Ed Ruscha's 18 limited edition artists books have been such a prominent part of the conceptual art discourse of the last 40 years that it's surprising to realize he hasn't actually made one of them since 1978. This makes the publication of Then And Now something of an event. Expanding on the premise of Ruscha's best known book, Every Building On The Sunset Strip, Then And Now pairs a comprehensive photographic record of Hollywood Boulevard Ruscha completed in 1973, with images of the identical locations taken today.
When Ruscha shot his pictures of Hollywood Boulevard back in '73, he planned to present them in a manner similar to that of Every Building On The Sunset Strip, a modest little black and white book published in 1966, that folded up like an accordion and was printed in an edition of several hundred. It's taken Ruscha more than 30 years to finally get around to making the Hollywood Boulevard book, and the resulting volume reflects the change in his stature in the art work that's taken place over the intervening years. Published by Steidl, Then And Now is a lavish, oversized book printed on gorgeous paper in an edition of 5,000. With a price tag of $175, it's a very grand book indeed, yet it manages to refrain from eclipsing the unassuming charm characteristic of all of Ruscha's work.
Speaking of unassuming charm, to see Ruscha at work in his studio in Venice, California, you'd never guess that he'd recently returned from Europe, where he was the U.S. representative at this year's Venice Biennale, or that he's one of the most acclaimed artists in the world. There are no assistants running around, no heavy security screening visitors, no sense that the meter's running on Ruscha's time; what you find is a preternaturally handsome and gracious man of 67, puttering around a cluttered room with a dog at his heels.
Asked what prompted him to finally complete the Hollywood Boulevard project, Ruscha says, "I wanted to do something that worked both as an update and as an obsessive study of the facts of the street.
"I try not to bring too much culture into my thinking on it and look at it almost like an archaeologist," adds Ruscha, whose photographs have a clinical detachment that's quietly funny. "I'm as interested in those curbs and lampposts as I am in the lore of the buildings. And, as to whether the street looks better or worse, I wouldn't venture that judgment—it's just different."
Different yet the same. This is, of course, the quintessential boulevard of broken dreams, and the ghosts of all those young beauties who gravitated to Hollywood and Vine seeking fame and fortune will never be banished from the neighborhood surrounding Grauman's Chinese Theater. In paging through Then And Now, however, it becomes apparent what a very small stretch of the 12-mile street it was that was colonized by the movie business. Most of the western end of Hollywood Boulevard is dominated by lush vegetation and groovy residences that appear to have been built in the '50s and '60s. (It was in one of these rather shabby architectural period pieces that Lenny Bruce died in 1966). The eastern end of the street is given over to small mom-and-pop storefront businesses, a handful of churches housing the sort of crackpot religious cults that are a California specialty, and alarmingly weird motels worthy of Norman Bates.
"Hollywood Boulevard was never as sensational as Time Square in New York, but it does still have some seedy stretches," Ruscha comments. "Some things are completely unchanged, but other parts are different—there are quite a few buildings, for instance, that have been restored and look as though they've just been subtly cleaned up. Musso & Frank's is in the same location and is absolutely unchanged. But there are occasional little bleeps where a building has disappeared, and sometimes an entire block will be gone.
"There's quite a bit of vegetation on the western end of the street and there are new residences in that area on sites that were once considered impossible to build on," he continues. "They're building on vertical surfaces now. Generally, though, I'd have to say that the street has a texture that's continuous and is pretty much the way it was in 1973."
The same could be said for the methodology that went into the making of the book. All the technical advances that have transformed photography over the past 30 years didn't prove to be of much help to Ruscha when he approached the task of compiling a pictorial record of Hollywood Boulevard for the 21st Century.
"We first tried to shoot the pictures with a video camera, but it didn't produce results that matched up with the original images—it was sad," laughs Ruscha in thinking back on his first stab at re-photographing the street. "We wound up shooting the pictures from a van that had four or five people in it taking pictures.
"We took all the pictures [4,500 black & white and 13,000 color images] in a single day, and it was fun—just to record these things is always fun," adds Ruscha, whose multi-faceted body of work can be read on several different levels. Among many other things, it provides an indelible portrait of the spirit of America and the way it physically looks. Its mindless power and can-do optimism, its mistakes and victories can be seen in the very streets of its cities, and Ruscha's Then And Now gives us one of them in explicit detail.
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