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Allen Ruppersberg: Art on the edge of visibility, 1968–1972

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Allen Ruppersberg: Art on the edge of visibility, 1968–1972

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ALLEN RUPPERSBERG: ART ON THE EDGE OF VISIBILITY, 1968–1972

by
Alexis Marissa Johnson

___________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2011

Copyright 2011 Alexis Marissa Johnson

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Bennett Simpson and Howard Fox for their time and
commitment to my project. Without their patience, encouragement, criticism and
intellectual generosity I would not have been able to complete this manuscript. It has
been a pleasure to work with them, and I have greatly valued their feedback.
Additionally, I am also indebted to those who have aided me in my research, including
Karen Moss, whose willingness to speak with me about the artworks included in this
thesis has been immeasurable. I would also like to thank the Margo Leavin Gallery and
the Norton Simon Museum. Most importantly, I am overwhelmingly appreciative of the
time Allen Ruppersberg has taken to speak with me about his work.

Alexis Marissa Johnson
March 2011

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Chapter One: The Act of Disappearing 1
Chapter Two: Seeing and Believing 12
Chapter Three: The Act of Reappearing 71
Bibliography 76

iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Location Piece (1969) 13
Figure 2: Image #7 from 23 Pieces (1968–1969), Ambassador Hotel 18
Figure 3: List of Images from 23 Pieces (1968–1969) 20
Figure 4: Image #5 from 23 Pieces (1968–1969), Royce Hall, UCLA 24
Figure 5: Image #11 from 23 Pieces (1968–1969), Cocky Moon Snack Bar 25
Figure 6: Al's Cafe (1969), Interior 28
Figure 7: Al's Cafe (1969), Interior 29
Figure 8: Al's Cafe (1969), Interior 30
Figure 9: Order Tickets from Al's Cafe (1969) 32
Figure 10: Framed Order Tickets from Al's Cafe (1969) 33
Figure 11: Menu from Al's Cafe (1969), Front, Back and Interior 34
Figure 12: Bowling Shirt worn by Allen Ruppersberg during Al's Cafe (1969) 35
Figure 13: Lee Baliantz (1970) 45
Figure 14: Image spread from 24 Pieces (1970), International Hotel 49
Figure 15: Image spread from 24 Pieces (1970), Holiday Inn 50
Figure 16: First image from Los Angeles section, 25 Pieces (1971) 52
Figure 17: First image from New York section, 25 Pieces (1971) 52
Figure 18: Al's Grand Hotel (1971), Exterior 54
Figure 19: The Jesus Room, Al's Grand Hotel (1971) 56
Figure 20: The Day Room, Al's Grand Hotel (1971) 57
Figure 21: Front Desk, Al's Grand Hotel (1971) 59
Figure 22: Cover of Greetings from L.A. (1972) 63
Figure 23: Where's Al? (1972) 67
Figure 24: Where's Al? (1972), Detail 68
Figure 25: Seeing and Believing (1972) 70

v
ABSTRACT
Through the analysis of the early works of contemporary, Los Angeles-based
Conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944), this thesis will examine and
contextualize the artist‘s engagement with the ideas of location, the conditions of the city
that affected his process and the artist‘s interest in the rejection of the preciousness of the
art object. The artwork produced between 1968 and 1972 provides a discrete body of
work focused within and utilizing images indicative of the site of Los Angeles, reflective
of the region‘s psychogeography and the reality of the individual‘s requisite mobility in a
city framed by freeways. Ruppersberg employed numerous strategies—particularly that
of shifting reality only minutely to translate it into art—to investigate this confluence of
ideas. The influence of Los Angeles on Ruppersberg‘s early work is a crucial and under-
examined point in L.A. art history and will be the subject of this manuscript.

1
CHAPTER ONE: THE ACT OF DISAPPEARING

Much of the early work of Conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944 in
Cleveland, Ohio) has been under-historicized, and the criticism that does exist has often
ignored the integral role the city of Los Angeles played within the artist‘s creation
process. Re-examining the ideas the artist was exploring between the years 1968 and
1972, immediately after graduating from art school, within the context of Los Angeles
and acknowledging the role the psychogeography of the region played within the
development of these early works are two crucial components that need to be considered
in order to more fully understand the work being produced and ideas being investigated
during this time period in the artist‘s practice. Articulating this fundamental correlation
between Ruppersberg‘s early work and Los Angeles is the intent of this thesis.
Ruppersberg‘s interest in rejecting the preciousness of the art object and moving
beyond the confines of the artist‘s studio and the production of art-market commodities
was reflective of the moment in which he was producing, an international zeitgeist
emblematic of the Conceptual art movement in which the dematerialization of the art
object was paramount among multiple milieus in disparate places from the United States
to South America to Europe.
1
Ruppersberg‘s work from this period is ephemeral and
difficult to classify; its combinative nature extends it beyond the neat confines of such

1
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference
book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a
fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on
so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as
minimal, anti-form, systems, earth or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England,
Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), vii. Her book chronicled this phenomenological process.

2
traditionally categorized art forms as painting, sculpture or photography. His work segues
with ease from spiral-bound photo books and performative installations in the guise of a
functioning café and, later, a hotel in spaces outside the gallery to novels and short stories
written on index cards. In many respects, this wide range of process and practice has
made Ruppersberg and his work elusive.
For these first four years, the artist mapped Los Angeles in myriad ways in an
effort to dissect and understand the unique amalgam that constituted the city. To a young
Midwesterner, L.A. was Atlantis, and Ruppersberg found numerous processes and
systems of diagramming the topographical and psychological realities of the Los Angeles
he was experiencing—one where the city was still holding on to its small-town remnants
of the 1940s and 1950s, where the old Victorian homes of Raymond Chandler‘s noir
metropolis that bristled atop Bunker Hill were being torn down to build the cultural
acropolis that now stands in its stead, a pre-postmodern Los Angeles full of sunny,
vernacular culture juxtaposed with the sordid underbelly made famous by Charles
Bukowski and Tom Waits.
Allen Ruppersberg‘s subject matter, methodology and artistic strategy between
the years of 1968 and 1972 revolved around the exploration of two considerations:
displacing and moving art-world viewers outside the gallery, and a fascination with Los
Angeles. The manifestation of these investigations became interwoven as the nature of
the works he created during this distinct period often used the visual language of one to
examine the cognitive implications of the other. Ruppersberg‘s interest in vernacular
culture, particularly as he encountered it in L.A. (futuristic, mid-century Googie diners

3
among other colloquialisms), colored much of the subject matter of his artistic production
during these early years.
His primary focus post-graduation was reconsidering the nature of art viewership
and dislocating art viewers from the context—and confines—of the gallery. This singular
idea permeated most, if not all, of the work produced in these first four years after
graduating from Chouinard Art Institute, while the investigation of the conditions of
location set the work‘s aesthetic tone. But in order to talk about location, it is important to
consider what cognitive elements contribute to its conceptualization. Within the idea of
―location‖ is the issue of place and its differentiation from space. Additionally
compounding one‘s interaction with and perception of location is psychogeography.
Marc Augé succinctly summarizes Michel de Certeau‘s distinctions between place and
space as: ―space, for [de Certeau], is a ‗frequented place‘, ‗an intersection of moving
bodies‘: it is the pedestrians who transform a street (geometrically defined as a place by
town planners) into a space. This parallel between the place as an assembly of elements
coexisting in a certain order and the space as animation of these places by the motion of a
moving body is backed by several references that define its terms.‖
2
Thus place is
denoted by its three-dimensionality, physical boundaries and geometric arrangement
while space is the psychological experience one has when a place is populated
anthropologically, when individuals animate a physical place in relation to each other. A
physical place is transformed into a psychological and emotional space when it is
inhabited and used by people. The effects of this transformation and this interaction has

2
Marc Augé, ―From Places to Non-Places,‖ Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso Press, 1995), 79-80.

4
been articulated by Guy Debord as ―psychogeography,‖ a term which elucidates the
psychological, emotional and behavioral effects the architecture of a place or a city has
on an individual.
3

For Debord psychogeography is perceived and evaluated through a methodology
called the dérive, which is ―a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences.
Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical
effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.‖
4
Even
though Ruppersberg‘s exploration of Los Angeles was not literally a dérive in the
Debordian sense, it is very much in the spirit of it. Because of Angeleno dependence on
transportation, Ruppersberg‘s discovery of L.A. happened via car not through walking as
Debord suggests a dérive might take place. Regardless, Debord proposes that people
should:
let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they
find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think:
from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with
constant currents, fixed points and vertexes that strongly discourage entry into or
exit from certain zones. But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its
necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the
knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.
5

Ruppersberg‘s exploration of the psychological and physical causes and effects of
the broader implications of ―location,‖ as nuanced above, is palpable from one work to
the next, but taken together as a whole, these works also provide a subtle commentary on

3
Guy Debord, ―Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,‖ Situationist International Anthology, ed.
Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 9.

4
Guy Debord, ―Theory of the Dérive,‖ Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley:
Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 62.

5
Ibid.

5
the city of Los Angeles as well. Additionally, his process—both intellectually and
materially—mirrors his own ―dérive,‖ the way in which he experienced, navigated and
interacted with the city. In these works Los Angeles functions in a capacity beyond visual
content and site; its ―essence‖ occupies an experience that merges the realms of how one
perceives it mentally and emotionally and how one experiences that conceptualization in
a visceral manner. A cognitive understanding of the ephemeral essence of the city and its
perceived/projected psychogeography was framed through an expansive network of
freeways and a topography of variegated terrain that could only be experienced by
driving through it. Navigating Los Angeles was both an intellectual activity and a
conceptual act made physical. This unique framework was generative for Ruppersberg
and influenced how he attempted to get people out of the gallery. An acknowledgement
of the centrality of L.A. in these works elucidates a deeper understanding of
Ruppersberg‘s practice during this time, re-contextualizing the art within the artist‘s
production process.
Ruppersberg first found himself in Los Angeles at the age of 11 on a family
vacation from Cleveland, Ohio, where he was born and raised, to visit Disneyland. By
that time, he had already decided he wanted to be an animator for Walt Disney Studios
and purchased all the requisite materials (lightbox, books on how to draw Disney
characters, etc.) from the Animators‘ Corner store at the Disney amusement park in order
to complete a cartoon he was intent on making.
6
While on this same vacation,
Ruppersberg also toured Hollywood, Los Angeles and San Francisco. ―After that trip,

6
Allen Ruppersberg and Frédéric Paul, ―Interview,‖ Allen Ruppersberg: Books, Inc. (Limoges, France:
F.R.A.C. Limosin, 1999), 31.

6
there was never a question in my mind that I was going to California as soon as I was
able.‖
7
Ruppersberg knew he wanted to be an artist at a young age and took classes that
focused on the many aspects of commercial art like advertising design, figure drawing
and illustration. At the end of high school, Ruppersberg applied to only two art schools,
both in California—the San Francisco Art Institute and The Chouinard Art Institute in
L.A. ―Luckily,‖ Ruppersberg has said, ―I was accepted into Chouinard first because I had
already decided that I was going to L.A. whether I got into school or not.‖
8

After moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to attend Chouinard in the mid-Wilshire
neighborhood of MacArthur Park, Allen Ruppersberg graduated in 1967 with a Bachelor
of Fine Arts degree and began showing in group exhibitions around that time; his first
was ―Two Man Show‖ in 1966 at Gallery 66, a cooperative space near Western
Boulevard and Melrose Avenue that he started with friend, artist and classmate Terry
Allen and a few other colleagues from Chouinard.
9
Chouinard became the California
Institute of the Arts (CalArts) a year after his graduation and relocated its campus to
Valencia, California. But the progressive, post-studio work of John Baldessari and others
who were practicing under this early conceptual framework influenced Ruppersberg‘s
work immediately after school. Even though he graduated as a painter, Ruppersberg
spanned the painting/sculpture divide while producing work at Chouinard, and after a trip
to the Pasadena Art Museum (PAM) to see Frank Stella‘s Protractor series, Ruppersberg

7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.

