For Your Eyes Only (1)

A pioneer of the first generation of West Coast Conceptual artists, Allen Ruppersberg, alongside contemporaries such as Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari, used language as imagery, producing art for the first time through exclusively linguistic means. However, Ruppersberg cannot simply be defined as a text-based artist. Through his incorporation of found objects his work is less made, than chosen. His body of work consists of a hybrid style that combines installation, performance, books, painting, photography, and sculpture, utilizing a personal collection of printed ephemera as its main source material. A scavenger of American pop culture, Ruppersberg, for over 40 years, has amassed a collection of discarded posters, sheet music, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, comics, books, and stationary from both contemporary times and previous eras. Unlike his peers, Ruppersberg continually endeavors to make conceptual art that is more familiar, approachable, and ultimately more directly related to the experience of everyday life. At times defining himself as not an artist but as an observer and custodian, Ruppersberg says, “what always seems overlooked and neglected is more interesting than what's right out in front…The art is to choose the meaningful from the not meaningful” (A. Ruppersberg, quoted by C. Donegan, “BOMB - Artists in Conversation,” Bomb Magazine, Sept. 2009). By recovering, reinterpreting and reproducing printed memorabilia that is often disposed of and forgotten, Ruppersberg reinvigorates the ephemeral elements of the American vernacular and mass media, imbuing them with new meaning and thus teasing out the details of existence within the American cultural landscape.

This series For Your Eyes Only, is emblematic of the artist’s oeuvre. Ruppersberg’s use of hotel stationary recurs as a frequent component in his art, inviting the viewer to not only participate in the collecting and construction of his own personal history, but also the dissemination of Americana. At times Ruppersberg’s entire body of work can been seen as an integrated whole, each piece a recovered memory from the artist’s personal and cultural narrative. There is a haunting nostalgia imbedded within the hotel stationary pieces, implying a transitory moment suspended and forgotten in time. Such objects are presented without context or authorship and one is never quite sure where Ruppersberg is within his own art. Therefore the work becomes at once deeply personal and totally anonymous. The artist is both ever-present and disappearing. It is within this absence that the spectator is required to actively participate in the construction of a narrative. Through forcing the viewer to question, to search for the artist’s voice, Ruppersberg both reinvigorates a collective past through viewer interaction, and ultimately drives the spectator to discover that the narrative they have been searching for is in fact their own.