CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/2/2018

Determined not to be trapped by his own trademark: Allen Ruppersberg

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."