9
Artist resume; Allen Ruppersberg and William Leavitt, ―Before MOCA: Two Artists‘ Perspectives of Los
Angeles in the 1970s, William Leavitt and Allen Ruppersberg in conversation with Carol Ann Klonarides‖
(lecture, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, November 19, 2009), part 1.

7
decidedly gave up painting: ―He had done it. There was nothing I could add to the
discussion. I realized he knew what he was doing and I did not.‖
10
Additionally, the
influence of Marcel Duchamp was fundamental to his development. The Dadaist had his
first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963, a seminal exhibition for many of
the young artists working in L.A. at the time. ―Whatever Mr. Duchamp said, we believed.
Myself and many other artists picked up on the kind of avant-garde ideas of the ‘20s,
which were then fresh again because they had been suppressed through the realist period
and the wars and the depressions and everything else.‖
11

Ruppersberg sites his main influences as ―European surrealism and then French
New Realists with American pop art thrown in. So I guess my work begins somewhere
where surrealism meets American culture in the Midwest in the 1950s.‖
12
And these
influences became evident in the works that followed graduation. Utilizing techniques
like theatrically presenting the banal to surrealist, if not absurdist, proportions—preparing
cafés and hotels that functioned in the same ritualized fashion that their real-world
referents did, but inside were twisted slightly to operate as artworks—characterized one
of the many ways in which Ruppersberg engaged the everyday and responded to the
particular constraints of Los Angeles.
Ruppersberg took up residence in nearly 50 different locations in the many years
the artist lived in L.A. before committing to a bi-coastal lifestyle in 1985.
13
―You could

10
Ruppersberg and Leavitt, ―Before MOCA,‖ part 1.

11
Allen Ruppersberg, ―Allen Ruppersberg Artist Talk‖ (lecture, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport
Beach, CA, September 20, 2007).

12
Ruppersberg and Paul, 44.

13
Ibid., 38. The artist lived between Santa Monica and New York City.

8
step off a plane at LAX in the morning, buy a car in the afternoon, find an apartment,
furnish it, and be sitting in a bar in Hollywood by evening. You could have a new life,
and then do it again the next month or the next week. This was a very attractive part of
L.A.‖
14
Perhaps this extensive moving around also influenced how Ruppersberg engaged
with the realities of the city, instilling in the artist a hyper-sensitivity to its
psychogeography, an acute perceptiveness of the numerous psychological implications
informed by the geographical exploration required of the city‘s denizens.
His investigation of the ideas of location—those inflected by and embedded in the
unique circumstances of the city (requisite mobility, freeways, dead spaces, vernacular
architecture, Hollywood, etc.)—seems at this time in the early 1970s more reflective of the
underpinnings of Los Angeles than his contemporaries like William Leavitt, Jack Goldstein
and Bas Jan Ader, whose interests were in the visual particularities of L.A. Ruppersberg
attributes this interest in L.A.—his own and his cohort‘s—to not being a native of the
region and has spoken of this ‗transplant condition‘: ―Most of the artists who were there
were also from someplace else originally. As with most transplants to L.A., there is an
initial fascination with the place itself. With my close friends, most of our conversations
about art took place within the context of talking about L.A.‖
15
Tactics used to examine the
context of L.A. varied from artist to artist in this group—Leavitt utilized tropes of the stage
set, Goldstein sourced Hollywood imagery, Ruppersberg nuanced his exploration of the
context of L.A. with a deeper infiltration of the way one navigates the city, physically and
intellectually, reflecting this commute in his creation process. That is to say transportation

14
Ibid.

15
Ibid.

9
or vehicular mobility is requisite in a city like Los Angeles, as opposed to some place like
New York City, and this constant commute affects the psyche of those who experience it
daily. It has tangible effects on the way people live their lives and how they interact with
each other. Ruppersberg sought to instrumentalize this reality in his early work.
His evolution of deadpan photographic documentation into a construction of
fiction and non-fiction—a condition perhaps inherent in Los Angeles given the presence
of Hollywood—is also a thoughtful engagement of the city‘s visual tropes and is an
investigation into its subtleties beyond a parochial understanding of its purported
superficiality and sprawl. It demonstrates a keen understanding and manipulation of the
vernacular in order to reveal a greater criticism, truth or essence of something larger—of
what Los Angeles ―is‖ and ―means.‖
Also present in Ruppersberg‘s engagement with location (and Los Angeles)
whether through architecture, landmarks, suburban names or the banal (motels, diners,
coffee shops) is Ruppersberg qua ―Al,‖ a persona of the artist whose reputation—and
visual, physical or written presence—was integral to the functioning of his artworks.
Additionally his construction of narrative and examination of fiction and non-fiction—
hallmarks of his later practice—were also coming into play in these early pieces.
Around 1973, Ruppersberg makes a distinct shift in his work from focusing on
Los Angeles as subject to engaging the idea of the book as an object and conceptual
framework. Within the chronology of his oeuvre, this becomes an obvious, and natural,
progression, but it marks a divergent body of work, which the artist himself sees as
separate from his earlier practice.
16
Yet it is the most definitive works of this early

16
Ibid., 41.

10
period—Al’s Café (1969) and Al’s Grand Hotel (1971)—that pioneered a participatory
practice that is still occurring today. These two performative installations created physical
sites of social interaction, conviviality and an intentional hub where artists could
congregate, both works utilizing the framework of ritualized interpersonal interaction to
elucidate a greater truth about the nature of how people interact (or rather, don‘t interact)
in L.A. Also at work within these projects was Ruppersberg‘s engagement with the banal,
the everyday. In a written work entitled 50 Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday
(1984), Ruppersberg elucidates a thread of the banal that pervades many of his works,
including Al’s Café and Al’s Grand Hotel, in a statement perhaps applicable to his entire
oeuvre: ―Reality only needs a slight adjustment to make it art.‖
17
This guiding principle
pervades much, if not all, of his work throughout his career and provides an interplay
with the title of not only this introduction but also of this manuscript, referencing the
subtle distinctions between experienced reality (daily life) and constructed reality (a work
by Ruppersberg) and the notion that if one is unaware of the work or the artist‘s
intentions, one would not be cognizant of the work‘s existence—it would be
imperceptible, that is it would simply slip into invisibility and disappear. Each of the
early works that will be discussed in depth in the following section investigates different
aspects of the concepts of location that Ruppersberg chose to engage, with many focusing
on the notion and experienced reality of Los Angeles, and all laying down an early
framework for many of Ruppersberg‘s later conceptual developments.

17
Allen Ruppersberg, ―50 Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday,‖ 1984, Allen Ruppersberg: The Secret
of Life and Death, Volume I 1969–1984, ed. Julia Brown (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, in association with Black Sparrow Press, 1985), 113.

11
It is also important to consider Ruppersberg‘s own revisiting of this time period
within his current work in a series titled L.A. in the ’70s (2010). It signals the artist‘s
renewed interest in this part of his life and practice and thus validates a critical return to
his early works. Examining how the city‘s networked infrastructure and social climate
along with the artist‘s own biography informed Ruppersberg‘s selection of visuals (the
colloquial, everyday experience of diners, Hollywood Boulevard, etc.) will prove
essential to situating his works in a reconsidered context. Focusing the analysis of the
work on how Ruppersberg created, documented and examined notions of location within
the specific context of L.A. will attempt to nuance the existing criticism by inflecting it
with a deeper understanding of the role Los Angeles, its topography and its
psychogeography played in the creation of Ruppersberg‘s early work.

12
CHAPTER TWO: SEEING AND BELIEVING
Traversing Los Angeles via Karmann Ghia, and later Volkswagen van, Allen
Ruppersberg explored the deserts, mountains, beaches and highways. This extensive
exploration of the city led to his attempt to transmit the experience, the essence, of one
world into the context of another, polar-opposite one. Ruppersberg‘s first foray into
investigating the ideas surrounding location came via a strategy that would continue to
recur throughout these years—dislocation—in the aptly titled work, Location Piece
(1968), an installation that occupied both the gallery and a seedy office in Hollywood.
Location Piece consisted of eight large, unprimed canvas panels, measuring 12-
feet square when assembled into the massive, 8-foot-tall, U-shaped structure.
18
A deer
head is hung in the middle of the back panel, transforming the structure into a de facto
altar of sorts. Thomas Garver, reviewing the show for Artforum, suggested that the skull‘s
central position ―within the chamber becomes a cult object, and ex-voto to the forces of
nature, an experience intensified by its being placed behind a sheet of glass, a gesture
which both adds to its preciousness and heightens its obscurity.‖
19
Also added to the
interior were a pile of leaves and some rocks. This injection of the natural into the
―aesthetic world of painting and sculpture‖—and by proxy the art world via the
installation‘s inclusion in a gallery exhibition—was an attempt by Ruppersberg to
―approximate some kind of atmosphere or some kind of very ephemeral and, in this case,
quite metaphysical ideas of the desert and California and these feelings that you get when
you‘re outside the aesthetic world that you‘re out in the natural world. This was an

18
Norton Simon Museum Archives.

19
Thomas Garver, ―Los Angeles,‖ Artforum (Summer 1969), 67.

13
attempt to bring those experiences into the gallery context.‖
20
The conflation of these two
worlds is heightened by the dislocation of each in the presence of the other, making the
viewer acutely aware of his own feelings of displacement.
Figure 1: Location Piece (1969)

Courtesy of the Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Eugenia Butler Gallery, Los Angeles, © Allen Ruppersberg
Location Piece was the centerpiece of Ruppersberg‘s first solo exhibition at
Eugenia Butler Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in January of 1969.
21
This exhibition
was also the inaugural one for the gallery—Butler had split from former partner Riko
Mizuno and their Gallery 669 a year prior.
22
Despite Butler‘s eponymous gallery‘s short
run, it was influential in exposing a generation of Los Angeles artists to work outside of

20
Ruppersberg, ―Artist Talk,‖ Orange County Museum of Art.

21
Artist‘s resume; Ruppersberg, ―Artist Talk,‖ Orange County Museum of Art.

22
Obituary of Eugenia Butler, Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2001.

14
the pervasive New York scene, exhibiting work from Ruppersberg‘s contemporaries as
well as conceptual work from San Francisco, New York and Europe. Many of
Ruppersberg‘s closely associated peers—William Leavitt, Bas Jan Ader, Ger Van Elk,
William Wegman, Guy de Cointet, John Baldessari, Jack Goldstein and Robert
Cumming—revolved around this gallery and later Claire Copley Gallery. (Nick Wilder‘s
gallery also provided a hub of sorts for the L.A. art scene during this time).
This opening exhibition, also titled ―Location Piece,‖ consisted of two
components in the gallery: a handful of (approximately six) different works—some
consisting of multiple, low-lying, canvas- or muslin-covered boxes acting as small
pedestals for items removed from nature as exemplified by Floor Piece, which consisted
of four small, muslin-covered boxes placed on the floor, each with a grouping of natural
artifacts arranged on top (a grey stone the size of a human head, a pile of sycamore
leaves, four brown stones and a handful of grey beach pebbles)—and directions to ―a
tacky Sunset Boulevard office building several miles from the gallery.‖
23
Even though
Location Piece was the showpiece of the exhibition, it was not present in the gallery. In
fact, it was constructed two miles away in an abandoned office in a dilapidated building
at 7507 Sunset Boulevard, near the corner of Gardner Street in Hollywood, where
Ruppersberg had his studio and his apartment. The displacement of the main work
outside and away from the gallery made tangible the artist‘s interest in moving his
viewers out of the white cube and its inherited intellectual and critical associations.
Location Piece was exactly the size of the Hollywood office it was built in, filling
its interior volume with a confluence of influences and ideas. At once, the sculptural

23
Garver, ―Los Angeles.‖

15
environment/installation stood in homage to the legacy of California‘s assemblage artists,
particularly Ed Kienholz, and also served as a response to not only Ruppersberg‘s own
training as a painter but also the concurrent conceptual strategies of Minimalism. Because
the work utilized the pristine surface of canvas to constitute its shape, it unified as well as
juxtaposed the essentials of painting with the purity and slickness of the artwork‘s
materials. In effect, its imposing construction reminded viewers of the physicality of their
viewership through a greater awareness of one‘s surroundings, created by the (placement
of the) artwork itself. Location Piece also comingled the two realities Ruppersberg was
immersed in at the time, taking ―minimalist painting surfaces which [were] then made
into a kind of container for natural objects.‖
24

