Visible From Space

2022

Publisher: BLURB

Hardcover, ImageWrap:

6×9 in, 15×23 cm

# of Pages: 48

Publish Date: Nov 20, 2022

Language English

ISBN: 9798211795464

In this book Phiri's text and Rubsamen's paintings explore the visual and biological affects of 'Light Trespass'. Looking at the Earth from low orbit, they ask, what is visible from space? The answer seems to be consumer fantasy and private property. At night, the lights visible from space are from advertising, nearly half a million electrified billboards in the US alone, and the search lights and flood lights illuminating and protecting warehouses, factories, and chain store parking lots from theft and vandalism. Lights that articulate escapism and consumption and lights that articulate the boundaries of ownership and exclusion. What is evident to any thinking creature watching the earth at night from space is that light distinguishes rich from poor, have from have-not, secure from insecure and reality from make-belief. Hard bound with over 40 color photos this book investigates the new struggle, aesthetic, psychological and economic, between the 'Nocturnal' and 'Diurnal'.

Gas, Food, And Lodging

2021

Publisher: BLURB

Hardcover, ImageWrap:

6×9 in, 15×23 cm

# of Pages: 48

Publish Date: Jan 27, 2021

Language English

ISBN: 9781034347224

Gas, Food, and Lodging is a series of paintings by Glen Rubsamen from 2020. The book includes 19 color illustrations from this series and an essay explaining the social and political implications of the works by Iván Aimé Valenciano. In these works, Valenciano explains, “Chain store signage is juxtaposed with telecommunications apparatus and vestiges of roadside architecture and vegetation. These disparate compositional elements fuse into a personal, local, and heterogeneous intimacy that is then re-embedded in the indigenous structure of the landscape. Rubsamen’s paintings address the subterfuge of cultural imperialism and its local adaptation; they depict moments of systemic conflict: standardization, efficiency, calculability, predictability, the chaos of historic neglect and natural decay. The paintings are infused with an apocalyptic calm, as if caught in the temporary stillness of a hurricane’s eye. They suggest a global post-pandemic society that roams about in cars looking for quick nutrition and the temporary safety of chain stores, motels, and gas stations. Gas, Food, and Lodging becomes a mantra of identity, a comfort zone, the way nationality used to be…”

Subvertising The Military Industrial Media Complex

2020

Publisher: BLURB

Hardcover, ImageWrap:

6×9 in, 15×23 cm

# of Pages: 48

Publish Date: Sep 28, 2020

Language English

ISBN: 9781715562991

Détournement (literally, diversion or hijacking), is the act of turning the expressions, both visual and literary, of the capitalist system and its mediatized military culture against itself. In Glen Rubsamen’s War Series this détournement is directed against an increasingly intrusive and instrumentalizing technocratic culture whose function is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols. In his works Rubsamen uses the visual language and rhetoric of military recruitment culture to critique that paradigm, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Rubsamen’s paintings warn us to beware of an invasive military media by exposing the subtle methods of its domination. His art raises our guard as we slide toward a world where young consumers will identify more with the media products they devour than with any notion of personal morality or socio-political ethics.

Environmental Catastrophes Top Ten And Other Abominations

2019

Publisher: BLURB

Hardcover, ImageWrap:

6×9 in, 15×23 cm

# of Pages: 48

Publish Date: Oct 13, 2019

Language English

ISBN: 9781714087457

In his series of paintings ‘Environmental Catastrophes Top Ten And Other Abominations' Rubsamen pokes fun at our need to make lists and hierarchies to codify the bad and the good. If we Google ‘Worst man-made environmental disasters in history’ the screen fills with sites offering lists. If we toggle the images button on the top of the page, the lists become images. Finding a commemorative image of an ecological disaster, an environmental tragedy or a moral trauma involves a set of priorities both aesthetic as well as pragmatic. The image must carry the message and it must have the potential of timelessness. The image must be beautiful as well as horrific. In this important book Rubsamen and Skarli investigate, pictorially and theoretically, the new complexity evolving in the relationship between nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization in the rituals of commemoration.

Afterlife

2022

Publisher: BLURB

Hardcover, ImageWrap:

8×10 in, 20×25 cm

# of Pages: 48

Publish Date: May 27, 2022

Language English

ISBN: 9798210374929

In a city full of recently embalmed architecture, few buildings look as un-dead as the corner shopping Plaza. Take the one at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Fuller Avenue in Hollywood, California. A squat rectangle of stucco and drywall, it offers everything we’ve come to expect in a corner 'convenience center': a pizza parlor, a doughnut shop, a cell phone store, a massage parlor, an immigration lawyer a check-cashing service and a coin Laundromat. There’s the requisite oil-stained parking lot, the brick enclosed dumpster, some spindly palms and an imposing street sign with every business name in a different font, color and size. The corner Plaza has standard principles: L-shaped and usually situated at a busy intersection, driveway access from two streets, free parking but never enough, a variety of goods and services in separate concessions, but all in a single place. The anchor tenant now most commonly a Cannabis Dispensary. In this collection of 46 photographs, all shot in Hollywood in April of 2022, Glen Rubsamen documents his awe and appreciation for the “corner Plaza convenience center”.

Billboard Palms

Sugitra Gantner, Mark von Schlegel, Matthew Licht, Glen Rubsamen

In 2013 Glen Rubsamen began a project to photograph defunct digital billboards. The city had forced them to be shut off because of light pollution. It became quickly apparent to Rubsamen that it was almost impossible to photograph a billboard in Los Angeles without a palm tree or cell-phone tower, or both, sneaking into the picture frame. The aesthetic construction which he began to describe as “an accidental ensemble” is an exercise in chance composition and a humorous negation of the classical principles of perspective, sequence and scale.  The modern billboard is a two dimensional, almost abstract, constantly changing (sometimes digital), mass-media sales event, the palms are mostly very old (at least thirty years sometimes much more) and they are three dimensional living creatures and finally the cell phone masts are ‘utilities’, tools of the telecom-munication revolution, an essential part of the landscape like lamp-posts and stop-lights.

