CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/3/2018

The first major Allen Ruppersberg retrospective in more than 30 years

"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's Allen Ruppersberg: Intellectual Property 1968-2018.