Intentionally constructed in a non-art environment, Location Piece set up the
juxtaposition between what one expects to find in a gallery—an artwork—with what one
was experiencing in the nondescript two-story, Hollywood Boulevard office building—a
perceptibly art-related intervention. Understanding that what was built in the office was
part of an artist‘s gallery exhibition and therefore, by association, ‗an artwork,‘
questioned traditional expectations of what art viewing entailed. The address and
directions that were present in the gallery required the viewer to get in his car and drive
to another location to see Ruppersberg‘s work. The act of traversing the city to access and
view Location Piece mirrored Ruppersberg‘s own process of gathering items for
inclusion in the installation. It comments on the topographic conditions of L.A. and
foretells of strategies and particular facets of the concept of location that the artist utilized

24
Ruppersberg, ―Artist Talk,‖ Orange County Museum of Art.

16
in subsequent works from this time period that incorporate Los Angeles, not only as
content and context, but as a conceptual exercise in dealing with perceptions of location.
Location Piece was shown one additional time after the Eugenia Butler exhibition—
at the Balboa Pavilion of the Newport Harbor Art Museum in the ―Appearing/Disappearing/
Image/Object‖ exhibition (May 11–June 28, 1969).
25
Location Piece was exhibited alongside
work by the artist‘s contemporaries like Michael Asher, John Baldessari and Barry Le Va.
According to Thomas Garver, the museum‘s director, who was quoted in the show‘s Los
Angeles Times review, the exhibition sought to highlight artists whose ―concern is with the
‗dissolution of more traditional artistic images and the creation of new forms.‘‖
26
However,
for Los Angeles Times reporter Lael Morgan, who reviewed the show, the work was anything
but transparent. The writer surmised from Location Piece‘s accompanying textual
explanation that ―the U is a large geometric environment organized to align one‘s approach
to natural objects and heighten the experience to these objects. It‘s a nice deer head.‖
27
The
facetious closing belies the reporting, undermining the artist‘s intentions, and suggests a
skepticism that pervades the entire review. The article begins with: ―The
Appearing/Disappearing-Image/Object is an art show calculated to turn Whistler‘s Mother
out of her chair. Few tradition-bound art lovers can view the collection of blank canvases,
invisible sculptures and transparent paintings without trauma.‖
28
Unfortunately, this

25
Artist‘s resume.

26
Lael Morgan, ―Tradition Goes Out Window at Newport Art Image Show,‖ Los Angeles Times, June 8,
1969, OC_A14.

27
Ibid.

28
Ibid.

17
cynicism—and outright dismissal—obscures any attempt by the reporter, and effectively the
reader, at understanding the challenging nature of conceptual work at that time.
Butler purchased the work
29
and later donated it to the Pasadena Art Museum in
1973.
30
It remained in storage there through the proprietary transition to the Norton
Simon Museum and was un-shown until the ―Art Since the 1960s: California
Experiments‖ exhibition (July 15 2007–September 14, 2008) at the Orange County
Museum of Art (OCMA), formerly the Newport Harbor Museum of Art, the last
institution Location Piece was exhibited at nearly four decades earlier.
For Ruppersberg, the exploration of Los Angeles began most literally with 23
Pieces, which was photographed in 1968 but published in 1969. It is unassociated with
the exhibition at Eugenia Butler Gallery but grew out of ideas related to Location Piece.
Prior to Location Piece, Ruppersberg was utilizing empty, tropical fish aquariums—glass
and chrome boxes ―that looked a little like Larry Bell‘s glass cubes.‖
31
This was the same
time that Ruppersberg had begun to use L.A. as a subject and
these [aquariums] became ready-made repositories for the things that I found. The
objects usually represented something about Los Angeles or Southern California.
I began bringing back to the gallery ‗locations‘ I had found outside of it. These
aquariums were like a miniature stage set: a self-contained, well-lighted world
with an audience peering into it. Each one represented a different location and
these works directly led to my first book, 23 Pieces, 1968, where photography
was also first introduced; I just substituted photos for objects.
32

29
Ruppersberg, ―Artist Talk,‖ Orange County Museum of Art.

30
Norton Simon Museum Archives.

31
Ruppersberg and Paul, 33.

32
Ibid.

18
Within this small, white, spiral-bound book were twenty-three images of locations
around the city, ranging from hotel lobbies to scenic parks, which are in many ways the
very definitions of the banal of urban living. All images were placed on the right-hand
page. Although the sites chosen were random—they held no biographical significance for
the artist and were only stumbled upon during Ruppersberg‘s navigation of the city—
there was something about them that affected him in some way, that drew him in, that
fascinated him.
33
The discovery and documentation of each of these places was in many
ways metonymic of Ruppersberg‘s own exploration and investigation of the city, an
extension of his process in Location Piece.
Figure 2: Image #7 from 23 Pieces (1968 –1969), Ambassador Hotel

33
Allen Ruppersberg, interview by author, El Segundo, CA, February 9, 2011.

19
Ruppersberg was captivated by vernacular culture, the plainer the better,
34
so
perhaps not surprisingly, these images seem as though they could have been taken
anywhere. Although none of the pictures themselves represent iconic L.A. landscapes—
no view of the Hollywood sign, Grauman's Chinese Theatre or the Pacific Ocean
appears—the particular range of such varied locations could only be found in L.A, a point
illustrated on the final page of the book, which lists the names and addresses of the
locations featured. This marks the beginning of the artist‘s incorporation of image and
text, something that still defines Ruppersberg‘s multi-decade practice. Even though the
text is not a narrative (a tool employed extensively by the artist later), it is descriptive and
is another way of defining place—through an address, a marker that indicates a physical
site in real space and on a map. Coupled with this information, each image—and the
book itself—takes on a new meaning. Upon reflection, the book begins to explore the
landscape of a Los Angeles leftover from decades prior, its in-between places, and
highlights mostly spaces of transition where people pass through but never stay long
(with the exception of the image of his own apartment). It juxtaposes an assortment of
locations, including Griffith Park, various lobbies from some of the city's most-famous
hotels and a few interior images of local cultural centers like University of California,
Los Angeles‘ (UCLA) Royce Hall and the Natural History Museum with way stations
like the Union Passenger Terminal and the Bonanza Coffee Shop.

34
Ibid.

20
Figure 3: List of Images from 23 Pieces (1968 –1969)

Similar to Location Piece, 23 Pieces was a manner of documenting the immaterial
essence of a location, transferring one world to another.
35
Instead of putting elements of
the desert in a non-descript Hollywood office building, Ruppersberg attempted to place
the ephemeral experience of sites around the city that fascinated him into a book (and a
different economy) by using photographs and addresses. Many of the sites selected
document a vernacular Los Angeles leftover from the 1940s and 1950s that was being
lost, ephemeral in their own temporal eradication. Additionally, the book was an object

35
Ibid.

21
that Ruppersberg intended to circumvent the gallery, purposefully created to operate
outside the art-object context by being able to be sold in any bookstore.
36

The book was meant to dislocate/move people outside of the gallery through the
experience of reading it and perhaps being mentally transported to these twenty-three
sites. By extension, it could be read literally as a map, a guidebook or scavenger hunt of
sorts, encouraging readers to go to these sites themselves, once again removing art
viewers from the gallery context. Upon reading the address list, one wonders whether a
special knowledge or inimitable experience would be garnered if he were to traverse the
city and visit each of the locations in the order they are listed, theoretically following in
the artist‘s footsteps.
These documentary-style photographs, not taken by the artist but in fact by
photographer friend Gary Kruger (although Ruppersberg approved the set-ups before
Kruger snapped the image),
37
are typical of "deadpan" views, particularly within Los
Angeles art history—Ed Ruscha shot every building on the Sunset Strip from his car in
1966 as well as hired a photographer (and a helicopter) to take aerial photographs of
parking lots in 1967, while John Baldessari‘s utilization of mundane photo perspective
also acts as a visual predecessor to Ruppersberg‘s book. Within this context, "deadpan"
functions as a description for decidedly non-cinematically framed images. The
photographs are in fact neatly composed, scene-setting shots (the opposite of a close-up)
with objects often squared up within the horizontal composition, much like a location-

36
The author purchased her own copy of 23, 24 and 25 Pieces (Cneai, 2000: Los Angeles) at the specialty
bookstore Arcana: Books on the Arts in Santa Monica, CA.

37
Ruppersberg, interview by author.

22
scouting shot for a movie. Within an artistic context this type of composition can be read
as anti-aesthetic; within an editorial context, the images become objective or ―neutral‖ so
as to not structurally emphasize one element over another in the frame and thus guide a
viewer‘s perception of what is being depicted. The lack of aesthetic compositional
framing perhaps can also be read as amateur since fine art photography up to this point
was favored for the creative composition and storytelling it enabled the photographer, but
it too had its own set of conventions. This intentional rejection of the history of art
photography was significant because instead of being classified as art photography, these
photographs were vernacular photography created by an artist and challenged
Ruppersberg to make what wasn‘t considered art into what was.
38

This artistic decision can perhaps also be seen as a decidedly anti-film industry or
anti-―dream factory‖ move to separate the artist‘s work from that of the local, dominating
business—Hollywood. To utilize this anti-editorial framing also removes the images
from a culture-industry standard of magazines and artfully shot movies, much like New
Wave film at this time, which was highly experimental, idiosyncratic and perhaps even a
touch surrealist in its cinematographic narrative construction, splicing long-range and
close-up shots that were intermixed with other emotionally evocative photographic
techniques. In effect, Ruppersberg‘s removal of himself as the individual who was
physically taking the photographs and utilizing a trained photographer (similar to
Ruscha‘s 34 Parking Lots), who also did the layout of the book, cedes the individual
meanings of his images to the whole, the gesamtkunstwerk.

38
Ruppersberg, interview by author.

23
If the images feel empty and lacking a human presence, they also seem
anticipatory of coming action or perhaps feel the ache of an action just missed by the
camera, the absence of evidence of an activity completed just moments before. However,
Ruppersberg himself appears in six of the twenty-three images. He first appears in the
second photograph, body seated facing the camera but his head turned away, looking
behind himself, so the reader cannot see his face. This is at the Franklin West Towers, an
apartment building in Hollywood, just west of La Brea Avenue and north of Hollywood
Boulevard. Next he appears four pages later on the stage of Royce Hall, lit from behind,
and minuscule in size as the image is shot from far away in the audience, a vast sea of
empty seats separating the camera from the artist (and theoretically the action).
Ruppersberg appears three pages later in the garden of the Fifield Manor,
39
located on the
corner of Franklin and Bronson avenues in Hollywood.
The following image of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel lobby features the young
artist sitting on a long, tufted couch reading a book. The subsequent image is of
Ruppersberg in his apartment at 1951 Gower Blvd. also in Hollywood. Following that,
Ruppersberg is positioned at the end of a row of twelve chairs, furthest on the right, in
front of the Cocky Moon Snack Bar near/on the Santa Monica Pier. Ruppersberg is then
seen in a hallway back at Fifield Manor, leaning in and glancing at what is presumed to
be a painting hanging on the wall. He appears again, three pages later, sitting in an
armchair in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton, and finally Ruppersberg appears in the
ultimate image, hidden in the foliage, sitting against a tree near a small river in Topanga
Canyon.

