Ruscha's Twentysix Gasoline Stations was a playful and cryptic visual combination of architecture and landscape, as well as his ability to "look at" what most of us "look through" on the road.

I forgot to add that the artist book---a cheap, mass-produced and exalting the idea, rather than the quality of the materials, printing and binding of coffee table photography books---was innovative in the US in the 1960s.

An earlier example was Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's two collaborations, Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires' (1959), two works of Psychogeography created from found magazines of Copenhagen and Paris respectively, collaged and then printed over in unrelated colours

Ruscha's book is directly related to American photographic travelogues, such as Robert Frank’s The Americans' (1965), but deals with a banal journey on route 66 between Ruscha's home in LA and his parents' in Oklahoma. Ruscha chose to distribute the original edition in the gasoline stations that he'd photographed, thereby completely bypassing traditional means of dissemination within the artworld. Ruscha created a series of homogenous books throughout the sixties, including Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 and Royal Road Test, 1967.

I can recall going into an exhibition at the EAF in Adelaide that featured nothing except a stack of artists' books. It was part of the Conceptual Art movement, that was pa reaction against formalism as it was articulated by the iNew York art critic Clement Greenberg. Conceptual art used the artist's book as a central part of their art practice that explored the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the art work, which took precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.

From memory it had something to do with the Art and Language group --the Australian practitioners were Ian Burn and Terry Smith. They dealt with questions surrounding art production, and attempted a shift from the conventional "non-Linguistic" forms of art like painting and sculpture to more theoretically based works. They argued against the formalist views of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried.