#effutopia

Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles. William Alexander McClung. University of California Press. 2000. Also possible to read as a case study in the invention of utopia and of arcadia.

Leave Any Information at the Signal :　writings, interviews, bits, pages. Ed Ruscha. Edited and with an introduction by Alexandra Schwartz. The MIT Press. An OCTOBER book. 2002. With interviews through page 381, it's a good way to understand how Ruscha talks and thinks about his work.

Works by Ruscha:

Some Los Angeles Apartments. Edward Ruscha. 1970, 1st ed 1965.

Thirtyfour Parking Lots. (Thirtyfour parking lots in Los Angeles). Edward Ruscha.

Nine swimming pools. (Nine swimming pools and a broken glass). Edward Ruscha. 1976, 1st ed 1968.

Colored people. Edward Ruscha. 1972.

A few palm trees. Edward Ruscha. 1971.

Various small fires. (Various small fires and milk.) Edward Ruscha. 1970, 1st ed 1964.

Twentysix gasoline stations. Edward Ruscha. 1969, 1st ed 1962.

Records. Ed Ruscha. 1971.

Crackers. Edward Ruscha. 1969.

Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Edward Ruscha. 1966.

Then & now : Hollywood Boulevard 1973-2004. Edward Ruscha. 2005. (Note: interesting book, but it invites comparison, so is hard to think about as an artwork itself. The size is good - folio is enormous, but lets EBotSS be printed at its original size. I'd rather have seen it in the same format as EBotSS, and without the original for comparison. Also: why not reprint EBotSS?)

More books:

Typologies : nine contemporary photographers / organized by Marc Freidus ; essayists, Marc Freidus, James Lingwood, Rod Slemmons.

On the museum's ruins / Douglas Crimp ; with photographs by Louise Lawler. (Only read one essay in this one.)

Ed Ruscha, photographer / [curated by Margit Rowell].

Ed Ruscha and photography / Sylvia Wolf.

Ed Ruscha : Road Tested / Organized by Michael Auping ; With texts by Michael Auping and Richard Prince, and an interview with the artist.

Visions of America : landscape as metaphor in the late twentieth century / essays by Martin Friedman ... [et al.] Read the essay on Ruscha.

Modern dreams : the rise and fall and rise of pop / Lawrence Alloway ... [et al.] ; the Institute for Contemporary Art [and] the Clocktower Gallery. Checked it out just for one article - that was mentioned repeatedly in something else I read. And that is Lawrence Alloway's seductively-titled The Long Front of Culture, which is reprinted from Cambridge Opinion, no. 17 (1959). In it, Alloway proposes that "acceptance of the mass media entails a shift in our notion of what culture is. Instead of reserving the word for the highest artifacts and the noblest thoughts of history's top ten, it needs to be used more widely as the description of "what a society does."" He argues against the existence of a mass audience as such, and in favor of a more heterogeneous understanding. It was a lot of work to track down this essay, but worth it.

Ed Ruscha / Richard D. Marshall. Published by Phaidon. Whatever else Ruscha's work may be, it's evident from this 270-page survey that it's intensely visual.

On the museum's ruins / Douglas Crimp ; with photographs by Louise Lawler. I read "The Museum's Old, the Library's New Subject" and "The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism." There are other essays I want to read, though.

New topographics : photographs of a man-altered landscape / Robert Adams ... [et al.]. It's an exhibition catalogue and Ruscha isn't in it, but nonetheless.

Rebels In Paradise : The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s / Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. There's a chapter on "The Okies".

State of the arts : California artists talk about their work / Barbara Isenberg. There's a brief interview with Ruscha.

Art in Los Angeles : seventeen artists in the sixties : [catalog of exhibition] : Los Angeles County Museum of Art / [edited by] Maurice Tuchman.

Ed Ruscha / Neal Benezra and Kerry Brougher with a contribution by Phyllis Rosenzweig. (This one's an exhibition catalogue; I may have missed noting that on others.)

Articles:

Ed Ruscha, Heidegger, and Deadpan Photography / Aron Vinegar / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009 pp 852-873.

Auto-Maticity: Ruscha and Performative Photography / Margaret Iversen / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009 pp 836-851. The performative comment is important here; so is a comment on "the importance of the linguistic premise" to Ruscha's work.

Introduction: Photography after Conceptual Art / Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009 pp 825-835.

Conceptual art / Buchloh / jstor778941

Something Else: Ed Ruscha's Photographic Books / Kevin Hatch / October 111, Winter 2005, pp 107-126.

Bookwork as Demediation / Garrett Stewart / Critical Inquiry 36 (Spring 2010) pp. 410-457

Art in Los Angeles : seventeen artists in the sixties / Peter Plagens / Art Journal, Vol 41 No 4, Winter 1981, pp 375, 377, 379.

Interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner / Elizabeth Armstrong / OCTOBER 70, Fall 1994, pp 55-59.