39
Fifield Manor is now the Scientology Celebrity Center.

24

Figure 4: Image #5 from 23 Pieces (1968 –1969), Royce Hall, University of California, Los Angeles

25
Figure 5: Image #11 from 23 Pieces (1968 –1969), Cocky Moon Snack Bar, Santa Monica Pier

The balance between the banality of the images and the iconic associations linked
with the locations‘ names (Griffith Park, Ambassador Hotel) sets up a dichotomy in
which the presence of Ruppersberg‘s own figure begins to become important to the
functioning of the work (in later pieces, he and his persona are integral). His body acts as
a grounding point in the sprawling map of Los Angeles locations suggested by the
photographs. Who is this man documented around town at such varied establishments as
the Beverly Hilton, Royce Hall and the Santa Monica Pier? His presence is silent and
fleeting since he is only seen in a handful of images. This erratic appearing and
disappearing lends the artist‘s persona the makings of a cultish and mythic character.
If this book were to be read as a traditional novel where a narrative is constructed
from one scene to the next, page after page, Ruppersberg‘s journey would begin in

26
Griffith Park and stretch across the city, zigzagging from Mt. Wilson to Mid-Wilshire to
Hollywood then Santa Monica, back to Century City then over the hill to Studio City,
returning downtown then Beverly Hills and so on, from hotel to museum to coffee shop,
eventually ending in Topanga Canyon. The symmetry of beginning and ending in nature
emulates the artist‘s own exploration of the city, traveling extensively to its outer
undeveloped regions like the desert and Angeles Crest.
Within Location Piece and 23 Pieces are many of the thematics that would
organize much of Ruppersberg early work, most generally under the rubric of engaging
viewers outside the gallery context, which is nuanced by various strategies throughout
these four years. Employment of the banal as orchestrated in 23 Pieces not only through
the content of the images—generic views of well-known places making them all but
unrecognizable—but also through the images‘ ‗vernacular,‘ formalist composition,
portends Ruppersberg‘s continued utilization of the everyday and the commonplace
throughout his entire oeuvre. Slight adjustments and small gestures characterize
Ruppersberg‘s next works, in particular Al’s Café (1969), 24 Pieces (1970), Al’s Grand
Hotel (1971) and Seeing and Believing (1972).
In the fall of 1969, Ruppersberg extended what had begun earlier that year with
Location Piece—of ―involv[ing] the viewer in something that‘s outside of looking at
autonomous objects and get them involved in looking at the real world‖
40
—and
transformed it into his most seminal project of the period, Al’s Café. The recent
Chouinard graduate opened a ―café‖ in the neighborhood of MacArthur Park, at 1913 W.
Sixth Street a few blocks east of Alvarado, a stone‘s throw from the original campus of

40
Ruppersberg, ―Artist Talk,‖ Orange County Museum of Art.

27
the aforementioned art school.
41
For several weeks,
42
the artist-cum-café
owner/manager/short-order cook operated a small, weekly, word-of-mouth ‗diner‘ that
opened at 8pm, often not closing until 2am.
43
The café, a simulacrum of the archetypal
American diner—―the American café of all American cafés, looking as if it had been
nurtured for forty years by a caring café-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.‖
44
—was in fact an artwork, serving as the much-desired art-
world meeting place and social fulcrum the artist was searching for post-graduation.
45

The Café was also a response to the topographic logistics of L.A., where
interactions between individuals were mediated by an overwhelming dependence on a car
or other mode of transportation. The café was a hub where people could congregate. It
was a public space where people could engage with each other, the kind of space
Ruppersberg felt was missing, and in that way was the artist‘s answer to the spread-out
nature of Los Angeles.

41
Allen Ruppersberg, Al’s Café (1969), menu, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles.

42
The duration of the café is contested; Ruppersberg in his interview with Frédéric Paul in Allen
Ruppersberg: Books, Inc. as well as several critics cite the café as operating for three months in the fall of
1969; however, gallerist Rosamund Felsen [both orally and per the press release for Al’s Café (Reheated)
(1979)], in addition to the chronology delineated in the Where’s Al? exhibition catalog [Allen Ruppersberg,
Yves Aupetitallot, and Marie de Brugerolle, Where's Al? (Grenoble, France: Magasin, 1996)] say that the
café was, in fact, only operational for six weeks from October 9 to November 13, 1969. It is universally
accepted that the storefront was only open on Thursdays, as indicated by the menu, which lists location and
hours of operation.

43
Ruppersberg and Paul, 36.

44
Allan McCollum, ―Allen Ruppersberg: What One Loves About Life Are the Things That Fade,‖ Allen
Ruppersberg: Books, Inc. (Limoges, France: F.R.A.C. Limonsin,1999).
http://homepage.mac.com/studioarchives/amcimages/al.html (accessed May, 8, 2010).

45
Ruppersberg and Paul, 32. ―Another reality in L.A. was the lack of meeting places for artists… A part of
the reason for the existence of Al’s Café was to try and create a place to connect for others and myself.‖

28
Filled with ―posters, nature calendars, fishing paraphernalia, pinups, picture
postcards, and autographed photos of movie stars and sports heroes,‖
46
in addition to
souvenirs, furniture scavenged from the then-defunct Pacific Ocean Park, a defunct
amusement park in Santa Monica (operational from 1958 to 1967 and built to compete
with Disneyland) where Ruppersberg was renting a studio,
47
the small space of the café
comprised a ground-level storefront with an interior mezzanine where patrons were
seated and served.
48

Figure 6: Al's Cafe (1969), Interior

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

46
Ibid.

47
Ruppersberg and Leavitt, ―Before MOCA.‖

48
Rosamund Felsen indicated the split-level nature of the café; she used the word mezzanine to describe
the upstairs portion. This is corroborated by the presence of a staircase in Figure 8, a documentary photo of
the café‘s interior; however, the author was unable to find any specific mention of this in her research.

29
Figure 7: Al's Cafe (1969), Interior

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

30
Figure 8: Al's Cafe (1969), Interior

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

A viewer became a participant upon entering the space, the site of the artwork.
―In Ruppersberg‘s work there is always a fine dividing line between artist and viewer, the

31
private life and the public.‖
49
One entered the make-shift café in a run-down building—
which has subsequently been demolished and is now an fenced-in, unkempt, vacant
lot
50
—overwhelmed with walls cluttered by paraphernalia and photographs hung salon
style, though intentionally less stylized. Menus were presented upon seating, like any
‗normal‘ café; a wait staff took customers‘ orders; Ruppersberg as the archetypal short-
order cook/manager, dressed in a yellow-and-blue bowling shirt embroidered with ―Al
Mgr‖ on the front, ―Al‘s Café 1913 W. Sixth‖ on the back,
51
concocted rocks, pine cones
and crumpled paper into meals of traditional, diner-inspired dishes like the ―B.L.T.‖—
branches, leaves, and twigs on lacquered pine board—or the ―Fillet of Southern
California Beach‖ from behind a counter.
52
A waitress then delivered the orders to the
table. Customers purchased their ―food,‖ i.e. their plate of rocks, and a beer or coffee and
that was that. It was the enactment of the same quotidian, banal ritual of sitting down to
eat that everyone was familiar with, the only difference was the actual meal with which
one was presented and who was preparing it, which together inflected the experience with
an entirely distinctive meaning. Guests functioned as patrons not only of the

49
―Allen Ruppersberg,‖ Centraal Museum (Utrecht, Netherlands). Nachtregels = Night Lines: Words
Without Thoughts Never Go To Heaven, Centraal Museum, Utrecht Museum, ABN-AMRO (Netherlands,
1991).

50
The author went to the location at W. Sixth and Bonnie Brae streets. The address was part of an empty
corner lot that is now overgrown with grass and enclosed in a decrepit fence. The nearest building is to the
west, at 1927 W. Sixth Street.

51
The bowling shirt is in storage at Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, CA.

52
Ruppersberg, Al’s Café, menu. Menus were also available for purchase during Al’s Café (Reheated) at
Rosamund Felsen Gallery in September 1979. According to the original Reheated material provided by
Felsen—a press release, price list and invitation card—large and small aquariums were also available for
purchase in 1979, seemingly indicating that these were available as well in 1969.

32
establishment, but of Ruppersberg as an artist: purchasing a plate, beer, coffee, Coke or a
menu itself supported the emerging artist.
53

Figure 9: Order Tickets from Al's Cafe (1969)

Courtesy of the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

53
Ruppersberg and Paul, 36. ―I did this for profit. How real is a café that doesn‘t need money to keep it
open? I was trying to support myself as an artist and I thought this should help do it. Warhol‘s Factory
certainly supported him, and this is the tactic I took.‖

33
Figure 10: Framed Order Tickets from Al's Cafe (1969)

Courtesy of the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

34
Figure 11: Menu from Al's Cafe (1969), Front, Back and Interior

All images on this page courtesy of the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

35
Figure 12: Bowling Shirt worn by Allen Ruppersberg during Al's Cafe (1969)

Courtesy of the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

The café was an artwork staged in real life, as real life, only removed from real
life by a few alterations. This attention to the hyper-real, to hyper-reality, in the
construction and decoration of the café primes the participants‘ experience by creating a
functioning, comfortable environment in which everything, from the tablecloths to the
movie-star headshots, is familiar. It is through this familiarity of procedure and of
ritual—sitting at a diner, having a waitress hand you a menu, then taking your order—
that Ruppersberg attempted to upend the art economy by altering reality, ever so slightly,
serving patrons assemblaged plates of rocks, sticks, leaves, etc. that were available for the

36
same price as a hamburger.
54
Yet these items were also ―sculptures‖ in the art-object
sense, crafted by the artist. For Ruppersberg, the menu items/sculptural dinners were the
artworks that existed after the café closed. Additionally he kept all the order receipts
taken by the waitresses; these have subsequently been organized into grids, framed and
now exist as a separate artwork cataloging the event of the Café. The rest that exists from
the café is ephemera and memorabilia.
55

The logic of experiencing the ritual of a functioning café, something familiar to
most Americans, only to be presented with a slightly skewed reality and the logical
fallacy of receiving nature, among other objects—like photos of Patti Page covered in
toasted marshmallows (a ―Patti Melt‖)—in lieu of food, even if the names of dishes on
the menu are remotely familiar, speaks to Ruppersberg‘s attempt to bypass the gallery
and the art economy by placing the work in a social context outside the white cube. ―As
much as I could make them, they were real,‖ said Ruppersberg of the Café and of a
subsequent work Al’s Grand Hotel, discussed later. ―That was the point: they had to be
real to escape being looked at like art.‖
56

According to the artist:

[Al’s Café and Al’s Grand Hotel] were an extension of my Location pieces. They
pushed further with the ideas of location and place in the context of L.A. and
Southern California. It was the period of post-studio work, and I, like others, was

54
Ruppersberg and Paul, 36; most of the meals available on the menu were about $2. Coffee was $.15 and
beer was $.20.

55
Ruppersberg, ―Artist Talk,‖ Orange County Museum of Art. ―The dinners are the real work. Photos and
ephemera are just ephemera. Later on I realized the receipts represent another aspect of the work, like the
dinners. So I consider that to be a work, but that‘s it. It was the dinners that were produced on the spot at
the time and taken away were the real artwork, and then later on the receipts.‖ The only complete set of
dinners exists in the collection of Stanley and Elyse Grinstein.

56
Ibid.

37
interested in getting away from an obsession with the studio and works that were
only seen in galleries and museums… I was attempting to introduce an audience
to a social reality rather than the context of the gallery—switching contexts
without anyone knowing it. Galleries were after all, at least in L.A., just
storefronts sitting next to other storefronts selling something else.‖
57

Al’s Café emerged in both a personal and a social context primed for this sort of
social environment as artwork. Similarly, Los Angeles also had previous experience with
such tableaux vivants. Four years prior, Ed Kienholz had built and exhibited The
Beanery (1965) initially in the parking lot of the original West Hollywood Barney‘s
Beanery
58
—the local dive bar after which the sculpture was modeled and the place the
artists involved with Ferus Gallery made their home away from home
59
—and then in
both the Los Angeles
60
and New York
61
outposts of Dwan Gallery. However, this
strategy was not only limited to L.A.; Claes Oldenberg foreshadowed several subsequent
investigations into ritual commercial exchange with The Store (1961), which sold
everyday items like foodstuffs, writing material and clothes all made out of plaster-
covered muslin. Later Tom Marioni began staging his ongoing beer-drinking events, The
Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art (1970), while Gordon
Matta-Clark opened Food (1971-73), an artist-run restaurant in New York City‘s SoHo
neighborhood that functioned both as a restaurant and a work of art. Additionally artists
like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer were also working to investigate similar

57
Ruppersberg and Paul, 33-6.

58
Art Seidenbaum, ―Scenery in Hollywood Beanery,‖ Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1965, C1.

59
The Cool School: How L.A. Learned to Love Modern Art, dir. Morgan Neville, perf. Eve Babitz, John
Baldessari, Larry Bell, et al, Tremolo Productions, 2007.

