Much has been written about Ed Ruscha’s publications. Milestones in the history of postmodern artists’ books, they marked a decisive shift towards industrial offset printing and helped establish the artist’s book as an inexpensive art form. Ruscha’s publications of the 1960s and 1970s were conceived as conceptual propositions, characterised by the interplay of abundant imagery, minimal captions, and the use of “text-as-image” on their covers.

Various Small Fires and Milk embodies this approach. Its deliberately neutral photographs, typographic cover, and sequential format transform the ordinary into the subject of an artist’s book, while challenging conventional notions of artistic hierarchy and uniqueness. The book presents 16 photographs: 15 depicting small fires of various kinds and one depicting a glass of milk. This visual pun punctuates and reinforces the sequence. As Ruscha explained in an interview with John Coplans for Artforum in 1965, “milk seemed to make the book more interesting and gave it cohesion.”

Unlike Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967), for which Ruscha hired the photographer Art Alanis, all but one of the images in Various Small Fires and Milk were taken by Ruscha himself. The identity of the anonymous photograph has never been explicitly established. In the same interview with Coplans, Ruscha acknowledged his uncertainty about the image, describing it as “some kind of fire” that “looks rather arty”. Based on this description, it is most likely the third photograph in the sequence.

While the book unfolds almost as a pyrotechnic catalogue, the squarish format of the photographs reveals a deliberate formal sophistication. For Ruscha, however, the subject matter was ultimately secondary to the form and production of the book. As he explained to Coplans:

“Once I have decided all the details – photos, layout, etc. – what I really want is a professional polish, a clear-cut machine finish. This book is printed by the best book printer west of New York. Look how well made and crisp it is. I am not trying to create a precious limited edition book, but a mass-produced product of high order. All my books are identical. They have none of the nuances of the hand-made and crafted limited edition book. It is almost worth the money to have the thrill of seeing 400 exactly identical books stacked in front of you.” (Artforum, 1965)

This emphasis on uniformity, mechanical precision, and mass production is central to Ruscha’s conception of the artist’s book. Rather than treating the book as a unique or handcrafted object, he approaches it as a reproducible work whose meaning is inseparable from its serial form and industrial mode of production.

Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk was exhibited in 2022 as part of BURNING MATTER at Studio 454 in Venice, alongside variations on the book by Bruce Nauman and Jonathan Monk, as well as works by other artists exploring fire as both image and material.