Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018
Edited with text by Siri Engberg. Introduction by Olga Viso. Text by Thomas Crow, Matthew S. Witkovsky, Aram Moshayedi, Allen Ruppersberg.
The artist as collector and champion of the American vernacular
Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 accompanies a major retrospective exhibition on one of conceptual art’s most inventive and acclaimed practitioners. Emerging in late-1960s Los Angeles, Ruppersberg was among that city’s first generation of conceptual artists to espouse a working method that privileges ideas and process over conventional aesthetic objects. Deploying posters, books, postcards and even a café and hotel, his projects have consistently had at their center a focus on the American vernacular—its music, popular imagery and ephemera—mining the nuances of culture through its unsung conventions. From his earliest works, the artist has also welcomed the involvement of the viewer as participant, inviting an immersive experience of his work through language, visual density, accumulated elements and ideas.
This fully illustrated catalog is the most comprehensive publication to date on Ruppersberg’s work, featuring a wealth of scholarly content and critical writing connecting Ruppersberg’s work to the larger contemporary art field. Produced by the Walker’s award-winning design studio and in close collaboration with the artist, the book presents a holistic view of Ruppersberg’s wide-ranging, 50-year practice.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1944, Allen Ruppersberg has been the subject of more than 60 solo shows. His only other US retrospective, The Secret of Life and Death, was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1985. His work is in the collection of public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Le Fonds Ronal d’Art, among many others. Ruppersberg lives and works in Los Angeles, Cleveland and New York.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Twin Cities Arts Reader
Posters? Check. Comic? Check. Book covers? Check! Record covers? Check-check! This is just a small sample of Allen Ruppersberg’s broad body of work… a 50-year retrospective.
Minneapolis Post
Pamela Espeland
Full of ideas, playfulness and wit…. permeated with a sense of humor and respect for artists who came before.
CityPages
Camille LeFevre
Fasten your seatbelts. We’re heading back to the future with this retrospective of Allen Ruppersberg’s still-fresh multimedia works…. Installations. Photo narratives. Drawings. Films. This collection has it all…. Dig through the layers or dwell on the surface quality. There’s much to behold.
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"The Cafe was intended to be a limited-run restaurant, staged once a week—Thursday nights from eight to eleven—in a rented location in downtown Los Angeles. It was to function socially as a meeting place for friends, members of the art world, and anyone else who wanted to drop by… Against all Minimalist, Post-Minimalist, and Conceptualist expectations, this cafe was not an idea as an idea as an idea; it was sumptuously filled with romantic detail, suggesting a cafe that had existed for a lifetime of years and was filled with Middle American memorabilia—posters, nature calendars, fishing paraphernalia, pinups, picture postcards, and autographed photos of movie stars and sports heroes. It was a place where any American would have felt at home. It was exorbitantly familiar.” Allan McCollum on Allen Ruppersberg's "Al's Café," photographed here in 1969, and reproduced from the Walker Art Center'sAllen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968-2018. continue to blog
Featured photograph, of west coast conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg in his Karmann Ghia, Los Angeles, c. 1969, is reproduced from the Walker Art Center's fascinating new thirty-year Ruppersberg retrospective exhibition catalog. And what a book: four different front cover designs, newsprint text sections, bound-in booklets of personal photographs, and killer graphic motifs are bound together by top-notch essays and text contributions by Siri Engberg, Olga Viso, Thomas Crow, Matthew S. Witkovsky, Aram Moshayedi, and Ruppersberg himself. "Ruppersberg is symptomatic of a younger generation of artists determined not to be trapped by their own trademark," the Los Angeles Times wrote in an October 5, 1970 review from Ruppersberg's clippings collection. "He works with photographs, books, scraps of paper. A few months back he opened a "Restaurant" where the dishes were in little assemblages. His materials are more than common. They are positively anonymous. His reference points are not just other art, we have seen the inbred hybrids that result from that. It is an art that manages to be concerned about broad social and ecological issues as well as the most miniscule autobiographical data." continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8.25 x 11.75 in. / 352 pgs / 120 color / 100 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $79 GBP £53.00 ISBN: 9781935963165 PUBLISHER: Walker Art Center AVAILABLE: 4/24/2018 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018
Published by Walker Art Center. Edited with text by Siri Engberg. Introduction by Olga Viso. Text by Thomas Crow, Matthew S. Witkovsky, Aram Moshayedi, Allen Ruppersberg.
The artist as collector and champion of the American vernacular
Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968–2018 accompanies a major retrospective exhibition on one of conceptual art’s most inventive and acclaimed practitioners. Emerging in late-1960s Los Angeles, Ruppersberg was among that city’s first generation of conceptual artists to espouse a working method that privileges ideas and process over conventional aesthetic objects. Deploying posters, books, postcards and even a café and hotel, his projects have consistently had at their center a focus on the American vernacular—its music, popular imagery and ephemera—mining the nuances of culture through its unsung conventions. From his earliest works, the artist has also welcomed the involvement of the viewer as participant, inviting an immersive experience of his work through language, visual density, accumulated elements and ideas.
This fully illustrated catalog is the most comprehensive publication to date on Ruppersberg’s work, featuring a wealth of scholarly content and critical writing connecting Ruppersberg’s work to the larger contemporary art field. Produced by the Walker’s award-winning design studio and in close collaboration with the artist, the book presents a holistic view of Ruppersberg’s wide-ranging, 50-year practice.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1944, Allen Ruppersberg has been the subject of more than 60 solo shows. His only other US retrospective, The Secret of Life and Death, was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1985. His work is in the collection of public institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Le Fonds Ronal d’Art, among many others. Ruppersberg lives and works in Los Angeles, Cleveland and New York.
