Ed Ruscha’s “The Books of Ed Ruscha” | Fondation Jan Michalski 

In the film The Books of Ed Ruscha (23’), directed in 1969 by Ed Ruscha (1937- ) himself, some of his iconic conceptual books are leafed through, unfolded and read by his accomplice Mason Williams. The books Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), or Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) reveal how the Californian visual artist invests the book medium to construct a photographic narrative of the everyday and banality of modern urban life in the United States, and to disseminate widely, democratically, an artistic work. His has been a pioneering and seminal practice in the history of the artists’ books, as researcher Mela Dávila Freire will analyze it following the screening.