artist 49

Allen Ruppersberg

Allen Ruppersberg was born in 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio.  Ruppersberg graduated with a bachelor of fine arts from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now California Institute of the Arts) in 1967.  From the beginning, Ruppersberg was fascinated with pulp fiction novels, magazines, posters, and films.  He drew his inspiration from the stuff of everyday life and culture.  He is one of the first generation of American conceptual artists that changed the way art was thought about and made. His work includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, and books. He now lives and works in New York and Santa Monica, California.

Allen Ruppersberg's philosophy is to use language as a means of expression in its own right. He has drawn on all the different sectors of the mass media and the consumer society from a critical viewpoint.  For an artist interested in the cultural mythologies, narratives, and common truths of everyday life, his collection of materials, featuring mostly items from American popular culture of the mid 20th century, has frequently served as fertile source material in his work. 

An early example of an installation that Ruppersberg created was Al's Café, in which Ruppersberg created a functioning café for 3 months.  The point of the café was to memorialize the time period through one of the most popular and beloved motifs.  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. In direct opposition to what one might have expected from a young artist at the time, the decor was familiar to the point of strangeness: hyperfamiliar, you might say today. The look was as crafted as a movie set, true to the period, though the period could have been anywhere from 1925 to 1969. 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. The patterns of the tablecloths were everyday plaid, the counter and the tables and chairs were traditional. Odd bits of advertising novelties were everywhere, souvenirs of past events abounded, and the waitresses were beautiful. This was Al's Cafe, the American cafe of all American cafes, looking as if it had been nurtured for forty years by a caring cafe-owner, filled with memories to be shared with generations of patrons. It was a place where any American would have felt at home. It was exorbitantly familiar.

But once one recognized this, and once one was comfortable, a strangeness was invited to the table. The menu supplied by the beautiful waitress was on the outside perfectly normal-looking—but the "dishes" were rather odd. The first offering ("From the Broiler") was "Toast and Leaves." The second offering was "Desert Plate and Purple Glass." And so on. From salad to desert, Al's Cafe mediated nature into sculpture, brought the forest and the desert to your table.  When a person ordered a "plate," the waitress brought the order to the "kitchen" behind the counter, the "cook" (Ruppersberg) put together the dish (of nature art), and the order was delivered to the table.

Ruppersberg's art café lasted three months.  I wish I could have gone, it is such an interesting and, well, kooky idea.  To express the essentials of art through something as commonplace and normal as an old American café... classic.

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