“The single word, its guttural monosyllabic pronunciation, that’s what I was passionate about,” Ruscha has said of his early work. “Loud words, like slam, smash, honk.” The comic-book quality of these words reflects the Pop artists’ fascination with popular culture. Lettered in clear typography rather than handwriting, the words are definite and impersonal in shape; unlike the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and ’50s, Ruscha had no interest in letting a painting emerge through an introspective process: “I began to see that the only thing to do would be a preconceived image. It was an enormous freedom to be premeditated about my art.”
Like OOF, many of his paintings have “a certain comedic value,” Ruscha has said, and their humor is underlined by the paradox of their appearance in the silent medium of paint, with neither an image nor a sentence to help them evoke the sounds they denote. OOF is particularly paradoxical, as a word describing a wordless grunt. In Ruscha’s hands, its double Os also punned on recent American paintings—the Targets of Jasper Johns and the Circles of Kenneth Noland.
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
Rarely uttered aloud, the work "oof" belongs to the world of comic strips, not the great literature and art, and particularly not to painting. We expect the emphatic word to appear wrapped in a speech bubble with an exclamation point at the end, but Ruscha has dedicated a large-scale painting to it as if it were worthy of veneration. Of his work from this period Ruscha has said, "I was interested in monosyllabic word sounds that seemed to have a certain comedic value to them." In capital letters, "oof" floats against an empty blue backdrop, suspended somewhere between image and language and between iconicity and absurdity.
Gallery label from 2008
