OOF

Ed Ruscha, 1962, reworked 1963

Oof. You know that noise. And Ed Ruscha makes a painting of it. Nearly six feet tall. Oil on canvas. Three yellow letters against dark blue. No fist. Nobody doubled over. Just the noise. He remembered it from the cartoons he read as a kid. Somebody gets punched in the gut. Oof. He said it felt like “almost a patriotic word.” So, Ruscha comes to Los Angeles from Oklahoma City in 1956. Goes to school for commercial art. Design. Typography. How to make somebody look at something. At school, they tell him to let the painting happen. Then he sees a Jasper Johns target in a magazine and decides: whatever he paints, he'll know what it is before he starts. So he settles on a word. Boss. Honk. Smash. Oof. The word is the whole painting. And look at these letters. The curves of those two O's. The straight edges of the F. All that blue around them. Carefully drawn. He knows how to give a grunt the full treatment. You read it in a second. Then you're still looking at it. Two O's and an F. He called these early words "monosyllabic, guttural utterings." Quite a mouthful for "oof." He lent this one to a buddy, who lent it to Tommy Smothers. It fell off Smothers's wall, face down, onto a chessboard. The pieces punched holes in it. Ruscha got it patched up and kept it until 1988, when a group of very rich people chipped in and bought it for MoMA. Here's how he explained the words. You walk into a butcher's. Ask for a pound of bacon. The butcher slams it down on the counter. He said, "It's the slam that I was after."

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