Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire

by Tom McCarthy (Contributor), Daniel Herrmann (Contributor), Christopher Riopelle (Editor)

Over the span of his six-decade career, Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) has created a distinctively stylized vision of the modern American landscape of gas stations, highways, and industrial buildings. Incorporating text, stark typography, and commercial logos, the artist’s multivalent images both portray and interrogate the contemporary world’s relentlessly packaged environment. By placing Ruscha’s celebrated Course of Empire —a ten-painting installation originally created for the 2005 Venice Biennale—in dialogue with Thomas Cole’s five-picture cycle The Course of Empire from the 1830s, this catalogue offers a fresh perspective on each of these disparate masterpieces. Unlike Cole’s grandiose vision of the rise and fall of classical civilization, Ruscha’s work comprises five black-and-white Los Angeles landscapes made in 1992 paired with color representations of the same sites as they appeared ten years later and draws attention to how often-overlooked changes in the evolving urban landscape are redolent of economic might and globalization or decline and stagnation.

Published by National Gallery Company, London/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition The National Gallery, London
(06/11/2018–10/07/2018)

48 pages, Hardcover

First published August 14, 2018

About the author

Tom McCarthy — “English fiction’s new laureate of disappointment” (Time Out, September 2007) — is a writer and artist. He was born in 1969 and lives in a tower-block in London. Tom grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine.

His debut novel Remainder was first published in November 2005 by Paris-based art press Metronome. After becoming a cult hit championed first by British webzines (it was 3:AM Magazine’s Book of the Year for 2005) and then by the literary press, Remainder was republished by Alma Books in the UK (2006) and Vintage in the US (2007). A French version is to be followed by editions in Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian.

A work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, was released by Granta Books in June 2006. It also came out in France and an American edition is in the offing.

Tom’s second novel, Men in Space came out in 2007.

He has published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and Contemporary Magazine, as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press) and The Milgram Experiment (Jan van Eyck Press). His story, “Kool Thing, Or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst” appeared in The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired By Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail) in 2008.

His ongoing project the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde network that surfaces through publications, proclamations, denunciations and live events, has been described by Untitled Magazine as ‘the most comprehensive total art work we have seen in years’ and by Art Monthly as ‘a platform for fantastically mobile thinking’. In 2003 the INS broke into the BBC website and inserted propaganda into its source-code. The following year, they set up a broadcasting unit at the ICA from which more than forty ‘agents’ generated non-stop poem-codes which were transmitted over FM radio in London and by internet to collaborating radio stations around the world.

Tom has also tutored and lectured at various institutions including the Architectural Association, Central Saint Martins School of Art, the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and Southern California Institute of Architecture. He recently taught a course on ‘Catastrophe’ with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium.

Reviews

[Wilde Sky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of works by an artist are presented in this book.

I thought some of the images were very striking – the text left me a bit cold.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ed Ruscha is one of the few multi-disciplinary trailblazers of his time. He has had an impact on many of us as we grew up, in awe of the things he has accomplished, with seeming nonchalance, but in actuality with deep thoughtfulness.

This beautiful catalogue documents a painting project that Ruscha developed over the years, five paintings from 1992, the supplemental five between 2003-2005. The impetus for the work is from Thomas Cole's five paintings, The Course of Empire, in the collection of the NY Historical Society. Ruscha's paintings were shown at the National Gallery in London concurrently with an exhibition of Thomas Cole's paintings "Eden to Empire."

The Metropolitan Museum in New York hosted a conversation between Ed Ruscha and writer Tom McCarthy. It is available at the Met's website: https://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/vi...

We live in a time when everything is changing quickly. The word entropy, which I learned in a zoology class back in the 1960s now takes on a kind of urgency which I probably didn't understand over fifty years ago. We can now observe it, and thanks to artists like Ed, we are documenting it.