书名：Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire/埃德·拉斯查：帝国的历程

作者：Christopher Riopelle

出版：National Gallery Company Ltd，2018-08

装帧：精装，48页

尺寸：25x31x1cm

本书通过将埃德·拉斯查（Ed Ruscha，1937-）著名的《帝国之路》——最初是为2005年威尼斯双年展创作的10幅装置画——与托马斯·科尔（Thomas Cole）在19世纪30年代创作的5幅循环画《帝国之路》并置，使这两个截然不同的杰作相互对话，为理解它们提供了一个全新的视角。

与科尔对古典文明兴衰的宏伟愿景不同，拉斯查的作品包括在1992年拍摄的五幅黑白洛杉矶景观，以及十年后在同一地点的对应的彩色景观，并引起人们对日新月异的城市景观中常被忽视的变迁的关注，这些变化让人联想到经济实力和全球化，或者是衰退和停滞。

在60年的职业生涯中，拉斯查创造了一种独特的程式化的现代美国景观，包括加油站、高速公路和工业建筑。结合文字，鲜明的排版与商业标志，艺术家含义丰富的图像结合了文字、鲜明的排版与商业标志，既描绘了当代世界中被无情包装的环境，也质疑了它。

Over the span of his six-decade career, Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) has created a distinctively stylized vision of the modern American landscape of gas stations, highways, and industrial buildings. Incorporating text, stark typography, and commercial logos, the artist’s multivalent images both portray and interrogate the contemporary world’s relentlessly packaged environment. By placing Ruscha’s celebrated Course of Empire—a ten-painting installation originally created for the 2005 Venice Biennale—in dialogue with Thomas Cole’s five-picture cycle The Course of Empire from the 1830s, this catalogue offers a fresh perspective on each of these disparate masterpieces. Unlike Cole’s grandiose vision of the rise and fall of classical civilization, Ruscha’s work comprises five black-and-white Los Angeles landscapes made in 1992 paired with color representations of the same sites as they appeared ten years later and draws attention to how often-overlooked changes in the evolving urban landscape are redolent of economic might and globalization or decline and stagnation.