Category: Reviews

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine

At sixty-three, Allen Ruppersberg, the thoughtful maverick whose work has returned again and again to posters and books, is finally getting his due.

Today collectors are hunting for underappreciated talent – value-investing, you might say –  while young artists with an apathy or a disdain for the machinations of the gallery system are looking for less market-friendly role models. Both may, in part, explain the increasing interest in Allen Ruppersberg, the Los Angeles and New York-based artist whose work was recently the subject of a survey in Europe and was brandished on the March cover of Artforum magazine. Ruppersberg’s cross-disciplinary approach, his embrace of pulp fiction, film, and quotidian graphics, and clever recycling of his old art for new have defined an innovate career that is still unfolding. Of particular interest, especially to artists, is his ongoing use of both posters and books, formats that remain excluded from the art historical canon.

From the early days of his career, Ruppersberg pushed the boundaries of what art could be. In 1969, two years after graduating from the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles, he established a short-lived cafe in which he served plate-size helpings of environmental art, followed by a similarly short-lived hotel/art installation. By the early 1970s, his love of literature began to manifest itself in artworks based on books, which, since then, have taken many forms, among them text-paintings, installations, and public art projects. In the early 1980s, he hit on the idea of making artwork that mimicked the highly commercial, colorful advertising placards ubiquitous in L.A. at the time.

Ruppersberg has a vast collection of postcards, books, movie posters, films, magazines, ephemera and other pop culture artifacts that he uses as a resource for his work.  Speaking about the time the artist spent in New York (from the mid-80s through the 90s), Christine Burgin, a New York dealer who has worked with him since the late 1980s, recalls, “Al came to New York and collected CBGB and Mud Club posters, archiving them as if they were fine art.” Burgin adds that in his artwork, “he uses posters of his own making – along with leftovers from jobs printed by other clients of the company that prints them – to disavow authorship, presenting them as they exist in the world.” ‘The New Five Foot Shelf’ (2001), a major installation by the artist, includes a fifty-volume publication with texts written or collected by the artist, and forty-four poster scale ink jet prints that document—photographically—the interior of his old library-like Manhattan studio.

‘The Novel That Writes Itself,’ an epic work that is ongoing, has to be the crowning poster project of his career. Although originally intended to be realized in another form—Ruppersberg sold roles in an autobiographical novel back in 1978 but the project languished before being reborn in poster form – it now consists, in Ruppersberg’s estimation, of more than 800 posters. These include the pages with ads, duplicates, and his own text.  More posters are produced each time the piece is installed. Displayed floor to ceiling, the posters have an eye-catching quality while perversely championing a form of communication considered lower than pulp.

In a multi-part work from 2003 and 2005, titled ‘The Singing Posters’, Ruppersberg used this formal precedent to pay homage to a now historical text once deemed obscene: Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.’ The piece consists of a phonetic rewriting of the poem, using changing typefaces, that is printed on nearly two hundred multicolor posters. Whereas most posters are designed to be read at a glance, but these force the viewer to puzzle out the poem, word by word, poster by poster.

Ruppersberg may be reflecting on his own influences in projects like ‘The Singing Posters,’ but others are looking to his example as they find their own artistic voice.  Artists like Mark Bradford, Evan Holloway, Scott King, and Carl Pope have all used posters in this work, while other young artists have closer conceptual parallels to Ruppersberg, including Carol Bove’s sculptural installations of books from the 70s, Bernadette Corporation’s cribbing from other people’s works, or North Drive Press’ treasure troves of artist-conceived ephemera.

The new interest doesn’t signal that Ruppersberg has passed the torch, however.  He has several new projects afoot, including an installation in June for the Art Unlimited section at Art Basel, for which he is preparing banners (printed by the same company that makes his posters) and thousands of photocopies based on parts of his collection which visitors can take away.  There, at the momentary center of the international art world, he will be perfectly positioned to influence and be influenced, to participate in the market and distance himself.  “It’s the same dialogue and process of artists talking about common ideas,” he observes, “…but a new generation looks at things differently, and that’s inspiring.”

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine

Yun-Fei Ji’s monumental new landscape paintings, depicting scenes along the winding banks of the Yangtze River just prior to the area’s flooding by the Three Gorges Dam, are composed of imagery sampled from a vast archive of photographs, notes and sketches he has developed on several trips to China over the past five years.  In the paintings, day laborers, moving trucks and departing residents occupy the cities and villages amid tranquil, mountainous scenery.  The inclusion of fantastical characters and otherworldly scenarios distances the delicate ink on paper paintings from pure documentary.  Still, the volume of primary research behind each image is in and of itself highly significant.

Before Ji made his first research trip to the Three Gorges region in 2001, he investigated the area’s rich history and turbulent politics, delving into its literature, following news reports, and reading blogs detailing often tragic stories about locals affected by the dam project.  During his travels, he amassed tens of thousands of images and reams of notes, which he organizes by geographic location upon returning to his studio, storing the digital photographs on CDs and filing away clippings and other ephemera.  Although he has no routine habit of accessing his archive (and sheepishly admits to sometimes losing track of what he’s collected), for the latest series, Ji dug back through his images in search of the period before the flood.  “In each picture, I can point out a detail that interested me,” he says.  The photographs in Ji’s archive depict a wide range of subjects, among them tidily stacked building materials, doors and windows waiting to be taken and reused, scavenging day laborers and the ubiquitous camps of holdout residents who refuse to move until the last minute.

Ji draws from computer printouts or while looking at photos on his monitor, improvising as much as he copies.  “I’m not just adding things up when I work,” he says. “I find details that trigger my interest and imagination and act as a stepping point to something else.”  Ji’s sketches can also originate just as easily from an idea generated during a conversation, from a found photograph, or, from other found source materials.  In one case, a propagandist magazine cover from the 1950s showing happy farmers in a time of widespread famine inspired an etching of cadaverous landsmen, while in another, accumulated tales from the demolition workers resulted in a painting of a scavenger’s wife communing with the dead.

“There is almost nothing that I don’t draw,” says Ji, referring both to the large number of drawings that cover the walls of his studio and fill his sketchbooks and to their varied subject matter, from studies of plant life to half demolished buildings.  More often than not, he’ll sketch a subject multiple times; occasionally, Ji collages together disparate sketches, then paints from those.  In keeping with his unique style – informed by studies in both Eastern and Western art – Ji explains his process as “…translating everything into line and brushstroke.  Though my work uses photography as source material like many Western painters, its very different because I’m not using light and dark shadow.”

Ji’s paintings, like his drawings, result from tireless preparation and intuition.  “Sometimes, I’ll start with a vague idea, not knowing where I’m going, and slowly it will emerge what the painting is about,” he explains.  This approach requires a concentration that the artist likens to walking a tightrope.  Each careful step of the painting involves using calligraphy brushes to build up an area with layer after layer of paint, which is applied using brush strokes like the staccato ‘ax’ or curly ‘buffalo hair.’  Working on a table covered with felt for absorbency, Ji applies paint and sometimes washes it to reduce its intensity, giving the mulberry-paper background of his most labored-over pieces a weathered appearance.

That Ji’s recent paintings derive from images and notes he recorded as he witnessed the mass relocation effort is poignant, but also helpful in explaining the surreal, disjointed quality that these works sometimes possess.  Buildings, people and plant life can appear to float on the painted page like objects bobbing on the water after a shipwreck, and a rock formation is as carefully rendered as a cluster of displaced villagers.  The technique evokes the dreamlike way in which memory can function, or history is written, bringing certain details into clearer focus than others and telling stories that might otherwise remain submerged.