OOF
ED RUSCHA, 1962, reworked 1963
It's dumb. Not "dumb" like careless. Dumb like body-first. Like the sound you make when something connects with your ribs before your brain has time to write a little essay about it. OOF. That's a hit, not a word. And Ruscha — who is genuinely one of the smartest people to ever make art in Los Angeles — looked at that sound and went: yeah, that's my painting. Six feet tall. Oil on canvas. Just that. Which is either incredibly confident or deeply unhinged. Probably both. He comes out to L.A. in 1956 from Oklahoma City to study commercial art — design, typography, the whole trade — and you can feel every bit of that training here. He knows how to set type. He knows how to make your eye stop. If you take one blunt little grunt and blow it up big enough, it stops being a throwaway and starts feeling weirdly monumental. He said those early word paintings came from "monosyllabic, guttural utterings" — words with vocal force and a kind of "social discord." Which is a very elegant way of saying: I painted the noise you make when you get hit with a door. Stand close to this thing for a second. It's almost six feet of one syllable, and the longer you stay with it, the more it starts to vibrate between stupid and profound. Comic-strip language handled with the care of a Flemish portrait of somebody's dead wife. Neither side blinks. Frank Gehry — who knew him — said Ruscha was interested in "the mundane and the stupid," and that a painting that says "Oof" says everything about the place and time he was living in. He's right. This is America in one syllable. Funny. Violent. Commercial. Blunt. A little perfect. No story. No image. No explanation. Just the sound a body makes when the world lands on it. And the enormous, very important, extremely tasteful paintings hanging on either side of it? They keep getting rotated out. This one stays. OOF.