Mason Williams | Bus

Mason Williams

Bus

Beverly Hills, USA: Blockbuster Bus Company, 1967

3.14 x 11.02 m.

Edition of 200 numbered copies

Mason Williams is best known as the composer and performer of the Grammy-winning instrumental hit "Classical Gas", from 1968. He was also a comedy writer, who contributed to the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and Saturday Night Live. Williams also published several artist's books and was close friends and roommates with Ed Ruscha, who designed the cover of his Music LP. The pair also collaborated on Ruscha's books Crackers and Royal Road Test (Williams threw the typewriter from the car).

This could be why his incredible example of 'size-as' photography has been received as both an art work and a prank. It was featured as the backdrop to performances on The Smothers Brothers show, and in a LIFE magazine article, but also at the Pasadena Art Museum, and more recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the Artists' Gifts show. It was also featured on the cover of The Mason Williams Phonograph Record, the LP where "Classical Gas" first appeared.

Williams remembers flipping through a magazine in 1967 and seeing a small photograph of a Greyhound and being struck by how readily we accept scale shifts in photography. He wondered what it would be like to flip through a book and discover a life-size image of a bus.

"I was going to make it as a book, 37 feet by 11 feet," he told an audience at MoCA in 2007, in his first ever artist-talk, "but I couldn't figure out how to fold it. I would've had to have been an origami master to figure that out, so it just ended up being a one-sheet in a box."

Williams hired photographer Max Yavno to shoot the bus on a 4 x 5 negative and had a Florida company print it on billboard paper, in sixteen segments. When the delivery arrived it weighed "2,200 pounds" and he had to hire a forklift to move it into his garage.

The taping of the sixteen sections into one large image was originally attempted at a tennis court belonging to the actor Dennis Weaver. Williams swept the court and laid the paper flat, but a gust of wind blew it up against the fence (hence the warning on the side of the box). He discovered that the only place large enough to collate the works were television sound stages. He convinced CBS to allow him to use their stage early in the morning, before the day's productions began.

The work was packaged in a beautifully designed cardboard clamshell box and weighed over ten pounds, giving the piece a sculptural presence. Ten fewer than the planned 200 were produced, as several were damaged during production. They originally retailed for $35 and currently the only copy listed at ABE.com is selling for $12,500.00 US., about the price of buying an actual 1967 Greyhound bus, I suspect.

The boxes of existing copies tend to be well worn, but often the poster inside is pristine. Artist Michael Asher donated his copy to the Museum of Contemporary Art, having never opened it in the many years he owned it, finding it satisfaction enough “just knowing that I had a bus in a box.”

""It began by accident," said Williams. "Sort of a put-on that grew." Folded into an 11-pound cardboard box, the project is boldly titled on the cover, "BUS," and in smaller type it says: "by Mason Williams. Warning-Do not open in the wind." "I made 200 copies," he said, "So far I've sold about 150. I charge only what they cost me—$35 each—so I don't make any money on it. The oversized bus was merely another whim-come-true for a man who has roadtested a Royal typewriter by throwing it out of a car, and "painted" a sunflower by skywriting stem and leaves around the sun— which was the blossom.”

- Billboard Magazine, 1968