ART-PRESENTATION: Allen Ruppersberg-Intellectual Property 1968/2018,Part II

Among the artists of Conceptual art’s first wave and one of its most rigorous and inventive figures, Allen Ruppersberg has since the late 1960s maintained a practice that invites a continued reinvestigation of mass culture and its byproducts. His enduring influence comes from what has from the beginning been an approach to making art that is decidedly nonhierarchical, open to mixing media, techniques, and styles, while moving freely from one idea to the next (Part I).

By Dimitrios Lempesis
Photo: The Hammer Museum Archive

The Allen Ruppersberg’s retrospective “Intellectual Property 1968-2018” at The Hammer Museum features 120 works made over the past 50 years divided in 5 thematic sections, and includes Ruppersberg’s photo works combining text and image, early assemblage sculptures, and his groundbreaking environments participatory projects that helped put Los Angeles on the map as a center for Conceptual Art. Since the 1970s, the artist has drawn from his vast archive of books, newspapers, records, films, and ephemera to create work ranging from meticulously detailed drawings of books to sculptures derived from vintage comics. Ruppersberg moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s with the goal of becoming an illustrator, but soon became active in an emerging scene alongside artists such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, William Leavitt, and others exploring the interface of language and image filtered through the lens of mass culture. By the mid-1970s, Allen Ruppersberg was actively working between Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. Ruppersberg’s projects have always had at their center a focus on the American vernacular or, as the artist characterizes it, the “vocabulary of the ordinary”. The artist has drawn from his vast archive of books, newspapers, records, films, and ephemera to create work ranging from meticulously detailed drawings of books to collages made from calendars to sculptures derived from vintage comics. Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, he has mined the nuances of culture through its visual details, unsung conventions and modes of the everyday, often welcoming the involvement of the viewer as social participant, an aspect of his work that has had particular resonance with a younger generation of artists. The exhibition is divided in four thematic sections. Locations: 1968–1973: the exhibition includes a range of Ruppersberg’s earliest “Location Pieces” made as site-specific projects or assemblages and show his engagement with found objects and elements from nature. Also included are examples of the artist’s photo works, primarily made in and around Los Angeles between 1968-1974, in which he formed wry narrative vignettes using text and image. In the key early works “Al’s Café” (1969) and “Al’s Grand Hotel” (1971), he created viewer-activated spaces, in this case a functioning café with small assemblage sculptures served as “meals” and later a hotel, complete with themed guest rooms and entertainment. Deftly combining sculpture, performance, and the prepared environment, it can be seen today as progenitors of what became known in the 1990s as relational aesthetics. Reading and Copying: 1974–1984:  Ruppersberg’s affinity for novels, screenplays, newspaper articles, and other writing have informed much of his work since the mid-1970s. Some works depict books as objects, as in the painting “Greetings from California” (1972), where a book floats over the Hollywood hills. Other works use his own handwriting, as in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1974), a series of 20 canvases onto which he transcribed the entire text of Oscar Wilde’s novel in felt-tipped pen. “Remainders” (1991) is a sculptural work comprised of custom-made, imitation mass-produced books, displayed as if on a bookstore’s discount table. “Reading Standing Up” (2004-08) is a tiled floor containing a poem to be walked on and read at the same time. The Archive: 1985–2003: contains a range of works drawn from the artist’s vast repository of books, magazines, comic books, newspapers, posters, records, and films. This section features “Cover Art” (1985), a series of photo-collages made from vintage wall calendars; “Lectures and Film Screenings” (1994), a walk-in installation that evokes a school hallway with audible lectures behind its doors and a window into an “audiovisual room” with aging televisions playing instructional films; “Big Trouble” (2010), a large-scale work based on Uncle Scrooge McDuck comics of the 1950s; and “The New Five Foot Shelf” (2001), in which life-size photographs of the artist’s former New York studio line the gallery walls, creating an immersive and unconventional self-portrait. Memorials: 2004–2018:  many of Ruppersberg’s later works laud or memorialize fellow artists, poets, novelists, and musicians who were crucial to his own development as an artist. In “Rauschenberg” (2014), a 44-foot collage comprised of cut and collaged letters, he transcribes Robert Rauschenberg’s obituary from the New York Times word for word, creating a poignant portrait. Several of his large-scale memorials are showcased in the exhibition, including “The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsburg’s Howl by Allen Ruppersberg (Part 1-3)” (2003/2005), a mural-scaled work in which the famous Beat poem is printed phonetically on vibrantly colored advertising posters made at L.A.’s now-defunct Colby Poster Printing Company.

Info: Curator: Siri Engberg, Assistant Curators: Jordan Carter and Fabián Leyva-Barragán, The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, Duration: 10/2-12/5/19,Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11 :00-17 :00, https://hammer.ucla.edu