60
Seidenbaum, C1.

61
Grace Glueck, ―New Place To Go: Ersatz Beanery,‖ New York Times, November 25, 1965, 45.

38
notions of gallery dislocation by returning to nature as a site of exhibition, a related
approach but different strategy to removing viewers from the gallery.
Differing from Kienholz, Ruppersberg‘s Café never operated in connection to a
gallery, much less displayed inside two. Instead, Ruppersberg shifted the economy and
commodifaction of the art object (which is inherent in the sculptural quality and gallery
exhibition of The Beanery) from the work as a whole, as an idea, and transmuted it to an
experience of absurdist proportions where plates of rocks served as dinners now
constituted sculpture. The experience of the café as a whole was ephemeral, purely social
and unable to be commodified; the holistic experience was the ―artwork.‖ Thus the
plates, aquariums, menus, etc. became the ―objects‖ representing (and documenting) the
experience, the work. Says Ruppersberg: ―Art should make use of common methods and
materials so there is little difference between the talk and the talked about.‖
62

Despite its instant success with L.A. artists, musicians and young actors—
everyone from Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Irwin to Joni Mitchell stopped by
63
—the
café ended up closing unexpectedly as police shut down Ruppersberg‘s operation for not
having alcohol permits and being in violation of the Health Department.
64

Little was written about Ruppersberg for the next decade and not until 1985
around the time of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA LA) ―The
Secret of Life and Death‖ retrospective did the press start to revise its perception of the
café—and of the artist. ―Allen Ruppersberg‘s complex sensibility is finally clearing up

62
Ruppersberg, ―50 Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday,‖ The Secret of Life and Death, 111.

63
Ruppersberg and Paul, 36.

64
Steven Stern, ―Note to Self,‖ Frieze, Issue 92 (June-August 2005), 120.
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/note_to_self/ (accessed May 8, 2010).

39
after a couple of blotchy decades of exhibition,‖ said the Los Angeles Times staff writer
William Wilson. Continuing: ―Often [his work‘s] main content is the perversity of the
attempt… A current crop is no exception but include stunning pieces and new depths.‖
65

Another lull in the discussion about the café occurred, and it wasn‘t until the late 1990s
that it—the café—like most memories, became romanticized and mythologized. In
1999‘s Books, Inc., Ruppersberg finally opened up about the goings-on and his
motivations for Al’s Café in an interview, which provided much new information about
the project. After that, exhibition catalog essays and other writings speak fondly—and
more extensively than ever before—of the work.
Ruppersberg also commented on why he stopped doing these ―environments‖:
―The main thing I felt was that I didn‘t need to do this kind of work anymore. The works
had been very successful and people were beginning to ask me what I was going to do
next—Al’s Supermarket or Al’s Department Store? I felt I had said what I had wanted to
say.‖
66
In the same publication, artist and friend Allan McCollum writes extensively—
and fondly—about the café, providing much theoretical framework for the project‘s
subsequent historicization, including macro readings about the work‘s commentary.
McCollum offers a reading of the significance of the rocks, leaves and other natural
materials used in the construction of the assemblage dinner plates, which hadn‘t been
proposed before and has influenced subsequent interpretations, including a 2005 Frieze
article:
67
―In Al’s Café,‖ writes McCollum, ―Ruppersberg answered the growing

65
William Wilson, ―The Art Galleries,‖ Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1985, H12.

66
Ruppersberg and Paul, 39.

67
Stern, 120.

40
mannerisms of Earth art with a slyly symbolic display of nature as always mediated,
always already determined by the culture that processes it—both literally and
figuratively—for its own use. He presented nature as a commodity for consumption, with
the pretense of any pure ‗natural‘ vision.‖
68
McCollum also suggested a contextual
radicality in Ruppersberg‘s actions, of working in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that
hadn‘t been ascribed to it previously.
Thus for Ruppersberg to simply reproduce (or even embrace) America‘s banal
traditional rituals (like having a meal at a local café) flew in the face of
expectation during those contestatory times. In Al’s Café he absolutely dismissed
the idea that a people could radically ignore their own culture. To the contrary, he
was determined to emphasize it at every turn.
69

All of McCollum‘s thoughts were couched in the mythic storytelling of how he
first met Ruppersberg, setting the tone for the artist‘s public persona (the dichotomy
between Ruppersberg as artist and Ruppersberg as ―Al‖ or his public persona L.A. Times
William Wilson addressed a decade and a half prior in 1985).
70
McCollum continued to
shed light on Ruppersberg‘s work in the essay, which still stands as the most extensive
secondary material on Al’s Café and has impacted many subsequent readings of the work:
―It was Ruppersberg‘s seemingly passive use of common everyday ritual as a ‗material‘
to work with that truly separated him out, very early on… But it was the cultural

68
McCollum, np.

69
Ibid.

70
William Wilson, ―Works by Lere and Ruppersberg at MOCA,‖ Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1985, G5.
―We know that Ruppersberg the artist is distinct from this persona because he obviously works hard. The
fictional Allen is the narcissistic layabout depicted collapsed on a Victorian sofa in a life-size self-portrait
photo. This guy is a bright L.A. loser who probably works as a book clerk and spends all his time
pretending he‘s some fin de siècle author, dandified, decadent and brilliant. He‘s a literary groupie, in love
with knee-jerk cult figures such as Raymond Roussel and Antoine Artaud.‖

41
narratives that lie behind the rituals of everyday life that began to preoccupy him as his
work continued.‖
71

Ann Goldstein, contributing an essay to the ―One of Many—Origins and
Variants‖ 2006 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, suggests in relation to Al’s Café,
that ―the role of the spectator shifted from passive viewer of works in a gallery to active
participant in the production of art. The ‗meals‘ were also works meant to be sold, to be
taken home, and in this way, Ruppersberg again circumvented the precious, unique object
of art…‖
72
This essay contributes to a discussion evolving about Ruppersberg‘s
interaction with or circumventing of the art economy by constructing an all-
encompassing, self-sustaining environment for the sale and experience of art outside the
gallery. Yet none of this historicization recognizes the unique parameters which were
informing Ruppersberg‘s work—those of Los Angeles, what it as a place ―meant,‖ or
how its particularities of culture and geographic orientation shaped the way Ruppersberg
interacted with his environment, both urban and natural. What much of this
historicization recognized was the ephemerality of the Café, the primacy of the
experience of the artwork and the limitations of communicating such a project in its own
aftermath. The work merely exists as a conceptual idea, amplified by the existence of
memorabilia, ephemera and photo documentation.
In 1979, for the tenth anniversary of the project, Rosamund Felson Gallery—
Ruppersberg‘s gallery at the time—hosted a two-night, celebratory gala on September 28

71
McCollum, np.

72
Ann Goldstein, ―A More Democratic Kind of Art Object,‖ One of Many—Origins and Variants
(Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2006), 35.

42
and 29, from 8–10pm.
73
Entitled Al’s Café (Reheated), the event showcased ephemera,
memorabilia and collectibles from the original café. The ―Memorabilia Menu‖ listed
what items were for sale and the corresponding prices, including large and small
aquariums, photo blowups from the original café, the bowling shirt, menus and signed
anniversary posters.
74
There was almost no coverage of the event,
75
except for one short
announcement in the L.A. Times a few days before it occurred at Felsen‘s gallery, then at
669 N. La Cienega Blvd.
76
This re-visiting is problematic for a work that can only be
experienced in situ. Ephemera and memorabilia become artifacts and relics of ritual since
the Café can no longer be experienced spatially, temporally or viscerally, but only
intellectually.
77

73
As per the press release and invitation provided by Rosamund Felsen.

74
Original copy of Al’s Café Memorabilia Menu provided by Rosamund Felsen.

75
Felsen believes that this is because press at the time didn‘t cover one-off or short-term art events like this.
She suggests that coverage of ―pop-up‖ events like Al’s Café (Reheated) is much more of a present-day
phenomenon.

76
Josine Ianco-Starrels, ―Art News: Abstractionist‘s Works in Survey,‖ Los Angeles Times, September 23,
1979, O99.

77
Seemingly, ephemera and other memorabilia from the café and the subsequent Al’s Grand Hotel (1971)
were displayed in the 1985 MoCA LA show, ―The Secret of Life and Death,‖ although there is no mention
of it included in the catalog. (The catalog for that matter is mostly a collection of select written works by
Ruppersberg plus an essay by Howard Singerman.) The Los Angeles Times did publish a short, almost
―classified section‖-like request for material from the Café and the Hotel in October 1983: ―Anyone who
owns or knows the whereabouts of objects, tapes, or photographs pertaining to Al Ruppersberg‘s ―Café‖
and ―Hotel‖ installation is asked to contact Elyse Grinstein at 471-4409. She will be designing
Ruppersberg‘s exhibition at MOCA in 1985 and seeks all possible leads to such material. A book/catalogue
will be published to document the MOCA show.‖ Two weeks later, on October 16, 1983, a correction is
printed with Grinstein‘s corrected phone number in the same column. (Josine Ianco-Starrels, ―Art News:
Celebrating Our Home Sweet Homes,‖ Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1983, R97.) Similarly in the 2006
One of Many—Origins and Variants exhibition at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Ruppersberg incorporated many
pieces of the ephemera from Al’s Café into a new work specifically for the exhibition, called These
Fragments… 1968–2003 (Rheingold Collection) (2005), which was described as ―dimensions variable,
mixed media, multiples from 1968 to 2003 on theatre furniture.‖ Allen Ruppersberg and Ulrike Groos,
Allen Ruppersberg: One of Many—Origins and Variants (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2006), 191.
Taking objects from the Rheingold Collection, Ruppersberg constructed theater prop furniture on which to
display material from previous projects. There was more material from the café than from any other project
included—six of the 23 items displayed were from the café. Ruppersberg utilized three original plates from

43
During the same time as the Café, Ruppersberg began showing beyond Los
Angeles. In 1969 alone, the artist exhibited work in Seth Siegelaub‘s ―One Month‖
exhibition (March 1–31, 1969); had a work titled Travel Piece, which was another
extension of Location Piece, exhibited in ―Live in Your Head/ When Attitudes Become
Form‖ at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland; and participated in Lucy Lippard‘s
―557,087‖ and ―955,000‖ exhibitions in Seattle and Vancouver, respectively. All of these
exhibitions began to ―define and survey post-studio art… The [Siegelaub] exhibition,
something of an indexical examination of the dissolution of the art object and its
replacement by statements, documents, and instructions, included works by thirty-one
artists, one a day and in alphabetical order; and, like the art it catalogued, it existed only
as a document.‖
78
Also included in the show were Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner,
Doug Huebler, Robert Barry and Ed Ruscha, who was listed the day after Ruppersberg.
Travel Piece was a ―documentation of a bus trip across the U.S. using a collection of
newspapers displayed on a card table.‖
79
The four displayed newspapers were from the
four stops the bus made between L.A. and Cleveland—the artist‘s then-current residence
and the place where he grew up, respectively—which commented on the transition of the
artist‘s own migration and re-location.

the café, light boxes, the ―Donut Tree‖ sign and the bowling shirt. These Fragments… was intended as a
―comprehensive and extraordinary installation for the first and only time. In addition, [the items] are to be
presented on the special pedestals Ruppersberg designed in 2003 in Ljubljana.‖ (Ruppersberg and Groos,
24.) These pieces are meant to mark significant stages in the artist‘s life, each linked to locations the artist
has called home. When seen together en masse it provides a snapshot of the artist‘s life writ large, a self-
portrait in a way. Ephemera from the Café was also exhibited in the 1995–1996 MoCA Los Angeles
―Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975‖ and the Centre Pompidou‘s 2006 exhibition, ―Los Angeles:
1955–1985 Birth of an Art Capital.‖

78
Howard Singerman, ―Allen Ruppersberg: Drawn from Life,‖ Allen Ruppersberg: The Secret of Life and
Death, Volume I 1969–1984, ed. Julia Brown (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
in association with Black Sparrow Press), 17.