Rubsamen's photographs transform themselves into a type of child’s play, like the games we used to invent in the back seat of the car to drive away boredom during a family outing. Like counting out-of-state License plates. Rubsamen shows us that the game has changed, it has become ten times more complicated and the aim is no longer just to codify all the players in the new landscape but more to understand the change that has overcome our physical relationship with technology and nature. In Rubsamen's photos, which usually depict a moment at dusk or dawn, the billboards, trees and cell towers coalesce into a hybrid of organic, technological and abstract shapes. They Transform into a living synthesis of the elements of post-nature.  In addition to the photographs and collage endpapers designed by the artist, the book contains an explanatory text by Gantner, and fiction by Licht and Schlegel.

The book is in color with a spiral binding and fitted transperant sleave

Publisher: Drought Press, Los Angeles, CA

Publication date: 01/18/2017

Pages: 98

Product dimensions: 12.50 (w) x 12.50 (h) x 0.53 (d)

ISBN-9781389475610

I Would Clap If My Arms Were Longer

Glen Rubsamen

100 black and white images depicting Glen Rubsamen's vision of the new global landscape. Combinations of trees, billboards, cell phone towers, utility poles and street lights which coalesce into an organic whole. Rubsamen imagines through these images a future culture/nature symbiosis in which objects in the landscape are disposable and incorrigible, simultaneously antagonistic with each other and unified in their uncertainty.

The book is black and white with a soft glued cover

Publisher: Comatose Books

Publication date: 11/18/2016

Pages: 104

Product dimensions: 7.00 (w) x 7.00 (h) x 0.53 (d)

ISBN-9781366817099

Rhynchophorus ferrugineus

Alexander Stille, Matthew Licht, Caroline Soyez-Petithomme, Glen Rubsamen

Glen Rubsamen's latest book is an extension of his new body of photographic works. It revolves around the Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, better known as the Red Palm Weevil--an insect with Asiatic origins that has moved quickly westward over the last century, aided by technology and globalism. The weevil's arrival in Southern Europe has devastated palm trees around the Mediterranean, a development Rubsamen describes as a case of "globalization eating colonialism," as many of the affected palms were planted in the last century for touristic and political reasons. Rubsamen depicts a process by which romantic elements in the landscape change meaning as things disappear from the mix; it is an investigation of a subtractive aesthetic event. In addition to the photographs and collage endpapers designed by the artist, the book contains an explanatory text by Stille, fiction by Licht and an interview by Soyez-Petithomme. The book is blind stamped with limp cloth binding.

Publisher: Osmos Books

Publication date: 9/30/2013

Pages: 80

Product dimensions: 8.10 (w) x 10.40 (h) x 0.30 (d)

ISBN-13: 9780988340466

Futureways

Laura Cottingham, Nick Crowe, Aline Duriaud, Nalo Hopkinson, Nico Israel, Matthew Licht, Peter Maass, Rita McBride, Glen Rubsamen, David Schafer, Mark von Schlegell, Rutger Wolfson, and Alexandre Melo

Futureways is a unique collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter, Inc., and Arsenal Pulp Press. Futureways is a faux science fiction "novel"; each chapter is written by a different contributor, all of whom create fantastic stories that simultaneously work within and outside the genre.

Futureways is the story of an art exhibition in the distant future, the biennale of a future civilization. With humour and imagination, each chapter deals with the transport of art objects to the venue of the biennale, a task difficult enough in the modern era but even more tenuous in the imagined futures of the writers. Throughout it all, art, fiction, and the act of imagination are taken to task, resulting in a book that is both satirical and forward-thinking.

Conceived by Rita McBride and edited by Glen Rubsamen, Futureways is the second book in the Ways Series. Subsequent titles include Crimeways and Myways, which include more than fifty different contributions by artists, architects, writers, journalists, scientists, curators, and critics who exploit and decipher genre writing with an entertaining and refreshing collective structure.

Publisher: Printed matter and Arsnal pulp

Publication date: 2004

soft bound, offset-printed

color

ISBN: 9781551521725

Take All The Time You Need

Glen Rubsamen, Christoph Keller, Mark von Schlegel, Matthew Licht, John Peter Nilsson

‘Take All The Time You Need’ proposes the idea that the concept of immensity cannot be located in an object, but reveals itself in the form of atmospherical poetry, formally created in Rubsamen’s paintings by the layering of muted color shades, in which the scenically applied storyline is surrounded by an effortless yet precise lyricism. In his paintings Glen Rubsamen refers to a conscious and staged contemplation of grandeur, he proposes a distinction between the suspension of time and the suspension of space. ‘Take All The Time You Need’ is a book about “immensity” as the movement of a condition and with this logic Rubsamen attempts to prove that both time and space are truly under the domination of the image.

Publisher: Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg

Publication date: 4/30/2010

cloth boards with dust jacket, offset-printed, sewn bound

color

Pages: 184

dimensions: 8.90 x 11.20 x 1.00 in.

ISBN-13: 9783941185487

Those Useless Trees

Glen Rubsamen, Christoph Keller, Mark von Schlegel, Christina Végh

2005

One Hundred and Nine Oil Paintings from the  Collection

Printed for the Trustees

2001

Publisher: Pepe Cobo / MAI 36 productions

Publication date: 2/18/2001

soft cover, offset-printed, sewn bound

b&w

Pages:150

dimensions: 7 x 9 x .5 in.

ISBN-none