Ed Ruscha & Mason Williams

Alden Projects™ announces Double Standard: Ed Ruscha & Mason Williams 1956 – 1971 (Part 1) to inaugurate a new ground floor gallery space at 34 Orchard Street, New York.

This historical exhibition unearths early dialogues, collaborations, and elective affinities between Ed Ruscha (b. 1938) and Mason Williams (b. 1937), Ruscha’s life long friend since fourth grade in Oklahoma. Unknown to a contemporary art audience, Williams occupied a unique, occasionally co-conspiratorial vantage in Ruscha’s early development. The two friends drove together in 1956 from Oklahoma to Los Angeles where they lived at various times as roommates. This exhibition is the first comprehensive look at the far-flung projects and Dada-inspired capers that the duo produced and co-published together--and in tandem--in convention-defying publications beginning as early as 1964. The title of this exhibition is drawn from Ruscha’s most sought after print, Double Standard (1969), which may surprise viewers to realize was actually a full-fledged collaboration between the two artists. Many other affinities are documented at Alden Projects™ for the first time.

This exhibition also focuses on a small, but extraordinary body of art by Mason Williams. On view is Williams’ 37 foot long Bus (1967)—a life-size, silkscreened image of a Greyhound bus conceived around the same time as Ruscha’s Sunset Strip. Another surprise is Sunflower (1967), Mason Williams’ series of never previously exhibited vintage photographs which document the artist’s attempt to make the world’s largest drawing of a sunflower--in smoke. "In 1967,” Williams recalls, "I had an idea for a film: to draw the world's biggest sunflower. The film was to be a slow-motion aerial ballet in which an old bi-wing aeroplane skywrites “draws” the stem and leaves of a flower in the sky beneath the sun, the sun itself thereby becoming the blossom of a ‘Sun’ flower." Although the film was unrealized for technical reasons, the photographs at Alden Projects™ are all that remain of this wonder-making caper. Williams cites Robert Smithson as an inspiring influence here, but the parallels with Ruscha’s use of areal photography—also in 1967 in Various Parking Lots)—are evident.

Other highlights include a focus on Ruscha and Williams’ weekend-long, desert road trip to Las Vegas (with Patrick Blackwell) in 1966, when the duo generated not one, but two seminal books together, The Night I Lost My Baby (1967) and Royal Road Test (1967); the latter matter-of-factly documents the results of throwing a Royal typewriter out the window of a speeding car on a desert highway. (Tellingly, Ruscha was “the driver,” and Williams “the thrower”). Alden Projects™ is pleased to announce the presence of previously unpublished archival materials.

In some ways, this exhibition represents the road not taken for Williams. Although his Bus (1967) was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969, the artist significantly abandoned visual art after achieving fame as a Grammy Award-winning composer (“Classical Gas” was a Top Ten Billboard Hit in 1968) and as an Emmy Award-winning screenwriter for the censored Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. While Ruscha’s originality stands in a class by itself, this is the story of two brilliant childhood friends who made perplexing publications together and separately, and who shared a curiosity to explore the surprising, ephemeral places that art can occupy in everyday life.

Ed Ruscha is represented by Gagosian Gallery.