79
Ruppersberg and Paul, 33.

44
The following year brought a one-man exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum
(renamed the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art in 1973, later the Norton Simon
Museum
80
) from September 22–October 25, 1970. This show contained nine works,
including Lee Baliantz (1970),
81
an epic wall-sized grid comprising 234 rectangular
pieces of paper each with a handwritten address (sans occupants‘ names) of familiar-
sounding streets located in L.A. suburbs.
82
This was the only time the work was
exhibited, and was, in fact, named after the artist‘s girlfriend at the time.
83
These sheets
of paper were arranged into columns headed by the 26 letters of the alphabet, much like
an address book, below each of which were nine rows of addresses referencing
flat southern California cities: Buena Park, Bell Gardens, Arcadia, Alhambra; and
their generic, interchangeable streets: Fairway, Paddock, Brookshire, Falling
Leaf… Each address lets us imagine a city, a street, a specific house: a tract home,
an old Spanish stucco, a garden apartment, a storefront. And as it designates that
house, that site, it points to it as a setting, a significant, that is to say, a fictional
place.‖
84
The addresses listed in the work are actual sites, referencing the real
world, pointing to the authentic, ―but severed and held away from their use, from
their norm, it is possible to read them a second time using the word location as
Hollywood does, for those scenes and settings that fit, and even hold, a story.‖
85

80
Norton Simon Museum website, http://nortonsimon.org.

81
Norton Simon Museum Archives.

82
McCollum, np.

83
Allen Ruppersberg, email to the author, February 22, 2011.

84
Singerman, 21-22.

85
Singerman, 21.

45
Figure 13: Lee Baliantz (1970)

Courtesy of the Norton Simon Museum Archives

This grid tactic used to organize Lee Baliantz would emerge again in the later
iterations of A Novel that Writes Itself, an on-going work first proposed in 1978. But
within the literal mapping of the city that occurs in Lee Baliantz surfaces a hint of
narrative, reminiscent of the story-telling nascent in 23 Pieces and later present in its
sequel, 24 Pieces (1970) among many of Ruppersberg‘s subsequent works.
The mapping Ruppersberg employs in Lee Baliantz again replicates the physical
charting of locations that occurs as one drives around Los Angeles, suggesting ―a
continuous stream of districts, neighborhoods, street names, and block numbers to place
[the sites] in continuously mapped and constantly noted reality.‖
86
The grid is an
amalgam of addresses, loosely assembled side by side, much like actual homes. The

86
Ibid.

46
incohesion that comes from glancing at the addresses is not unlike moving swiftly passed
a blur of houses, office buildings and businesses. Within this work is a narrative
reflective of the movement intrinsic within the city, paralleled not only by the addresses‘
organization, but also by the locations they signify. Additionally the lack of names also
echoes the actual physical movement one undertakes; monikers of buildings and
businesses become obscured by vehicular speed and residents‘ names are rarely
accessible to strangers driving by, so their non-presence mimics passage across the city.
Perhaps these are addresses passed along a personal commute of the artist.
Perhaps they were selected at random from the phonebook. Perhaps some were taken
from the artist‘s own address book.
87
Regardless, they are symptomatic of the L.A.
condition, which architectural critic Reyner Banham, writing contemporaneously,
described as:
…the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the
language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique
degree, as Richard Austin Smith pointed out in a justly famous article in 1965,
and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently
through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented
life. […] I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.
88

And in what is perhaps a gross overgeneralization not without some kernel of
truth, Banham assessed that Angelenos were most at home on the freeways,
89
a statement
reflective of both the critic‘s perception of the city‘s denizens‘ acquiescence to the reality
of extensive traveling requisite of a vehicularly dependent day-to-day existence and

87
McCollum, footnote 9—his own address appeared in the work, so he stipulated that some many have
come from Ruppersberg‘s own address book.

88
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), 5.

89
Banham, 203.

47
indicative of the pervasiveness of the simple logistics of driving, or at least commuting,
required to navigate—both physically and psychologically—a city as vast and disparate
as Los Angeles. The freeways, and a few supplemental, large boulevards are the arteries
through which the lifeblood of the city is pumped. The personal freedom that comes from
within a private car on a public highway (or at the very least the freedom of mobility
enabled by public transportation) is crucial to the Angeleno psyche.
There seem to be two major reasons for [the freeways‘] dominance in the city
image of Los Angeles and both are aspects of their inescapability; firstly, that they
are so vast that you cannot help seeing them, and secondly, that there appears no
alternative means of movement and you cannot help using them. There are other
and useful streets, and the major boulevards provide an excellent secondary
network in many parts of the city, but psychologically, all are felt to be tributary
to the freeways.
90

The freeways provide a literal frame around the city of Los Angeles and psychologically
connect the city center to its extended suburbs scattered throughout the vastness of its
4,000-acre county. Needless to say, freeways are integral to the Angeleno experience, and
Lee Baliantz captures part of that migratory pattern indivisible from living in L.A.
Returning to 1970, despite the success of the Café, most of what little press
Ruppersberg received early on couldn‘t come to a decision about him or his work,
especially with regard to the reviews about the work shown at the Pasadena Art Museum
exhibition. ―It is impossible to tell at this juncture, if the excitement of his best work is
inspired by simple unfamiliarity or authentic aesthetic shock,‖ wrote the L.A. Times‘
William Wilson.
91
The critical reception of the PAM exhibition in particular was

90
Banham, 196.

91
William Wilson, ―Three Artists in Museum Spotlight,‖ Los Angeles Times, October 5, 1970, G9. In the
same article, Wilson alludes to the Café: ―A few months back he opened a ‗Restaurant‘ where the dishes
were in little assemblages. His materials are more than common. They are positively anonymous.‖ This

48
distinguished by reviewers‘ indecision and non-comprehension, if not utter disgust as
exemplified by Peter Plagens‘ review: ―Allen Ruppersberg‘s show at PAM is the worst
exhibition I‘ve seen since assuming this [column]… Even if the exhibition fails on what
seem to be its own terms—the ever-so-slight alterations of very common objects for ever-
so-slight highly ‗poetic‘ disassociations—…Ruppersberg found the reverse glamor (sic)
of no-object too slick in its own way and tried to preserve an essential homeliness by
ducking back a little closer to sculpture. …The show is more the museum‘s fault than
Ruppersberg‘s.‖
92

Despite this poor reception, Ruppersberg continued to work, releasing 24 Pieces
in 1970 as a follow-up to 23 Pieces. This second book followed a similar format to the
first but with a slight modification to the layout and content. The images, twenty-four this
time, still remained black-and-white, documentary-style photographs taken and laid out
by someone else (the same photographer, Gary Kruger), but these were juxtaposed in sets
of two, one image on the left, one on the right. On the left of each of these twelve pairs is
a view of the interior of a hotel or motel room, with a slight alteration, evidence of human
action and prior presence. On the right of each pair is another scene, shot closer-up than
the hotel rooms and featuring locations distinctly not intended for sleeping or traveling,
like a diner table or the outdoors. These too exhibit evidence of human action/presence
through more declarative or aggressive means. The hotel rooms feature small gestures—
three rocks placed on a bureau beneath a mirror, a painting removed from above the bed

review is one of the first to mention the café. Wilson‘s assessment also articulates one of Ruppersberg‘s
main strategies with Al’s Café—the use of the banal.

92
Peter Plagens, ―Los Angeles,‖ Artforum (December 1970), 86.

49
and placed sideways in front of the pillows or a beer bottle left on the nightstand of an
otherwise perfectly cleaned room. The nature or diner photos capture more interruptive
gestures like a tree with a white X spray painted on it near a rock tied with string; or a
folding chair thrown down a hillside into a rock formation; or a card table with a table
cloth covered in splattered ketchup with the uncapped ketchup bottle positioned next to
the Jackson Pollock-like mess, folding chair pushed in. Each image chronicles human
action or presence through the remnants of action. The only actual people present in the
images appear twice: once in a hotel room a man's crossed legs are visible (presumably
the artist's) and once in one of the right-hand-side outdoor images a woman is walking by
a house with a couch left on the porch.

Figure 14: Image spread from 24 Pieces (1970), International Hotel

50
Figure 15: Image spread from 24 Pieces (1970), Holiday Inn

The double-spread layout and juxtaposition of two images returns to the artist‘s
burgeoning engagement with narrative. Even though an actual storyline is
unperceivable—the images merely document events of one kind or another—it is
irrelevant. The point is that the images are presented in such a way so as to elicit a
particular response from the viewer. Attempting to decipher the small gestures
documented in the photographs is an expected response of most viewers, who try to
construct their own narrative and make their own connections between how the two
adjacent images relate. It is unclear whether the images are intended to be read as one
action/occurrence or one the disjunctive consequence of the other, but this is a natural
assumption given their linear positioning, recalling the Western convention of reading
left to right.
25 Pieces was the next and final installation of the photo book series, intended to
be published a year later in 1971, but between the time Ruppersberg prepared the book‘s
maquette and its scheduled publishing, he became preoccupied with preparing for his
next project Al’s Grand Hotel, which required his transforming of a residential building

51
on Hollywood Boulevard into a functioning, weekend-only hotel-cum-artwork. 25 Pieces
was shelved and finally published in 2000 accompanied by a reprint of both 23 and 24
Pieces. This final installation documented the artist‘s extended time in New York City,
merging his life both there and in Los Angeles.
93

Within the twenty-four images (not twenty-five as would be assumed given the
pattern established in the other two books), the first twelve focus on L.A. indicated by a
page titled ―Los Angeles‖ while the second twelve focus on New York, denoted by the
same title-page construct. Each image contains three elements: a page from a newspaper
(either the Los Angeles Times or The New York Times, both dated August 30, 1971); a
photograph of either New York or Los Angeles, paired with the corresponding
broadsheet (images of L.A. with the Los Angeles Times and the same for New York); and
a letter addressed to either Ruppersberg‘s New York P.O. Box from friends in L.A. or a
note left at his L.A. apartment by friends in search of Ruppersberg when the artist wasn‘t
home, also paired with the corresponding city the note was sent to (letters sent to the L.A.
address were partnered with the L.A. Times, ditto for New York).

93
He visited New York for the first time in 1970 and began renting a studio there in 1975.

52
Figure 16: First image from Los Angeles section, 25 Pieces (1971)

Figure 17: First image from New York section, 25 Pieces (1971)

53
25 Pieces was considerably more autobiographical than either of the two
preceding books. It documented Ruppersberg‘s living in New York while still being
connected to L.A. and further utilized ideas of location and dislocation as subject matter.
The use of ephemeral materials like newspapers (a different page of each newspaper was
used in each photograph) related this work to his others. Ruppersberg was never where
his was supposed to be, so the letters represent the temporal and spatial disconnect of the
artist‘s non-presence, which is also at work here. The actual artwork documents the
ephemerality of time and place, leaving the viewer to experience the concept
intellectually. This construction of a fabricated narrative—of friends looking for
Ruppersberg when he was not where they expected him to be—also presages another of
Ruppersberg‘s well-known works from the period, Where’s Al?, which follows a similar
construction of short tête-à-têtes between friends asking each other if they knew where
―Al‖ was. These short passages, as a whole, assemble essentially a short story, shadowing
his later work with books and narratives.
But before Ruppersberg moved on to focusing his efforts on more literary-driven
work, he had one more in situ performative installation to enact: Al’s Grand Hotel
(1971). For six weeks in the late spring of 1971 (May 7–June 12), Ruppersberg operated
a hotel-cum-artwork entitled Al’s Grand Hotel on Friday and Saturday nights located in a
rented house at 7175 Sunset Boulevard.
94
Rates began at $15 and bought participants a
night in one of the seven, uniquely decorated rooms (The Jesus Room, The Day Room,

94
The hotel was open Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday morning when a continental breakfast was
served to guests who had spent Saturday night at the hotel. Additionally, this house still stands on Sunset
Boulevard and is currently the offices of the music-programming operation Goldenvoice.

