![]() ![]() Williams commissioned the Los Angeles photographer Max Yavno to shoot the bus on a 4 x 5 negative a 16 x 20 print was then sent to a company in Florida where the full-size image was divided into sixteen segments and printed onto billboard paper. But the bus was do-able, though the process to make the print in the days before digital imaging and large scale ink-jet printing was daunting. ![]() While Bus veers and crashes right into absurdity, it is exactly at the level that Mason Williams could deliver other ideas that he had, such as a attempting to make a one-to-one reproduction of the Empire State Building, or a (comparatively modest) tugboat just could not be realized. It’s “low-res” taken to an extreme: the mechanical reproduction is unavoidable, and yet there’s that big old bus, two out of three dimensions confronting reality, and you know exactly what you are looking at, despite all that is missing. The joke of Bus is in the wacked-out proportion between the (obvious) amount of processing needed to deliver the image, versus the amount of actual information delivered. This now extremely rare print was recently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in an exhibition of works donated to the museum by the artist Michael Asher, and those lucky to see it were quite fascinated by all of the issues dredged up by this strange and humorous work. Bus is an inversion of the question that inspired it, since instead of making a reduction replace (and perform) as the real thing, Williams just confronts us with a big halftone copy of the real thing at real scale. Though this conversation seems redolent of a variety of deadpan humor of the period (in the same category as Steve Martin’s trademark line, exhaled hoarsely after a deep inhale, “Lets get smaaaaaaaaall”), Mason Williams went to work and the result was Bus, a full-scale (10’3.5” x 36’2”) reproduction of a 1960s era Greyhound bus, printed in an edition of 200, then folded down and packaged in a box. RIGHT: Mason Williams during installation of Bus, MoCA, 2007 LEFT: Mason Williams (left) and Ed Ruscha (right), early 1960s. The aesthetic philosophers in question were the artist Ed Ruscha and the artist/comedy writer/composer/performer Mason Williams, perhaps most famous for his hit guitar composition, “Classical Gas.” Fellow emigres from Oklahoma, where they had met in fourth grade, Ruscha and Williams occasionally cooked up and produced collaborative projects, most notably The Royal Road Test (a spiral-bound book that documents, in forensic fashion, the throwing of a Royal typewriter out the window of a moving automobile, and its aftermath, published in 1967). ![]() “Isn’t it strange that folks can look at an image of a really big thing reduced in the pages of a magazine, and take it for granted that it’s real? But what if that little reduction of the real thing actually materialized? Like what if a 6-inch long bus suddenly appeared at the curb? Wouldn’t they be amazed?” So, it’s 1966 and two guys are hanging around their Los Angeles apartment, musing about the sort of things that people mused about in the Sixties. It is included in our anothology Culture is Not Always Popular: Fifteen Years of Design Observer out this fall from MIT Press. As displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007Įditor's Note: This essay was originally published in April, 2008. ![]()
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