ED RUSCHA: “PREMIUM”
Excuse me. Excuse me.
Dirty room.
Residents of the building,
unhappy,
sit down in it.
Crackers! I forgot the crackers.
Have to go to the store & get the crackers.
A market right here.
PREMIUM [crackers].
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 6-16-05 (1:39 AM)
This text was not written after provisionally finishing a previous work
from the same sitting. Nor does it follow from it. The process wasn’t
exactly simultaneous, but it certainly wasn’t serial. Rather, “FILM, [E]D
[R]USCHA”, posted last week, was in progress while “ED RUSCHA: ‘PREMIUM’”
was in progress. Taking into consideration this artist’s laconic manner
and the brevity of his two 16 mm films from the seventies (“PREMIUM”
and “MIRACLE”), I was trying to increase the odds of eventually completing
at least one work. In fact, my attempt to write an acrostic sixteener
during my viewing of “MIRACLE” failed. Had I known in advance
that “PREMIUM” was based on the same story by Mason Williams from which
Ruscha composed his 1969 artists’ book “CRACKERS”, I would hardly have
attempted to write watching it. Only one word appears between the covers
of that book amidst numerous film stills snapped by the artists Ken Price,
Joe Goode, and Ed Ruscha. But apparently Ruscha felt that the movie
version gave him “the opportunity to be a raconteur”. A surprising amount
of language written/found by Ed Ruscha could be heard/seen, including 5
lines which found their way into last week’s contribution to the Snapshot
Project.
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