Leave Any Information at the Signal :　writings, interviews, bits, pages.  / Interestingly, the review records the book as being by Schwartz.. Review by John-Paul Stonard in The Burlington Magazine, Vol 147 No 1229, Aug 2005, p 566

Living in the Long Front / Julian Myers / Tate Papers Issue 16 / 1 October 2011 / http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/living-long-front

Benjamin Buchloh / Conceptual Art, 1962-69: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions / October, no. 55 (winter 1990): 105-43.

More fun to have: books waiting to be read as a result of this paper:

Century of artists books / Riva Castleman.

Twilight memories : marking time in a culture of amnesia / Andreas Huyssen. I'll read some of the essays.

Learning from Las Vegas : the forgotten symbolism of architectural form / Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour.

I am a monument : on Learning from Las Vegas / Aron Vinegar.

Art and artifact : the museum as medium / James Putnam. I'll read some of the essays.

Jeff Wall : the crooked path / Hans de Wolf (ed.). Who is this Jeff Wall guy and how does he have a relationship to nearly everything? This I want to know. 

Phenomenology of Perception / Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Being and Time/ Heidegger

Modern dreams : the rise and fall and rise of pop / Lawrence Alloway ... [et al.] ; the Institute for Contemporary Art [and] the Clocktower Gallery. There are essays in here that I'd like to read.

On the museum's ruins / Douglas Crimp ; with photographs by Louise Lawler. There are essays in here that I'd like to read.

More fun to have: articles waiting to be read as a result of this paper:

Almost Merovingian: On Jeff Wall's relation to nearly everything / Wolfgang Bruckle.Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009

Roni Horn's Icelandic encyclopedia / Mark Godfrey / Art History Vol 32 No 5 December 2009

...That old thing, art... Roland Barthes in his book The Responsibility of Forms

The sky is my lightbox.

But why are the light sources so large? I must have removed the pinhole with the cap. Cap lifts off; pinhole twists off; twisting the cap takes both at once. And that's why the light sources are so big. Sigh.

Inverse.

So whatexactly did I do, by doing that?

A 16mm pinhole is f/5 and a 0.35mm pinhole (that I should have used) is f/206. (source: calculator) The area of the aperture was about 1090 times what it should have been. Difference: about 10-2/3 stops (source: table)

So the equivalent of my 9.6 hour exposure from March would be 20,064 hours with the pinhole. My next question is, what would I have gotten as an image, otherwise? Anything? Either way, the irony here is pretty satisfying.

Looking forward. For Thursday into Friday: temp forecast dropping from 60 at 8pm to 50 by 6am / wind SW to WSW to SSW at 2-3mph / sky cover forecast 12-13 / Sunset:19:57 Sunrise: 05:10 / so the exposure time would be about 7 hours, which is about 70% as long as the March exposure / Moonrise: 00:37 Moonset: 11:13 / not as full a moon as March, but a pretty decent amount of moon / so it's likely that I'd get a full arc in my photograph, instead of a truncated one.

It might look something like this, but with much smaller light points, and without the fingerprints and scratches on the negative. Then again, it might not.

More research (to make sense of Romand Coles’ The neuropolitical habitus of resonant receptive democracy. Published in Ethics & Global Politics, Vol 4, No. 4, 2011). Two good articles and a little love for NOVA.

A special class of brain cells that fire not only when an individual performs an action, but also when the individual observes someone else make the same movement. Source - Society for Neuroscience

Cells that Read Minds - NYTimes article.

While part of me wants to cry foul over this article (Romand Coles' The neuropolitical habitus of resonant receptive democracy. Published in Ethics & Global Politics, Vol 4, No. 4, 2011) because it assumes that the reader has knowledge that this reader lacks, my practical side realizes that I'm stuck with it, so here's some research in trying to make sense of some concepts mentioned in the abstract.

Bourdieu and habitus This is an amazingly readable summary of Bourdieu.

Thinking with Bourdieu against Bourdieu: There are two strands in Bourdieu's sociological writings. On the one hand, Bourdieu argues for a theoretical position one might term his “practical theory” which emphasizes virtuosic interactions between individuals. On the other hand, and most frequently, Bourdieu appeals to the concept of the habitus according to which society consists of objective structures and determined—and isolated—individuals. Although Bourdieu believes that the habitus is compatible with his practical theory and overcomes the impasse of objectivism and subjectivism in social theory, neither claim is the case; the habitus is incompatible with his practical theory, and it retreats quickly into objectivism. However, Bourdieu's practical theory does offer a way out of the impasse of objectivism and subjectivism by focussing on the intersubjective interactions between individuals.

Understanding habitus by being in a different habitat. A class exercise that works as a thought experiment and sheds some light on the notion.

Habitus and Utopia in science an abstract for an article

Here's a hard and heavy explanation (that I'm willfully overlooking, for the time being)