Ed Ruscha's OOF painting is a real survivor.

In 1962, it was passed between Ruscha’s buddies. Ruscha first lent it to his childhood buddy Mason Williams, who at the time was working as a writer for the left-of-center comedy TV show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Williams, in turn, lent OOF to Tommy Smothers, one of the stars of the show. One fateful day, the painting slipped from the wall of Smothers’s house and fell facedown onto a chessboard, which inflicted multiple puncture wounds on the canvas. Oof indeed!

I’d love to know how Ruscha personally reacted to the debacle. I doubt there was much bad blood between these fellows since Williams, Smothers, and Ruscha would collaborate on projects in the future (for instance, a film called Premium, which centers on some smutty hotel room behavior involving saltines, lettuce, and Leon Bing…)

Ruscha took the painting back from Smothers, had it repaired, did some repainting, and hung onto it until 1988. There was a payoff in the end--wealthy museum donors pooled their funds, and the painting now lives at MoMA.

A good deal of Ruscha’s work from the early ‘60s features short, weird words that seem more from the realm of comic books than art galleries (check out Honk, Smash, Noise, and Won’t). Ruscha was “interested in monosyllabic word sounds that seemed to have a certain comedic value to them.” And “Oof” was a word with a distinct special quality. “It had one foot in the world of cartooning...You get punched in the stomach, and that’s ‘Oof.’ It was so obvious, and so much a part of my growing up in the U.S.A. I felt like it was almost a patriotic word.” 

Somehow, Ruscha’s paintings can visually articulate the connotation, cultural associations, and feelings that are implicit in one goofy little word.