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Twentysix Gasoline Stations documents a
journey between Los Angeles and Okla-homa
City, a trip that Ruscha made fre-quently
between his hometown and his
adopted city. The book’s snapshot aesthetic
(Hickey described the black-and-white pho-tos
as “blunt”) and lack of preciousness
(offset printed in an open edition on coated
stock with red slab serif letters on the
cover2) have come to be identified as
nearly iconic symbols of the genre of art-works
now called artists’ books. In 1963,
though, when the book was first pub-lished,
the art world was not certain what
was hitting it. Between the experiments of
Dieter Roth, the minimalist sculptures of
Sol LeWitt and the performative works of
Fluxus, all theorized using concepts like de-materialization,
the face of art was chang-ing.
And, according to Lucy Lippard, these
new books, books whose content was unex-pected
according to the standards of the co-dex,
had reached an ultimate state; they
were ultra-dematerialized objects. Ad Rein-hardt’s
comment that sculpture is some-thing
you bump into when you back up to
look at a painting suddenly seemed far
from the new reality of conceptual art prac-tice.
Joan Hugo & Otis Art Institute
When Joan Hugo came across Twentysix
Gasoline Stations, she knew that the book
did mean something. Hugo, who began
her career as the librarian at Otis Art Insti-tute
in 1957, would become among the ear-liest
buyers of artists’ books for library col-lections,
demonstrating a prescient sensibil-ity
about the genre. Hugo grew up in New
Jersey. During her childhood, Saturdays
meant trips with her father to the great
New York museums and galleries. After
completing a library degree at Simmons
College, she did brief stints of fieldwork at
both MOMA and the New York Public Li-brary,
where she held her first librarian-ship.
A move to Paris resulted in a job at
the American Library, with its patronage of
graduate students from the Sorbonne
studying side by side with expatriate Eng-lish
and American residents. It was at the
American Library that Hugo learned to
work with what she referred to as “a rela-tively
specialized clientele—one got to
know the reader’s taste, and tried to match
book to taste. It made me familiar with the
process of anticipating.”3
" This knowledge would serve her well
at Otis, a school that was in the process of
accreditation when she arrived. (Another
sign of her early adaptation: She and her
husband had decided when they moved to
Los Angeles in 1956 that if she were the
one to find a job, he would stay home with
the baby. She found her Otis position
through a classified ad in the Los Angeles
Times.) Hugo’s position as the only librar-ian
at a “small school with a small collec-tion”
meant that she made all collecting de-cisions
on her own. “I felt that I could trust
my judgment and taste if they were vali-dated
by positive response on the part of
the users.”4
" Evidently Hugo’s ability to anticipate
the library users, along with her willing-ness
to involve students and faculty in her
decision-making process, were highly suc-cessful.
Hugo realized that Otis would
benefit from resources that went far be-yond
books and slides into “records and
electronic music, ephemera, clipping files,
picture files.”5 This willingness to expand
the conventional idea of what constituted a
library collection helped to foster her inter-est
in artists’ books, a form that to many li-brarians
would have seemed highly ephem-eral
in the 1960s.
7
Object Description
Description
| Title | Page 8 |
| Full Text of PDF | Twentysix Gasoline Stations documents a journey between Los Angeles and Okla-homa City, a trip that Ruscha made fre-quently between his hometown and his adopted city. The book’s snapshot aesthetic (Hickey described the black-and-white pho-tos as “blunt”) and lack of preciousness (offset printed in an open edition on coated stock with red slab serif letters on the cover2) have come to be identified as nearly iconic symbols of the genre of art-works now called artists’ books. In 1963, though, when the book was first pub-lished, the art world was not certain what was hitting it. Between the experiments of Dieter Roth, the minimalist sculptures of Sol LeWitt and the performative works of Fluxus, all theorized using concepts like de-materialization, the face of art was chang-ing. And, according to Lucy Lippard, these new books, books whose content was unex-pected according to the standards of the co-dex, had reached an ultimate state; they were ultra-dematerialized objects. Ad Rein-hardt’s comment that sculpture is some-thing you bump into when you back up to look at a painting suddenly seemed far from the new reality of conceptual art prac-tice. Joan Hugo & Otis Art Institute When Joan Hugo came across Twentysix Gasoline Stations, she knew that the book did mean something. Hugo, who began her career as the librarian at Otis Art Insti-tute in 1957, would become among the ear-liest buyers of artists’ books for library col-lections, demonstrating a prescient sensibil-ity about the genre. Hugo grew up in New Jersey. During her childhood, Saturdays meant trips with her father to the great New York museums and galleries. After completing a library degree at Simmons College, she did brief stints of fieldwork at both MOMA and the New York Public Li-brary, where she held her first librarian-ship. A move to Paris resulted in a job at the American Library, with its patronage of graduate students from the Sorbonne studying side by side with expatriate Eng-lish and American residents. It was at the American Library that Hugo learned to work with what she referred to as “a rela-tively specialized clientele—one got to know the reader’s taste, and tried to match book to taste. It made me familiar with the process of anticipating.”3 " This knowledge would serve her well at Otis, a school that was in the process of accreditation when she arrived. (Another sign of her early adaptation: She and her husband had decided when they moved to Los Angeles in 1956 that if she were the one to find a job, he would stay home with the baby. She found her Otis position through a classified ad in the Los Angeles Times.) Hugo’s position as the only librar-ian at a “small school with a small collec-tion” meant that she made all collecting de-cisions on her own. “I felt that I could trust my judgment and taste if they were vali-dated by positive response on the part of the users.”4 " Evidently Hugo’s ability to anticipate the library users, along with her willing-ness to involve students and faculty in her decision-making process, were highly suc-cessful. Hugo realized that Otis would benefit from resources that went far be-yond books and slides into “records and electronic music, ephemera, clipping files, picture files.”5 This willingness to expand the conventional idea of what constituted a library collection helped to foster her inter-est in artists’ books, a form that to many li-brarians would have seemed highly ephem-eral in the 1960s. 7 |
