 |
| The Roger Miller Show Storyboards: England Swings (details). 1966. Concept by Mason WIlliams. Drawings by Ed Ruscha. |
Work For Hire: Ed Ruscha & Mason Williams
October
30 – November 29, 2015
Opening
October 30, 6 - 8 pm
Alden Projects’ Work For Hire: Ed
Ruscha & Mason Williams (October 30 – November 29, 2015) is the first exhibition of unique
drawings made by Ed Ruscha produced in tandem with his life-long friend, and
fellow artist, Mason Williams for storyboards giving form to narrative ideas for
a 1966 television show, The Roger Miller
Show. The series featured the eponymous country singer, fellow Oklahoman,
and fabled writer of the classic Pop song, “King of the Road” (1965)—a particularly
serendipitous, peripatetic association for the royal road testers, Ruscha and
Williams.
Produced at the same time as the duo co-authored and co-published Royal Road Test (1967), all of The Roger
Miller Show Storyboards (1966) were
intended as “cold openings”—the dramatic action that happens prior to a show’s
titles. Executed on pre-printed storyboard panels, they are divided into two
sections: a lower panel for Williams’ type-written, narrative directions and the
larger, television-shaped panel above for Ruscha’s renderings in graphite,
marker, and gouache. All are consecutively numbered by Ruscha. The Roger Miller Show Storyboards were created at a moment in time
when Williams, in his salad days, imagined the medium of television as a
potentially rich, creative space for art and for fine artists. And for this
reason, he personally invited his close friend, Ed Ruscha, to work together with
him on his first stab at writing for television. (The concepts and drawings
were executed between April – August 1966).
Instead of delivering what the network wanted, Williams and Ruscha
worked “outside the box,” turning convention on its head. “The producers kept telling me that variety
shows were based on ‘packaging’ the star for the viewing audience.” The first
storyboard, Roger in a Box (1966) was
conceived as the first “cold opening” of the show’s premiere, a humorous
narrative featuring the star of the show, Roger Miller, being literally
delivered to an NBC studio in a wooden crate, stencil-marked by Ruscha,
“Contents: (1) TV Personality.” Eventually, the box is delivered to a stage,
where the “packaged star” saws holes (from inside the box) to enable himself to
strum a guitar hanging on the outside. He becomes, in essence, a live music
jukebox. “The crate metaphorically represents the fact that Roger had to be
packaged and delivered to NBC Television,” Williams explains. “This is a
package from me delivered to NBC that has Roger Miller in it! He comes in a crate.”
Too subversive, too self-reflexive, and too
ahead of its time, the producers rejected the storyboards as well
as Williams and Ruscha’s adoption of the visual
storyboard format, saying: “We don’t use storyboarding. All we go by is a
script,” Williams recalls. “I had thought that television, being a visual
medium, was a place for artists to express ideas visually. I think me and Ed
and TV lost out on this.” Nevertheless, The Roger Miller Show Storyboards remain potent signposts for roads not taken by the pair of
artists together.
Unlike Warhol’s work-for-hire drawings from the 1950s, the storyboards were
executed during the beating heart of Ruscha’s signal era of the 1960s when in
the midst of conceiving his most groundbreaking work-- particularly his perplexing
publications which the artist himself considers to be his most important work. (Both Every
Building on the Sunset Strip and The
Roger Miller Show debuted in September 1966). Also contrary to Warhol,
Ruscha’s storyboard drawings differ dramatically in context, purpose and scope.
The Roger Miller Show Storyboards were
created at Mason Williams’ personal invitation to his roommate, frequent
co-conspirator, and sometimes collaborator who had driven across Route 66 from
Oklahoma to Los Angeles with him in 1956, and whose impulse to include Ruscha
in his very first days of visualizing for television was expansive: to open the
door to an ongoing, creative collaboration with a kindred spirit. Suddenly finding
himself “in the money,” as Williams put it, his first gesture in April 1966 was
to share the opportunity with his roommate.
The pair also shared, for example, a love of Dada-like capers, word
play, graphic signs, fonts, titles, and subversive humor—all of which are
evident in The Roger Miller Show Storyboards.
Williams briefly continued writing for the King of the Road, and later, for the
Smothers Brothers’ variety show, though he changed his tune portentously
concerning the potential for advanced artists (and musicians) in television only
a couple of years later, after encountering some well-chronicled road blocks.
(Williams moved away from Hollywood in 1971). But this exhibition looks back to
a particular moment in time in 1966 before the road diverged when two not-quite-famous-yet
artists nearly took art, music and television on another convention-subverting
road trip through the nascent matrix of inter-media. The Roger Miller Storyboards are a glimpse into what that world
might have looked like.
Williams, after all, had only fallen into television by chance after
working on the early West Coast folk circuit, writing (and producing) songs for
The Kingston Trio and publishing peculiar books (inspired by the example of his
Los Angeles roommate). Williams was hired to write for television on a fluke: Roger
Miller ran across his first book, Bicyclists
Dismount (1964)--with photographic covers by Ed Ruscha--on a coffee table
in Hollywood and decided that the Oklahoman should be hired at once.
In addition to his work-for-hire
drawings for The Roger Miller Storyboards,
Ed Ruscha also produced other such art with Mason Williams, including the cover
of Mason Williams 1969 long-playing record, “Music”. Ruscha’s ultra-distilled cover
(created, like the storyboards, together with Mason Williams), consists of the dead-pan
title, a single word: “music” mechanically printed on top of Ruscha’s
hand-painted, color-fading ground. The art was initially rejected by the executives
at Warner Brothers who objected to the unconventional omission of the recording
artist’s name (Mason Williams) on the front cover. Ultimately, the conflict was
resolved after Williams agreed to have his name printed on a sticker affixed to
the top of the disposable shrink-wrap—thus preserving the integrity of the art
and its punchy minimalism. Ruscha’s credit is noted at the bottom of the back
cover: “Sorry, cover by Ed Ruscha”--a final, sly wise-crack aimed at the record
executives who didn’t want the concept/design in the first place. Anecdote: the
hand-painted elements of Ruscha’s artwork for “Music” no longer exists, having
been discarded long ago by Warner Brothers executives.
Fortunately, Williams and Ruscha valued The Roger Miller Storyboards enough to preserve
them. They make an abbreviated appearance in Mason Williams’ artist’s
book, The Mason Williams F.C.C. Rapport (which was originally assembled
to present before the Federal Communications Commission in 1969) to address
urgent questions about the relationship between art, creativity, and
television.
This is the first time that The Roger Miller Show Storyboards have been exhibited publicly.
Work for Hire: Ed Ruscha & Mason
Williams is the
second part of a two part exhibition at Alden Projects™, following Double Standard: Ed Ruscha & Mason
Williams 1956 -1971 (September 10 – October 18, 2015).