Art review: 'Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take' at SMMoA

No, the big vinyl banner that says “Wave Goodbye to Grandma” in the middle of the new exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is not a healthcare debating fiction uttered by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). Instead, it's Conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg's way of marking an epochal transition.

Using the span of human lifetimes, including his own, Ruppersberg compiles printed matter of many different but familiar kinds to quietly escalate an elemental awareness of impermanence and change. Keyed to vernacular objects and mechanically reproduced images — books, records, newspaper clippings, family photo albums, postcards, snapshots, magazines and more — his work is like a mountainous archive of half-remembered, shared events from the not-too-distant past, temporarily sorted in the midst of slipping into inevitable decay. Wave goodbye to Grandma.

“You and Me and the Art of Give and Take,” as the surprisingly poignant exhibition is called, includes two new large-scale installations and a selection of 10 drawings and collages made between 1985 and 1989. Among those drawings is an exquisite set that clarifies Ruppersberg's objective.

Titled “The Gift and the Inheritance,” each is a pencil rendering that shows a single book from Ruppersberg's extensive library — Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Horatio Alger Jr. and even a "Tick Tock Tales" comic. The books are rendered diagonally on the page, in careful perspective as if glimpsed resting on a tabletop; but, in fact, the images are adrift in the blank white space of the sheet. The result is an uncanny sense of materiality given to an illusion — of drawing as both an activity in time and a physical object in space.

Ruppersberg's use of soft, dark graphite emphasizes inescapable relationships between drawing and writing, as well as their considerable differences. According to a wall text, each of these drawings comes with a pledge that, in the future, the actual book Ruppersberg drew will be sent to the drawing's owner as a bequest from the artist.

An unexpected sense of yearning begins to surround the work — a longing to know the past recorded in the historical publication, as well as for the promised inheritance that will arrive at an unknowable moment in the future. Like Proust's madeleines, the drawings are their own strange brand of tick-tock tales. One is left with the luminous experience of perception, in search of lost time.

The exhibition's two new installations depend on a tall, wide wall that cuts across the museum's main gallery. One side is covered in peg-board.

More than 350 sheets of graphic imagery hang from the peg-board on hooks. Laminated in plastic, the graphics are divided in two primary groups: pre-World War II sheet music, material from a time when playing instruments or singing at home was participatory entertainment; and fliers and handbills for late-1970s punk performances, another do-it-yourself form of musical entertainment, albeit played out in public rather than private.

Like flies in aspic, these laminated representations of auditory sounds can be rearranged on the wall at will. The sheet music incorporates pictures and lyrics of decorous romance and period racism, the punk posters indecorous tantrums and bleak despair. On the wall, they merge to create a gigantic Dada nonsense-poem. You are invited to rearrange it at will.

That poem — dedicated to Hugo Ball, author of the 1916 Dada Manifesto, a shriek against the insanity of modern warfare — partakes of both the private and the public entertainments represented in the materials. Like Phil Spector's rock 'n' roll era separating the two moments that Ruppersberg italicizes, it makes a literal “wall of sound.” And like Ball, who fled the mindless brutality of World War I, it is a visual-noise-jamming art that stands against the cruelty of our own time.

The second installation is on the other side of the wall, where the “Wave Goodbye to Grandma” banner is displayed on a wall papered over with photocopies. Ruppersberg has filled specially made cardboard boxes with thousands of copies of pictures from his archives — book pages, photo albums, clippings, sheet music, food-section recipes (Rabbit pie, potato doughnuts, etc.) and more — all free for the taking. Visitors are invited to riffle through the boxes and make selections, participating in a collaborative effort to produce “The Never Ending Book Part 2/Art and Therefore Ourselves.”

The boxes, plus some light-boxes affixed with color transparencies of old photographs, are arranged on top of tables, chairs, stairways and other furniture adapted from theatrical stage-designs of the 1940s — the decade of the artist's birth. Painted in solid colors of the rainbow, the furniture makes all the world a child-like stage. We are players in it.

Ruppersberg, 65, has been working in an interactive mode for 40 years, ever since he arrived in Los Angeles from Ohio to attend the old Chouinard Art Institute (now Cal Arts). Much of his work has required the construction of a social environment in which art's meanings emerge from clarified networks of human relationships.

He famously cooked for weekly visitors to “Al's Cafe” in 1969, although the food was not necessarily edible in the usual way. (A Ruppersberg “Patti Melt,” for example, was a photograph of singer Patti Page, slathered in toasted marshmallows.)  In 1971 he offered stays in specially designed rooms at “Al's Hotel.”  These projects anticipated by a generation the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carsten Höller and other 1990s purveyors of so-called “relational aesthetics.”

