babycakes ed ruscha
DESCRIPTION
Edward Ruscha provides Artists and Photographs with another humorous and somewhat absurd piece, in the form of a fifty-two-page artist book, Babycakes. Its light-blue cover pages are hole-punched and bound by a pink ribbon, with the title written on it in light-green flocking. The book consists of a series of black and white photographs of a few-months-old baby captioned with his or her weight, followed by snapshots of twenty-one cakes or pieces of cake also captioned by weight. Ruscha piles one idiosyncratic gesture upon another by means of tongue-in-cheek wordplay: he gives superfluous attention to the physical form of the book as a cute blue-and-pink fuzzy package, and riffs on the convention of listing a newborn’s weight on a birth announcement by transferring it to images of actual cakes. Like many of Ruscha’s Pop-influenced text paintings that emphasize meaning, language, or humor, Babycakes documents a pun by depicting mass-produced, packaged cupcakes (VanDeKamp’s Cupcakes, sixTRANSCRIPT
