Note to Self
From index cards to diners, Allen Ruppersberg's approach to making art is replete with endless loops of reference
‘Start out and go in.’
Allen Ruppersberg, Fifty Helpful Hints
on the Art of the Everyday (1984)1
The last time I encountered Allen Ruppersberg’s work in a gallery – at his most recent New York show – the centrepiece of the exhibition was a jigsaw puzzle. It sat on a low table in the middle of the room, already completed, the pieces fitted together. Its box – a dead-on simulation of the mass-market form – was on the table next to it. The puzzle depicted crammed bookshelves: one wall of the Broadway studio that Ruppersberg occupied from 1986 to 2001. It was a photograph recycled from an earlier piece, The New Five Foot Shelf (2001) a project he did for Dia Center for the Arts in New York documenting his sprawling collection of literary and Pop cultural ephemera. The gallery was selling the puzzle in an edition of 15. And I got to thinking: the art collectors who purchased this object, what would they do with it? How, ideally, would it be displayed?
There was a brief period in my pre-adolescence when I bought and tried to do jigsaw puzzles. I remember that there is a thing sold in hobby shops known as ‘puzzle glue’. You smear the stuff on the surface of your completed puzzle and it coheres, a joy forever, ready for framing. I vaguely recall doing this once, attempting to preserve my precious assemblage. It was all a bit embarrassing, really. So I wondered: might collectors assemble Ruppersberg’s puzzle – or maybe hire someone to do it for them – and then glue it together like this, display it on the wall? Connect up their own assemblage with the artist’s? Somehow I doubted it, though it was an option, just as leaving it in its box was an option, an option that most art works don’t provide, exactly.
The gallery statement for the Christine Burgin Gallery show quoted from Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1987) a novel in the form of a puzzle (or the other way round) that has a puzzle-maker as one of the main characters. (The late French author has been a recurring reference point for Ruppersberg, perhaps an exemplary figure. Among many other things he has written an essay about the various methods of arranging one’s books.) When the puzzle is completed, and each piece fits into the next, Perec claims, ‘the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece’. But is that true, really? Does the piece ever stop being a piece, even when it is integrated into the puzzle? No matter how well the thing coheres, a puzzle never becomes the picture it depicts. Even if you slather it with puzzle glue and stick it on your wall, what you are displaying is never simply the image, but your own accomplishment, a record of time spent.
Steven Stern
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