One of the most appealing aspects of the two new installations in the Santa Monica show, smartly organized by guest curator Constance Lewallen, is the bracket formed by the material. On one side is the time between the two World Wars, which created the experience into which Ruppersberg, a child of World War II, was born. The other loosely encompasses the period between Vietnam and Iraq, the decades of his adulthood. From the Great Depression to the Great Recession, Ruppersberg has erected a marvelous clarifying lens for where American culture stands today.

-- Christopher Knight

Photos: from "Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take"; credit: Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times

“Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave.; 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Ends Dec. 19. $5. (310) 586-6488

Comments

[big shot]

allen ruppersberg is a master and one heck of a nice guy

[Donald Frazell]

Of self absorbed kitcsh, Will boomers never tire of babbling on and on about thier supposedly glorious lives, which are really examples of magnified self and material consumed mediocrity. Where is humanity, where is nature, where is god? This aint art. Call it what you want, and give it some acclaim and supposed gratness, but crative art it ain. Call a spade a spade, and this is homeroom in first grade. Grow up.

Saying this is art is like comparing table tennis to basketball, not exctly the same breadth of skill and athleticism, and barely a sport, as this if it is, barely an art, certainly not the creative art that is supposed to go in museums. This is why i avoid SMMoA as much as MoCA, its all about mirror gazing soft do nothing narcissists.

The Age of Meism and Excess is over, time to put aside childish things.

art collegia delenda est

[someone in San Diego]

Oh dear, how sad that you Donald can not see beyond the end of your nose or be open enough to get past your tiny brain. Ruppersberg has been relevant for a long time and apparently you just can't stand it.

[BT]

Mr. Frazell, please give it a rest. You've repeated your "this ain't art" mantra on this blog far beyond the point that it is capable of contributing anything constructive to the discussion. If you want to add something to the conversation about art, I suggest that you focus on the art or institutions you do approve of and champion those; leave the those poor fools, chumps, narcissists, whoever-they-are that find something in it to wallow in their "Meism and Excess" without your monotonous heckling. If there is anything substantive to your critique, demonstrate it by supporting (or creating) the work you'd like to see valued by others; are cranky rants against "boomers" and art schools really the best you've got?

[Donald Frazell]

I actually have supported artists quite often on this site, simply not nearly as often as i would like as childish drivel is what is so often presented as art these days. There is perhaps only one truly great artist at the moment, Anselm Kiefer, but a few who produce good works. MoLAA here in Long Beach often does, as Latin art is much stronger than that of Norte America and our voracious consumer society these days.

Those working after the beginning of the narcissistic age in about 1960, with the still birth of contemporary art, are mostly dead now. Tamayo, Diebenkorn, Francis, and many who are not quite of the first rank. Like locally the late Robert Graham and Carlos Almaraz. Many of those who had grown from the earlier time continued to create excellent work, but as they have died off, as with the great pioneers of jazz, has led to a weaker field. And one that took over, one of consumerism and career over passion and relevance to mankind. It is now all about the marketed class, rich and middle class white kids,severely limited in knowledge and mature passion.

And so you get this. Its about spoiled soft kids, those who live in their own past, and truly dont live at all. Its a huge world, life is OUT there, not inside. We are only what we bring into ourselves, the sum of our decisions, and must have fuel to burn. Not dried leaves, but solid oak. This is tofu, or more appropriately Captain Crunch, compared to a gourmet meal. For the anorexic, metrosexual, over educated, under comprehensive class, its perfect. And so irrelevant to humanity as a whole. Arts true concern.

Playtime is over.

art collegia delenda est

[William Wray]

please don't call tracings of photos drawings.

[Cate]

While reading this story, I half-remembered some lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

All the world’s a child-like stage. Wave goodbye to the Grandpa Frazells.
Here’s to us all growing a little younger every day.

Cate (a.k.a. A Free "American Idiot" Lancer)

[Donald Frazell]

No, you youngsters are the ones who have gotten soft because of a care free life, one wiht no repsonsibilities or ahrd work. Adversity breeds character, and the last few generations have none. And go to art schools to avoid having to work, Michael Jackson and Neverland their ideas of a good life. LOL!

There is much work to do, the world is changing rapidly, and WE will fail if the naive and lazy run it, already did with W in charge.

art collegia delenda est
click on the name and learn, Wendy.
Quoting Shakepeare, a play about death and personal accountability, as seen by a third grader. LOL!
If not so sad.

[canvas101]

allen ruppersberg is a talented man. You cannot deny this fact.