"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. (Apr.)