54
The Al Room, The ‗B‘ Room, The Breakfast Room, The Bridal Suite and The Ultra
Violet Room) and the opportunity to actually sleep in an artwork.
Figure 18: Al's Grand Hotel (1971), Exterior

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

The Jesus Room had a bed and a massive, human-scale cross positioned
diagonally across the room, making it difficult to move through, much less sleep in. The
Day Room was filled with 161 paper buckets each containing ―the throwaways of 1971
America—packaged cereals, newspapers, paper products, and old glossies of movie stars
and models. All the objects were at least partially made of paper, so that the scene had an
air of ephemerality.‖
95
Visitors were welcomed into The Al Room by seven, life-size
cutouts of the artist, each costumed differently (one was a cowboy, another in a suit, and

95
Melinda Terbell, ―Los Angeles,‖ Arts Magazine (September-October 1971), 53.

55
yet another in the ‗manager‘s‘ shirt sported by Ruppersberg during Al’s Cafe), but all
giving peace signs (mostly) with their left hands. Party decorations completed the
ambiance. The ‗B‘ Room held 126 Life magazines secured to the walls and a picnic lay
out on the floor, while the The Breakfast Room contained what looked like a mini diner
with restaurant booths and halved furniture and pictures.
96
The Bridal Suite was as it
sounds, replete with a three-tier wedding cake, plastic ivy and flowers on the bed, seven
framed wedding portraits positioned around a pink mirrored vanity and ten wedding
presents and cards.
97
And in The Ultra Violet Room, nine sheets of notebook paper each
displaying a title of a movie in which Ultra Violet, the Andy Warhol-affiliated actress,
appeared. Each page was signed, dated and framed.
98

96
Goldstein, 36.

97
Ibid.

98
Ibid.

56
Figure 19: The Jesus Room, Al's Grand Hotel (1971)

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

57
Figure 20: The Day Room, Al's Grand Hotel (1971)

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

Investigations into myths surrounding Hollywood, the ―dream factory‖ and deeper
issues of theatricality were common among Ruppersberg‘s peers—friends like Bas Jan
Ader, Ger Van Elk, William Leavitt and Jack Goldstein all utilized the language of
Tinseltown. Whether through the incorporation of movie sets, location-scouting practices
or general employment of cinematic techniques, Hollywood was palpable. For
Ruppersberg, the strategy of using the theatricality of a hotel, the design of which
specifically references a film about the brief crisscrossing and intermingling of multiple
lives who encounter each other in a posh Art Deco hotel in Berlin, only signals how the
use of the constructs of Hollywood were instrumentalized in Ruppersberg‘s work—as a
stage orchestrated to promote the authentic albeit ritualized interaction of individuals.
Through the design and inspiration of the hotel:

58
Ruppersberg reiterated his appreciation of the role everyday ritual plays in the
ongoing course of human events and culture. In addition, however, by creating the
hotel in the image of a Hollywood film he infused it with a mythic dimension
derived from the surrounding city. Furthermore, by designing most of its rooms as
artist‘s installations that in one way or another referred to his own personal
history—ripe with suggestiveness and symbolism—he invited his overnight
guests to share a part of their own developing personal histories with the epic tale
he was creating in reference to his own life. This epic was intended to include the
imaginings of the other guests, the spectacle of the hotel itself, the drama of a
famous, many-storied film, and the grand myth of Hollywood, all at once.
99

The lobby was adorned with ―campy objects—a contemporary ‗Roman‘ bust, a
Maxfield Parrish print, and nostalgic furniture, antimacassars, etc., combined to create a
homey atmosphere conducive to relaxed talk, the kind of atmosphere notoriously lacking
in the Los Angeles art scene.‖
100
The hotel functioned much like the café of 1969 in that
it served beer and coffee and provided a meeting space for other artists and their friends,
who could ―inspect the hotel until twelve o‘clock‖.
101
Additionally, the lobby hosted an
occasional event, including a performance by Terry Allen.
102
Above the front desk was a
quote from the 1932 film Grand Hotel after which the hotel was named: ―Same thing
every day. They come and go—the Grand Hotel. Nothing ever happens.‖
103
Below that,
Ruppersberg hung his own quote: ―I‘m not creating environments. Only breaking them
down.‖
104
This is an insight into the intention of the work—that by creating a simulacrum

99
McCollum, np.

100
Terbell, 53.

101
Ibid.

102
Ruppersberg, interview author. The hotel was also the site of special parties, including one hosted by
Billy Al Bengston who rented out the hotel for a weekend.

103
The film starred Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford and Wallace Berry. It
won an Academy Award for Best Picture.

104
See Figure 21.

59
of a functioning hotel, and specifically a re-interpretation of a movie set, Ruppersberg is
asking the viewer/participant to re-evaluate ritualized interaction and become cognizant
of the social construct it is replicating.
Figure 21: Front Desk, Al's Grand Hotel (1971)

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

The artist‘s critical reception in the press was beginning to shift at this point, as
exemplified by a review of the Hotel in Arts Magazine: ―Extraordinary juxtapositions of

60
trivia and the built-in aspect of viewer involvement in the hotel created an actual
experience of the integration of art and life theory as opposed to a statement about it.‖
105

Although in a 1971 review of Al’s Grand Hotel, William Wilson called
Ruppersberg an ―L.A. vanguardist,‖ and elsewhere in the same article, jokingly
commented: ―Everybody‘s supposed to be a frustrated something… but whoever heard of
an artist that is a frustrated hotel keeper. …A while back he was a frustrated café operator
so he opened a café. The police closed him for not having proper licenses. It was
impossible to communicate the idea that a thing could look like a café and actually be an
art work.‖
106
Within this same article, Wilson tries to explain this new kind of art:
―…which are also a species of art work called an Environment. Such art started in the
early 60s when, for example, Claes Oldenburg opened a ‗store‘ full of painted produce
and Ed Kienholz made a re-creation of a bawdy house.‖
107

A year later, on the occasion of Ruppersberg‘s monographic show at the Pomona
College Art Gallery (October 31–November 22, 1972), Wilson summarized the exhibit—
and Ruppersberg—in the following way: ―Ruppersberg is sentimental and romantic about
the real Hollywood and the intimate life and glamor (sic) of street corners, drive-ins and
neighborhood bars. His art is noticeably insubstantial, relying on myth and mood.‖

105
Terbell, 53.

106
William Wilson, ―Rooms with Environmental Art: Al‘s Grand Hotel,‖ Los Angeles Times, May 30,
1971, N47.

107
Ibid.

61
Wilson calls Ruppersberg a ―provocative talent,‖
108
but this assessment is a far cry from
his previous on-the-fence review of Ruppersberg‘s 1970 PAM exhibition.
109

Helene Winer provided much context for Ruppersberg‘s work in 1972 and much
of his then-recent past work. She was the gallery director during the Pomona College Art
Gallery show and wrote the catalog essay, laying the groundwork for later interpretations.
―The café and the hotel were working situations that resembled and alluded to the real
thing… but relied upon chance occurrences within the basic structure… The content and
form of his work are essentially one and the same.‖
110
The following year, Winer wrote
about Ruppersberg for Art in America, hinting at his connection to L.A. and its role in his
work. ―Ruppersberg is in touch with most of what occurs in the city, and evidence of his
encounters—fragments of current style, speech, fads, attitudes and locations—are
represented in his work… The hotel and Al’s Café of 1968 (sic) were temporary
businesses that explicitly acted out Ruppersberg‘s fantasies.‖
111

Around this time, Ruppersberg expanded his engagement with the idea of
narrative, which he had been investigating since 1968, turning from photo narratives to
literary ones. His first experiment with writing prose began with Greetings from L.A.
(1972),
112
a self-published, paperback novel utilizing the tropes of Raymond Chandler as

108
William Wilson, ―Both Sides of Process Art—Ping! And Not-So-Ping!,‖ Los Angeles Times, November
12, 1972, N69.

109
See page 42.

110
Helene Winer, ―Introduction,‖ Allen Ruppersberg (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Gallery,
Montgomery Art Center, 1972), np.

111
Helene Winer, ―Scenarios/Documents/Images II,‖ Art in America, May-June 1973, 69.

112
There is also a related work, Greetings from California, that Ruppersberg was working on at the same
time. It was an oil painting of an orange novel of the same title as the work seen ―floating before a
California hillside sunset (to be exact, the view from the backyard of collectors Stanley and Elyse

62
well as the constructs of the archetypal ―Hollywood‖ novel, if such a thing existed
(another concern off of which Ruppersberg was playing).
113
The 240-page, hardboiled-
noir-esque novel-as-art-object set in Los Angeles typifies the puffery of this genre, its
title ―obviously derived from a tourist postcard.‖
114
Only eleven pages contain text (pages
35-38, 100-104, 180-181), providing snippets of three pivotal scenes from which the arc
of the mystery/murder novel can be constructed. The blank pages help to distinguish
Greetings from L.A. as an object and not a book, making it more sculptural than
functional as a work of literature. Even though the reader is privy to only snippets of
action, the natural response is to attempt to fill in the blanks in the mind. The first scene
takes the reader to a diner on Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Ventura Boulevard in
Studio City, one of the many neighborhoods comprising the San Fernando Valley, where
the intersection is described in detail—the Denny‘s, Hughes Market, and Union 76 and
Mobil gas stations—as the main character, a man, waits for a woman. Next the main
character appears to be in a bar listening to horse racing and stories of Hollywood
cowboys while directions to a ranch further west in the Valley, off Devonshire, near
Reseda, are heard intermingled with the tales as he lays ―his new .38 next to his beer.‖
Finally, the last scene ends in a courtroom in downtown L.A. where a plethora of

Grinstein).‖ Peter Plagens, ―Ruppersberg‘s Encyclopedia,‖ Art in America (December 1985), 86.
Ruppersberg illuminates the process: ―I think I did the painting first and then the book [Greetings from
L.A.], but I was working on them both at the same time. It‘s not that one was patterned after the other. I
didn‘t make the book because it was in the painting, and I didn‘t make the painting because I was thinking
of the book. They were being worked on simultaneously. So that was when I started thinking about books
as subjects, or beginning to think about what a book could do and what a painting or an art object
couldn‘t.‖ Ruppersberg and Paul, 40.

113
After Greetings from L.A., Ruppersberg enrolled in writing classes at the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA).

