Various Fires and MLK
  • artists' book
  • wrappers
  • offset-printed
  • glue bound
  • black-and-white & color
  • 17.8 x 14 cm.
  • [42] pp.
  • edition size open edition
  • unsigned and unnumbered

Various Fires and MLK

Scott McCarney, Ed Ruscha

Various Fires and MLK

description

"Edward Ruscha's second book, Various Small Fires and Milk, (1964) was published in Los Angeles, California. It presents a series of photographs of small fires – cigarettes, matches, a stove, a barbecue – and surprises us with an unrelated image of a glass of milk as the last plate. Various Fires and MLK uses this book's time (1964) and place (Los Angeles) as a point of departure. It adopts its layout while subverting the droll collection of photographs and non-sequetor coda by adopting images imbued with historic meaning: the Watts riots of 1965; the aftermath of Rodney King's beating in 1991; reactions to the shooting death of Manual Jamines, a Guatemalan immigrant, in 2010.

The Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination including racial segregation, was passed in 1964. The use of MLK's picture is a typographic gestalt of Ruscha's title (MILK/MLK), and is a surprise in this sequence considering his message of nonviolent civil disobedience. It is this disconnect that relates Various Small Fires to the fires that followed." -- Publisher's statement.

Rochester, NY: Visual Books,
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