Red Grooms and Ruckus Manhattan

31 pages, [30] leaves of plates, illustrations (some colour); 29 cm. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Light edgewear to wraps, age toning. *** "Ruckus Manhattan is a sprawling, larger-than-life sculptural reconstruction of New York City, created in a madcap 13-month collaboration by Nashville-born artist Red Grooms and his multi-talented crew of visual mercenaries -- painters, sculptors, engineers, carpenters, and welders -- who make up the 'Ruckus Construction Co.' Described by the artist as 'a sculptural novel about New York,' Ruckus Manhattan offers a roller-coaster ride through the city's familiar buildings and places, generously populated by every species of scurrying inhabitant, all recreated with loving detail and a well-considered disregard for true scale. Here the twin towers of the World Trade Center pitch and swell in syncopated perspective, their supporting piers entangled like wet spaghetti. Straddled atop a listing Woolworth Building, a green currency-plated 'five-and-dime' dragon executes a creaking waltz of flapping wings, roving head, and masticating jaws. Bug-eyed browsers roam through a richly appointed Porn Shop in Day-Glo decor, while giant Tourists in purple-and-yellow plaids lunge across the skating rink of Rockefeller Plaza. Life-size plaster figures of snoozing drunks, overladen shopping-bag ladies, and imperturbable businessmen lurch back and forth in a full-scale, walk-in Subway car, complete with graffiti-filled walls of painted canvas and spring-mounted fun-house floor -- 'a masterpiece,' according to The New York Times, 'that every hardened subway rider will experience with a scream of laughter and a shock of recognition.' Ruckus Manhattan now returns to life in 44 color plates and 40 black-and-white reproductions, most of them photographed expressly for this publication and including comparative views of some real-life objects of Ruckus satire. In addition, there are photographs of Grooms and his crew, and reproductions of a few of the preparatory sketches as well as a number of earlier works by Grooms that led up to this major sculptural extravaganza. In his brief Introduction to the plates, freelance journalist Judd Tully draws upon a close inspection of the work and numerous interviews with the artist and his crew to provide a freewheeling account of Red Grooms's development out of the Happenings of the late 1950s, the almost accidental genesis of Ruckus Manhattan, and the feverish working methods of its crazed atelier, concluding with a subjectively guided tour of the entire Ruckus." - Publisher. Size: 4to.…