Siste Viator (Stop Traveler)

With its ready-made appearance, Siste Viator (Stop Traveler) bears witness to Allen Ruppersberg’s conceptual exploration of the way everyday objects are loaded with memories, meaning and independent consciousness. The work presents a set of two World War II era bookends and twenty facsimile books in four languages – English, Dutch, Polish and German. One book in each language printed in its entirety, whilst the others are printed with their covers only. Ruppersberg has inscribed each bookplate with a soldier's name, creating an evocative memorial to British, Dutch, Polish and German war casualties. ‘Siste Viator’, or ‘Stop Traveler’, is in fact the first sentence of many epitaphs found carved in war memorials, asking the passer-by to pause in mourning of the soldiers fallen on the battlefield. As the artist describes, ‘This work is a collection of narratives. It is about the telling of stories both fact and fiction. A memorial to individual memories and the reading of books of the private imagination combined with the public, political history. A link is established between the private experience and public memory. As this era of World War II recedes from the realm of immediate experience, I propose to create in the public mind a new personal memory that is not just another replaceable image. Dignity in a memorial is usually associated with stone and statue, with pose and gesture and with the body. I propose a similar attitude with words, as was once done with an epitaph. A comparison of words, a collision of worlds, nationalities, ideas, ideals, and kinds of literature. This work then is a reconstruction and an exhibition of history in free association to create a continuity between various narrative acts which give shape to the random acts of history’ (A. Ruppersberg, quoted in A. McCollum, ‘What One Loves About Life Are the Things That Fade’, in Allen Ruppersberg:Books, Inc, Limousin 2001).