by Anthea Raymond
In the age of the Kindle, handcrafted book projects by artists are again on the rise. A new work, Dirty Baby, takes that idea to the next level. The book, which has two sides like a record, features poetry and recordings of original music, inspired by work from seminal Los Angeles visual artist Ed Ruscha. The book's producer calls it a "trialogue."
Courtesy of Cryptogramophone, Artist Ed Ruscha, writer and producer David Breskin and musician Nels Cline.
Courtesy of Cryptogramophone, Artist Ed Ruscha, writer and producer David Breskin and musician Nels Cline.
Iconic Los Angeles painter Ed Ruscha describes Dirty Baby as three clowns coming together. It's based on his so-called censorstrip paintings from the 1980s and '90s. "You get three crazy people together like this to make a book and, well, it's a new kind of thing," Ruscha says.
The two other clowns in question are guitarist Nels Cline, who splits his time between the rock band Wilco and his own free jazz group The Nels Cline Singers, and writer and producer David Breskin.
"When different art forms get together and mate, the offspring you get is not pure; it is a mutt," Breskin says. "It is a raunchy, down and dirty, complicated, noisy, noisome, voluptuous and perhaps really interesting mutt."
Breskin first suggested the coupling several years ago to Ruscha, who'd seen another poetry-music-image project the writer produced about painter Gerhard Richter.
"[Breskin] presented this idea of poems, of ghazals, that sent me right running to the dictionary, and I didn't quite understand this form I hadn't heard of before," Ruscha says. "I knew it was something like a haiku."
Something like a haiku, but not exactly. More like a series of couplets that rhyme not at the end but in the middle.
"So in this case, I found a very restrictive, repetitive form; a poetic form that I felt was as tight and limiting as Ruscha's own formal language," Breskin says. "Because Ruscha's language is very, very specific."
Pure Abstraction
Ruscha's visual language incorporates cityscapes — gas stations, buildings on Sunset Boulevard — and sometimes just text. But the 66 paintings in Dirty Baby border on pure abstraction. They have no text except in the titles. Many also have no images, except rectangular blocks on color fields — the censorstrips — that suggest where words would be.
"My works are a lot of the time based on blind faith and instant inspiration and foolish things that bounce off the walls and the pavements, and I just grab these things and use them," Ruscha says. "And they seem to fit a pattern of some trail I'm on that I don't always understand, but it's OK by me."
Breskin first suggested the coupling several years ago to Ruscha, who'd seen another poetry-music-image project the writer produced about painter Gerhard Richter.
"[Breskin] presented this idea of poems, of ghazals, that sent me right running to the dictionary, and I didn't quite understand this form I hadn't heard of before," Ruscha says. "I knew it was something like a haiku."
Something like a haiku, but not exactly. More like a series of couplets that rhyme not at the end but in the middle.
"So in this case, I found a very restrictive, repetitive form; a poetic form that I felt was as tight and limiting as Ruscha's own formal language," Breskin says. "Because Ruscha's language is very, very specific."
Pure Abstraction
Ruscha's visual language incorporates cityscapes — gas stations, buildings on Sunset Boulevard — and sometimes just text. But the 66 paintings in Dirty Baby border on pure abstraction. They have no text except in the titles. Many also have no images, except rectangular blocks on color fields — the censorstrips — that suggest where words would be.
"My works are a lot of the time based on blind faith and instant inspiration and foolish things that bounce off the walls and the pavements, and I just grab these things and use them," Ruscha says. "And they seem to fit a pattern of some trail I'm on that I don't always understand, but it's OK by me."
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