Along For The Ride
Those of you interested in the formative years of Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams may want to pick up the new issue of ArtUS for my Along For The Ride(read sample below). After a series of interviews with the Classical Gassist himself, and hours of delving into towering piles of Ruscha correspondence, I managed to get somewhat of a grasp on the pair's intriguing twin-tales of dual motivation, westward wanderlust, and verbal experimentation. Lot's of what got dug up is in there. Even more got left out. When Ed was working for Artforum in the '70s as a graphic designer he went by the name "Eddie Russia." Perpetual humorist Williams tried to convince him at least once to alter the cover so it would read Artfor'em.
We cannot go unmarked beneath the sun.
We cannot know when or why it¹s done.
We do not write the reading on the wall. Time and chance happens to us all.
Mason Williams, 1967
In 1956 two young Oklahomans jumped in a 1950 Ford and, like their kin before them, headed west. Their goals and ultimate destinations may have differed, but their motivations were similar to those of young people everywhere. One of them, Edward Ruscha, hoped to study graphic design at Art Center, but had to settle for the more iconoclastic Chouinard Institute. The other, Mason Williams, had vague plans "to go to school or whatever"—"I was just along for the ride," he admitted. Fifty years later, Ruscha would represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale and command some of the highest prices for a living artist. Williams would go on to watch his music climb the Billboard charts and eventually win three Grammys. Where they differed was in motivation and practice. Where they were aligned was in origin of ideas, and how their adopted West affected them as their paths diverged and crisscrossed into distinguished careers and lives.
Once in Los Angeles, Ruscha stuck to his guns, honing his graphic-oriented imagery (with detours into photography and books) to become the region's preeminent verbal imagist. Williams, on the other hand, bounced from one medium to another, dabbling in (and at least temporarily succeeding in) everything from songwriting to television, from conceptual art to poetry. Through it all, the two never lost touch: their exchange of ideas proved vital to both their oeuvres.
If you want to read the rest, order it here.