,
bursting the limits of its self-enclosure to reveal a radical vacancy at its center.
Thus, Ruscha aptly described his work as an "extension," as a "surrogate," or
in other words, as a supplement, as though to register an absence it can never
fully fill because its existence is extrinsic, its function adjunct, its place is on the
fringe. This is the impossible ground of the almost, whose depletion of art and
information Ruscha baptized"almost not photography."

NOTES
1. Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast ( New York: Praeger,
1974): 145.
11
2. Peter Schjeldahl, Ed Ruscha: Traffic and Laughter," in Ed Ruscha, exh. cat. (Lyon:
Musee Saint Pierre Art Contemporain, 1985): 40.
3. "Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and
has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be bought and sold to the people
of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash." Morrow Mayo,
Los Angeles (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1933): 319.
4. Ruscha asserted, "My real inspiration is the plastic side oflife, what you might call
city life." Bernard Blistene, "Converation with Ed Ruscha," in Edward Ruscha:
''Almost not photography" 77

Paintings Schilderijen, exh. cat. (Rotterdam, London, and Los Angeles: Museum
Boymans-van Beuningen, Serpentine Gallery, and The Museum of Contemporary
Art, 1990): 126.
5. His paintings were included in New Painting of Common Objects, featured in the three
consecutive years that followed in solo shows at Los Angeles' Fems Gallery, and
included in 1963 in the Oakland Art Museum's Pop Art USA as well as the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art's Six More. While very much present in the Los
Angeles scene, Ruscha was omitted from the broader considerations of Pop that took
place in New York throughout the 1960s.
6. Walter Hopps, "A Conversation," in Edward Ruscha: Romance with Liquid Paintings
1966-1969, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1993): 107.
7. Henri-Man Barendse, "Ed Ruscha: An Interview," Afterimage 8, no. 7 (February
1981): 10.
8. Blistene, "Conversation with Ed Ruscha," 126.
9. Ibid., 134.
10. Walker Evans, American Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962).
11. Leslie Katz, "Interview with Walker Evans," Art in America 59, no. 2 (March-April
1971 ): 87.
12. Paul Cummings, "Interview with Walker Evans, October 13, 1971," 12. Typescript,
Archives of American Art, Washington, DC.
13. Katz, "Interview with Walker Evans," 87.
14. See John Szarkowski, New Documents: Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand,
exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1969).
15. For instance, see Jean-Francois Chevrier, "Dual Reading," in Walker Evans & Dan
Graham, exh. cat. (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Witte de With, 1992): 17.
16. Walker Evans, "The Reappearance of Photography," reprinted in Classic Essays on
Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete's Island Books, 1980):
186.
17. The book was first published in France as Les Americans, with selected texts and
introduction by Alain Bosquet (Paris: Robert Delpire, 1958). The English edition
was released in 1959 with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. See Robert Frank, The
Americans (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
18. Robert Frank, Fellowship Application Form (1954), reprinted in Robert Frank, New
York to Nova Scotia, ed. Anne Wilkes Tucker (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986): 20.
19. Robert Frank, in "Robert Frank," Photography within the Humanities, eds. Eugenia
Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil (Danbury, CT: Addison House, 1977): 56.
20. Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, exh. cat. (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1981 ): 1.
21. Walker Evans, "Robert Frank," U.S. Camera Annual 1958 (New York: U.S. Camera
Publishing, 1957): 90.
22. William Stott, "Walker Evans, Robert Frank and the Landscape of Dissociation,"
artscanada 31, nos. 3 and 4 (December 1974): 84.
23. Jack Kerouac, "Introduction," The Americans, 5.
24. Margot Weiss, "Book Review," Infinity 11 (September 1962): 13.
25. See Popular Photography 46, no. 5 (May 1960): 104-6.
26. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952).
2 7. Arthur Goldsmith, "An Off-Beat View of the U.S.A.," in Popular Photography, op. cit.,
104.
28. Robert Frank, "A Statement," in U.S. Camera Annual 1958, op. cit., 115.
29. Willoughby Sharp," ... a Kind of a 'Huh'? An Interview with Edward Ruscha,"
Avalanche 7 (Winter-Spring 1973 ): 30.
78 CONCEPTUAL ART

30. John Coplans, "Concerning 'Various Small Fires': Edward Ruscha Discusses His
Perplexing Publications," Artforum 3, no. 5 (February 1965): 25.
31. Ibid. p. 25.
32. David Bourdon, "Ruscha as Publisher (or All Booked Up)," ARTnews 71, no. 2 (April
1972): 33.
33. Henry Hopkins, "Director's Foreword," in The Works of Ed Ruscha, exh. cat. {New
York: Hudson Hills Press with San Francisco Museum of Modem Art, 1982):
11.
34. JeffWall,"'Marks oflndifference': Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,"
in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1996): 266.
35. Philip Leider, "Books," Artforum 2, no. 3 {September 1963): 57.
36. Elizabeth Armstrong, "Interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner," October 70
(Fall 1994): 55.
37. Ibid., p. 56.
38. Barendse, "Ed Ruscha, an Interview," 9.
39. Ibid.
40. Bourdon, "Ruscha as Publisher," 33.
41. The description is from Dave Hickey, "Available Light," in Hopkins, The Works of Ed
Ruscha, 24. Hickey usefully separates Ruscha's affirmation of the "typical" or
"ordinary" from his derogation of the "normal" or "standard," echoing Evans's
distinction between vernacular and instrumental language.
42. Jonathan Crary, "Ed Ruscha's Real Estate Opportunities," Arts 52, no. 5 (January
1978): 119-21.
43. Bernard Brunon, "Interview with Ed Ruscha," in Edward Ruscha, 95.
44. Bourdon, "Ruscha as Publisher," 34.
45. Robert Smithson, "Entropy Made Visible," in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed.
Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979): 189.
46. Barendse, "Ed Ruscha, an Interview," 10.
47. Clive Phillpot, "Sixteen Books and Then Some," in Edward Ruscha: Editions
1959-1999, Catalogue Raisonne (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1999): 68.
48. Robert Smithson, "The Spiral Jetty," in The Writings of Robert Smithson, 10.
49. Robert Smithson, "Entropy and the New Monuments," in Ibid., 10.
50. Ibid., 13.
51. Bourdon, "Ruscha as Publisher," 33.
52. Ibid., p. 35.
53. Fred Fehlau, "Ed Ruscha: I Have This Kind of Lofty Idea of Landscape Being Pivotal
to Making a Picture," FLASHART, 138 (January-February 1988): 71.
54. Information theory measures the quantity of information (through its levels of
order and disorder) of a given message.
55. See Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, A Mathematical Theory of Communication
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 19 71).
56. Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Concogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989): 51.
57. Bourdon, "Ruscha as Publisher," 68.
58. The term "noise" designates the interference that threatens the transmission of
meaning by attacking the system from outside or even inside, as instantiated by
connotations.
59. Barendse, ''Ed Ruscha: An Interview," 9.
60. Coplans, "Concerning Various Small Fires," 25.
61. Ibid., 25.
"Almost not photography" 79

62. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, 58.

63. Ed Ruscha, as quoted in Brougher, "Words as Landscape," in Ed Ruscha, exh. cat.
(Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn, Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2000): 161.
64. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy I and II," Idea Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1973): 98.