“You want people to see something that is important, and it’s your job as an artist to focus that somehow.” Inside his studio in El Segundo, California, Allen Ruppersberg discusses the roles collecting and copying play in his practice—and how ephemera, from old comic strips and advertising signage to historical materials from the Walker Art Center Archives, makes its way into his art.
Bootlegging Al: Designing the Catalogue for Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018
How do you bootleg contemporary art? In designing the catalogue for Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018, Ben Schwartz started with the exhibition's title, which nods to the theme of copyright that spans the artist's 50-year oeuvre. Referencing pop cultural traces in the work—borrowed, copied, stolen, and subverted—he set out to create "a giant cultural bootleg filtered through a Ruppersbergian lens."
Collector’s Paradise: Greil Marcus on Allen Ruppersberg’s Rock ’n’ Roll Chronology
From collaborations with musicians like Terry Allen to his El Segundo Record Club, music has played a vital role in Allen Ruppersberg's art. A keen observer of this thread in his work is critic Greil Marcus, author of music histories including Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989) and The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (2014). Here Marcus zeroes in on Ruppersberg's passion through Collector's Paradise, a 2012 book that traces rock history through some 1,500 recordings in the artist's collection, from Gipsy Smith's "Saved By Grace" (1909) to Al Green's "Full of Fire" (1975).
In 1978, Allen Ruppersberg offered his friends and supporters a chance to be in a novel he aimed to write: $300 would buy a “leading character,” $150 a “major character,” and so on. As the work progressed, he had the Colby poster company make posters listing the names of those who had signed up for the project, which served as gifts to his donors, coming attractions–type announcements, and works of art in their own right. The novel was never completed, but as Jan Tumlir writes in this essay from Rupperserg's The Novel That Writes Itself, "something clicked," and from this point onward the iconic Colby posters became a regular feature in his work.
Opening-Day Talk: Allen Ruppersberg with Aram Moshayedi
Allen Ruppersberg's conceptual art practice has for five decades focused on the American vernacular—its books, music, popular images, and everyday ephemera. "It's definitely about saving things that I think are worthwhile and that might disappear but that also goes back to the beginnings of thinking about what you want to make," the artist told Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi during the opening-day talk for Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018, the artist’s first comprehensive US survey in more than 30 years. "You know you're making things out of ephemeral and throwaway stuff for a reason, and that's to say that this can be art too."
