LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum presents a major retrospective on the work of Conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944, Cleveland), the artist’s first comprehensive US survey in over 30 years. Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 is an opportunity to experience the artist’s work with unprecedented breadth and depth. Many of the works included, from private and public collections in Europe and elsewhere, have never before been exhibited in US museums. Organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where it premiered in March 2018, the exhibition will be on view at the Hammer Museum from February 10 – May 12, 2019.
“Allen Ruppersberg has been a force in Los Angeles for many decades,” said Hammer director Ann Philbin. “He was a key figure in establishing our city as a center for Conceptual art with innovative projects like Al’s Cafe (1969), which functioned at once as sculpture, environment, and performance. This seminal work is part of the Hammer’s collection, and we’re thrilled to share 50 years of this artist’s impressive career.”
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. His early projects—including environments made with found objects; wry, narrative photo works; and redrawn book covers—began a career-long practice of creating works that prompt both reading and looking, and that intertwine fact with fiction.
By the mid-1970s, he 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.
Featuring more than 120 works made over the past 50 years, the exhibition includes Ruppersberg’s photo works combining text and image, early assemblage sculptures, and his groundbreaking environments Al’s Cafe (1969) and Al’s Grand Hotel (1971), participatory projects that helped put Los Angeles on the map as a center for Conceptual art.
Exhibition 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 Cafe (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 “From the very beginning,” Ruppersberg noted, “I found that the things I was looking to make had as much to do with words as with pictures.” His 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 (2004-2008) is a tiled floor containing a poem to be walked on and read at the same time.
The Archive: 1985–2003 “I am definitely a custodian of obscure and disappearing things of all sorts,” Ruppersberg remarked, considering his own process of translating the archival into art. The exhibition includes 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 selfportrait.
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.
Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 is organized by the Walker Art Center, and curated by senior curator Siri Engberg, with assistance from curatorial fellows Jordan Carter and Fabián Leyva Barragán. The Hammer’s presentation is organized by curator Aram Moshayedi, with curatorial assistant Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi.
