Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts [Hardcover]

Jeff Brouws (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2003

Jeff Brouws has crisscrossed the country for two decades, documenting an America that is at once quintessential and peculiar. Readymades is a quirky, multi-layered catalog of this ascendant photographer's work: partially painted pickup trucks, bowling alley signs, vibrant-hued houses that defy the monotony of the suburbs, abandoned drive-in movie theaters. Brouws treats his subjects as readymade art found in the landscape, brought together to create an idiosyncratic roadside panorama. Provocative essays by leading writers and cultural commentators such as Luc Sante, DJ Waldie, M. Mark, Diana Gaston, Bruce Caron, and Phil Patton are juxtaposed with these images of all that is unique in the uniform, and striking in the mundane.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Partially Painted Pickup Trucks," "Storage Units," "Abandoned Drive-Ins," "Bowling"-in captionless photographic chapters, this long, postcard-shaped book is a clean visual meditation on the United States as man-made artifact. Brouws (Inside the Live Reptile Tent), whose photographs are in the collections of the Whitney and the J. Paul Getty museums, has traveled the country riffing on simple roadside themes, uniting them here under Duchamp's post-modernist aegis. While far from Duchamp's spirallingly ironic meditations on formalism, Brouws's photos do form a subtle meditation on time and culture. Two pages of freight cars seem nearly identical except for the amount of rust on each. A chapter called "Freshly Painted Houses" offers beautiful images of houses above paint chips with names like "serenity" and "tawny taffy." Luc Sante (Low Life) sets up "Abandoned Drive-Ins," and M. Mark (a founder of the Village Voice Literary Supplement) tells of her own experiences with "Farm Forms." There is an homage to Ed Ruscha's gas stations, introduced by Brouws, who says that the gas station was his "first true `hang out,' a place to feel my coming manhood and be in the company of men who were good with their minds and hands." As curator Diana Gaston (Abelardo Morell and the Camera Eye) writes in her introduction, there is "a fondness for the unabashed attempts at survival that [Brouws] finds in these remote places"-and his pleasure in collecting them is apparent throughout the book.-- finds in these remote places"-and his pleasure in collecting them is apparent throughout the book.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Walker Evans made worn surfaces and abandoned structures express a nation profoundly stressed by the Depression. Later, city lensers Helen Leavitt and Aaron Siskind homed in on peeling posters and paint, graffiti, and the marks of children's games--she to lyricize the human spirit, he to disclose "found" abstract expressionist artworks. Brouws produces galleries, in color and black and white, of abandoned drive-in theaters, bowling alleys, automobile trailers, and gas stations; worn boxcars and farm buildings; words and images on storefronts and signs; and half-painted pickup trucks, brilliantly repainted tract houses, and rental storage units. Like Michael P. Harker in Harker's Barns [BKL Mr 15 03], Brouws captures a fading material culture, but his evenly lit, confrontational pictures of big, simple forms aren't in the least elegiac. Instead, they show the kind of delight in form and perspective that makes the paintings and photos of the superrealist American response to cubism known as precisionism so appealing. Adding to their attraction are superb layout and accompanying essays almost as good as the pictures. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First Printing edition (February 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811836770
• ISBN-13: 978-0811836777
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 9.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #821,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worn surfaces of America., June 2, 2003

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts (Hardcover)

Yet another roadie book but `Readymades' is a cut above the usual photographic selection of what can be seen along the nation's back roads. For a start the book is landscape, just the right shape for images that are basically horizontal. Secondly the photos are divided into sections rather than loosely hung together by state or date order. Thirdly the choice of material is refreshing, for example, tract housing, freight cars, trailers or storage units (no kidding).

This is Jeff Brouws second road book, his first, the excellent `Highway: America's Endless Dream', was more the traditional photographic road book, a mixture of everything plus a selection of interesting black and white images from the thirties and forties. I like the formal arrangement of `Readymades'. By having each of the eleven chapters devoted to a particular theme he "presents the subject in the most factual terms possible" as Diana Gaston says in her intro. The chapters are tract housing, signs, abandoned drive-ins, farms, pickups, abandoned gas stations, boxcars, signs two, trailers, bowling and finally storage units.

Partially painted pickup trucks are just that, twenty-five of them are all taken side on and nicely framed within the image area. Twenty-six abandoned gas stations (in black and white) are one to a page and just the sort of thing Robert Frank would have stopped his car for back in the fifties. Freight cars, again one to a page and neatly framed, are an amazing colored selection of various shades of rust and railroad livery. Perhaps the most unusual chapter is storage units, hardly the sort of thing to capture the creative eye but here they are, eighteen shots including a stunning one taken in West Virginia in 2001 showing three power station cooling towers in the distance, the storage units in the middle and a parking lot in the foreground. The photos of these units remind me of Lewis Baltz and his photos of the industrial parks in Irvine, CA, simple oblongs just placed in the landscape.

`Readymades' is a refreshing look and presentation of the vernacular everyday and I think it might well turn out to be a classic photo book of the decade.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another wonder from Jeff Brouws, July 30, 2008

By 

Jose Maria (Barcelona, Spain) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts (Hardcover)

This is a testimony. A book that maybe can't be done anymore. A reminder of a lost identity among franchise. A poem to the past.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts", May 8, 2007

By 

Fuzzy Widdle Doggie (Adelaide, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts (Hardcover)

A great photographer is one who sees the beauty in the banal and everyday aspects of our surroundings, and frames and shoots so that these things are brought to our attention. And so it is with Jeff Brouws. "Readymades" is a collection of subjects that are so much a part of America's cultural landscape that they are barely noticeable; 60's tract homes repainted in bright, hot colours; pick-up trucks with dents, primer touch-ups and replacement panels; ruins of the 20th century - drive-ins and gasoline stations; farmyard buildings; neglected freight cars and trailer homes in various states of abandonment, ten-pin bowling buildings and accompanying signs, roadside and inner-city signs advertising goods and services long forgotten, and even an artifact of the current age - storage units - which already have an aura of desolation.

My favorite series is of the "Partially Painted Pick-Up Trucks". Deeply American; all of these vehicles indicate a gritty, blue-collar life, yet there is something in them that is inexplicably beautiful and noble. The ghostly and forlorn aspect of the abandoned drive-ins and gasoline stations bring to mind the questions - "who worked here"? and "did this place really mean anything to anyone"?. "Do they ever think of it" and even "where are these people now"? "Dead? - and does anyone care"?

Books of this type are quite often large and unwieldy (big pictures usually equals bigger visual impact). This one is small (15cm x 23.5cm x 2.5cm) and much easier to handle, but this does not reduce the value of the photography; the power of the images has been retained. For its genre, the book is exceptionally good value (particularly for the current price on Amazon); 272 pages, including over 220 crisp, sharp images. The essays accompanying each section are short and enjoyable, being as they are personal reflections by different contributing writers who have some real connection to the subjects, and - thankfully - there is no tedious discussion of photographic technicalities or of the merits of urban photography. Overall, this is a thorough exploration of the range of Jeff Brouws' work. After this, I would strongly recommend his "Approaching Nowhere" - a much larger book in terms of size, but a closer and deeper examination of the American landscape.