114
McCollum, np.

63
directions, routes and street maps are listed, recounting the main character‘s movements
across the city, mapping his actions through locations. ―Every time I look at a map of
L.A., the whole thing comes back in increasingly greater detail.‖
Figure 22: Cover of Greetings from L.A. (1972)

From http://www.biblio.com

The book ―adopts the tight-lipped litany of locales and the clipped, expedient
directions of [Joe] Friday and [Phillip] Marlowe. And [Ruppersberg] takes their city,
always indicating and fateful, as his subject. Greetings from L.A. is, as the blurb on the
back cover claims, a ‗lucid and powerful examination of the tawdry, tarnished truth of
Tinseltown.‘ It is ‗infused with the urgency of Lotusland, informed by the dream city‘s

64
quotidian loss.‘ The novel, or its come-on, readily acknowledges its location as illusory
and fictional.‖
115

For Ruppersberg, this is an investigation of space. It is as much about mapping
the physical space of the city as it is experimenting with how the blank spaces of L.A.
can work, be represented and be transitively experienced in literary form.
The Sunset Boulevard office that replaced Ruppersberg‘s studio in the late ‘60s
and early ‘70s, that held half of The Location Piece (sic), is a telling location. It
moved Ruppersberg not only out of the studio‘s confines and into the seedy
everyday of Hollywood, into the real, but into Phillip Marlowe‘s office and Joe
Friday‘s streets, as well. In Ruppersberg‘s L.A., fiction increasing infects and
empowers the real. That is, perhaps, the nature of the city, or of how we know it.
Ruppersberg remembers watching Dragnet as a boy in Cleveland, watching L.A.
mapped and narrated on T.V.‖
116

This work, like the others, is still about the investigation of place, of
communicating the immaterial essence of one location (the lost or blank spaces of L.A.
experienced while driving) through another (the tropes of the quintessential L.A. novel).
The blank pages represent the cognitive leaps readers make when reading this work as
well as the time spent driving around the city, driving through and encountering the blank
spaces of Los Angeles, a strategy reflective of Ruppersberg‘s time spent driving in the
car.
117
These ‗blank spaces‘ hearken back to Banham‘s suggestion of Angelenos feeling
most at home on the freeways. In many ways, L.A. drivers become immune to the
landscape between destinations, and the commute is merely a respite of thought, where
the mind wanders and turns on autopilot. These blank spaces (both cognitive and

115
Singerman, 21-22.

116
Ibid.

117
Ruppersberg, interview by author.

65
physical) become areas of dislocation between points of concrete location. Whizzing
across miles of freeway and miles of city leads to spatio-temporal ambiguity and
psychological disruption and displacement. Representing these spaces by leaving pages
blank within the conventions of a book (bound pages of a certain dimensional proportion,
replete with cover and printed text) suggests this same disconnect between driver and the
landscape of commute, and reader and the intermediary, filler story between the pivotal
action scenes. Thoughts of the dérive cannot help but flood back even though this is a
somewhat oppositional effect of how Debord envisioned the renewed sensitivity to and
awareness of one‘s surroundings that came through the act of engaging in a dérive, but
perhaps this is what part of the Angeleno psychogeography is—autopilot.
Some of the locations mentioned in Greetings from L.A. reappear in Where’s Al?
(1972), showcasing how certain areas of interest along with personal biographic details
infiltrated many of Ruppersberg‘s works from this period. In Where’s Al?, Ruppersberg
constructs a fictive narrative/short story of quick exchanges between friends asking
where ―Al‖ is. Although the mythic character of ―Al,‖ presumably the artist (and
author/photographer of this work, which in effect contribute to the public persona of the
artist), is constructed through the snippets of conversation accompanied by candid
snapshots. The work itself is made up of 121 index cards typed with short questions and
answers between ―He‖ and ―She‖ or ―He‖ and ―He‖ or any such combination of
characters, arranged in a grid and interspersed with 150 small color Instamatic photos all
of which, including the index cards, are secured to the wall with silver push pins. The
viewer can assume that these are images of the Hes and Shes chronicled on the index
cards, and that the man behind the camera is indeed the artist and transitively ―Al.‖

66
Al, we learn through the conversations, is never present because is his either off
reading (Joan Didion or Raymond Chandler) or at some coffee shop on Hollywood
Boulevard. But Al is never missing; he is actually ever-present. He is only missing from
the documentation but is in fact the one doing the documenting. Conversations narrated
on the index cards read something like:

He: Where‘s Al?
She: I don‘t know. Probably out in the Valley. Fantasy can‘t compete with reality
you know.
He: Yeah, I know.

He: Where‘s Al?
She: He‘s hibernating on Sunset.

He: Al‘s missing a good time.
She: Maybe he‘ll show up later.

He: Al‘s not here?
She: No.
He: I‘m sure he‘ll be here later then.
She: I‘m sure.

He: Wasn‘t Al coming?
He: I thought so.
He: He‘s kind of a careless driver. I hope he didn‘t smash up somewhere.
118

118
Excerpts from Where’s Al? (1972), Allen Ruppersberg: The Secret of Life and Death, Volume I 1969–
1984, ed. Julia Brown (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with
Black Sparrow Press, 1985), 87-104.

67
Figure 23: Where's Al? (1972)

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

68
Figure 24: Where's Al? (1972), Detail

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

Through the text, readers also learn more about this persona ―Al,‖ who has anti-social
moods, wakes up around 11am, hangs around Denny‘s and in old coffee shops, spends

69
time in the Valley, is traveling to New York and Europe, is sometimes broke and likes to
hole up reading books and not answering the phone. All these short exchanges lead to the
construction of a jumbled narrative, its muddled state unimportant because everything
stated can exist synchronistically without compromising what is gleaned about the
character.
Ruppersberg‘s choice of setting, again siting this work within Los Angeles, is
integral to the viewer‘s experience and creation of the character of Al, and thus the artist
himself. In a 2005 article for Frieze, Steven Stern suggested that: ―If the freeway—an
inexhaustible network of interconnected access points—is the model for the early work,
the reclaimed loft—a layered history of forgotten past uses—might be the East Coast
equivalent.‖
119
Where’s Al? is an apt example of this ‗freeway model‘ inasmuch as it has
multiple entry and exit points—reading it from beginning to end or picking up in the
middle leaves the viewer/reader with the same impression—in addition to the fact that the
viewer/reader is required to synthesize the information himself (much like a blurred
landscape seen from a highway-bound car window) where only clips of data are gathered
clearly, but, assembled together, register as a larger whole.
In Seeing and Believing, a series of six pairs of photographs, each pair consisting
of an exterior of a typical Southern California bungalow (labeled under the ―Seeing‖
category) and a corresponding image of Ruppersberg lounging around somewhere in the
interior of a home (labeled under the ―Believing‖ category), the viewer is asked to
construct a narrative. Though shown as two framed sets of six images, all six exteriors
are hung on the left under which ―Seeing‖ is typed and framed, all six interiors are placed

119
Stern.

70
on the right under which ―Believing‖ is typed and framed. The viewer is directed to ‗see‘
then ‗believe.‘ However, the crux of the work lies in that the exteriors are matched with
interiors that are obviously not from the same edifices; they are instead from suburban
tract houses. They are the fiction, rather than the non-fiction (which the exteriors, the
―Seeing,‖ provides). The ―Believing‖ is the sham. Ruppersberg toys with the viewer‘s
willingness to construct a narrative between two disjointed locations with his own
presence lending itself to the construction of the lie as he is photographed in each of the
interior shots.
Figure 25: Seeing and Believing (1972)

Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles

As critic Peter Plagens, who had been writing about Ruppersberg‘s work from the
beginning, suggests in a review of Ruppersberg‘s 1985 ―The Secret of Life and Death‖

71
retrospective at MoCA in Los Angeles, which subsequently traveled to the New Museum
of Contemporary Art (NMCA) in New York City:
Seeing and Believing is based on the common, almost inevitable, fallacy of
perception and reasoning, post hoc ergo propter hoc: B follows A, therefore A
causes B. In the work, a banal photograph of a typical Southern California
dwelling‘s exterior is followed on the right (‗followed‘ because we Westerners
read words from left to right and tend to read pictures, as well as combinations of
pictures, the same way) by an interior, which, on re-examination, proves to be that
of a different house. But the strength of the A-causes-B assumption commands a
quivering momentary belief that the two belong to each other.
120

The trick or the error lies in the viewer. As the need to construct a narrative is so
pathological, we become willing to collapse two disparate locations into one under the
instruction of the artist. We are asked to see the façade and believe the interior belongs.
Only upon second glance do the two appear irreconcilable.
From outside these stereotypical Southern Californian façades we enter into a
world of fiction where the artist‘s directive supersedes the viewer‘s own better judgment.
The viewer accepts the dislocation that‘s presented and upon digesting the difference
realizes that his willingness to believe the fallacy is the crux of the work, but it is the
exploration of displacement as couched within these archetypal Los Angeles bungalows
and what one believes to be their interiors that sets up the disconnect. This immersion
into a realm of disconnection and displacement overarchingly pervades the entirety of
this early work and further qualifies Ruppersberg‘s interest in removing the viewer from
the gallery context and asking the viewer to reconsider his own quotidian surroundings as
a new framework and environment for the experience of art. For Ruppersberg, art does
not need to be seen in a gallery, a museum or any other circumscribed white cube in order
to be Art.

120
Plagens, ―Ruppersberg‘s Encyclopedia,‖ 85.

72
CHAPTER THREE: THE ACT OF REAPPEARING
Ruppersberg‘s interest and exploration of location is evident in the work from
1968 to 1972, and he utilized various strategies to nuance this investigation. Whether
literally removing viewers from the gallery context by siting works and projects outside
the white cube or by creating books about locations around L.A. that were intended to
circumvent the gallery system, Ruppersberg contextualized his practice during this time
around Los Angeles as both a physical site and as a psychological condition waiting to be
explored.
Los Angeles was crucial in the functioning of many of these works, not just by
providing visual content but by endowing the work with a multifunctional examination
into the conditions of place and the psyche as specifically informed by the unique
character, geographical layout and intellectual experience of such a city dominated by
mobility. The freeways serve as lifelines and metaphors for the artworks, enabling a
correlative ease of access to the underpinnings of many of Ruppersberg‘s pieces like
Greetings from L.A. and Where’s Al?.
A renewed institutional interest in Allen Ruppersberg and his practice from this
early period merits a re-visiting and re-contextualization of the work produced during this
time, re-reading it as operating within and specifically instrumentalizing concepts
uniquely associated with Los Angeles. This interest is widespread as Ruppersberg‘s work
will be included the Getty Research Institute‘s city-wide initiative, ―Pacific Standard
Time: Art in L.A. (1945–1980),‖ which will include 30 concurrent exhibitions throughout
Southern California beginning in the fall of 2011. Additionally, a complete installation of
Al’s Grand Hotel, replete with artifacts, photographs and an original soundtrack, will be a

73
centerpiece in the upcoming ―State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970,‖ co-
organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific
Film Archive in early 2012. This institutional attention, coupled with Ruppersberg‘s own
return to this period in his life, which served as inspiration for a series of work titled L.A.
in the ’70s, recently shown as part of his ―No Time Left to Start Again‖ solo exhibition
(September 16–November 6, 2010) at Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles, signals a
valued re-examination and chronicling of this early work.
L.A. in the ’70s is composed of a handful of works on paper that include a black-
and-white photograph of Ruppersberg‘s friends taken on the opening day of his solo
exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. It maps the interpersonal relationships of a
certain milieu, denoting who knew whom by literally drawing connections through the
physical act of these individuals standing next to each other as a way to visualize an
emotional relationship.
121
Other works in the series include the use of mailing address
labels, typed with names and addresses of Ruppersberg‘s friends, again mapping
physically where people lived (some names reoccurring more than once, indicating their
moving around the city). This use of addresses to map the city returns back to strategies
used in 23 and 24 Pieces along with Lee Baliantz. Within this new series, the addresses
(which also include the names of the people who lived at each residence) mimics the
photograph, drawing connections to the geographical relationship these friends had to
each other, in addition to graphing Los Angeles—one person lived in Pasadena, another
in Venice, another in Hollywood, Santa Monica, etc. Because these works were created
some forty years after the content they utilize transpired, the effect of hindsight acts to

121
Ruppersberg, interview by author.

74
chronicle something that‘s lost—a lost moment, a lost temporality, a lost reality that
Ruppersberg had once lived.
122

I have chosen to retrace and reconsider a small cross-section of artworks
emblematic of the ideas Ruppersberg was engaged with during this time as part of a
process from which Los Angeles, as site and as idea, cannot be removed. The city is an
integral part of the reading of these works and deeply affected their production,
biographically, conceptually and psychologically, as the artist employed the unique
conditions of L.A.—vast spaces accessed via vehicular traversal—to investigate how
such a spatio-temporal framework affects and inflects interpersonal interaction and
individual exchange with the urban environment.
Ruppersberg‘s exploration of the city was mirrored in the art he was making
through process and concept. The act of traversing and discovering Los Angeles
profoundly shaped the way in which works like Location Piece, 23 and 24 Pieces, Lee
Baliantz and Greetings from L.A. were conceived and should be considered as integral to
the reading of the work. That said, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which Los
Angeles—how one navigates it, its psychogeography and its unique confluence of
vernacular culture, culture industry, and Hollywood—influenced the broader body of
work created between 1968 and 1972. Ruppersberg explored the blank spaces in between
the commute, in between the action of interpersonal exchange and how those in-betweens
affected conceptions of place within the Angeleno context.

122
Ruppersberg, interview by author. The artist also revisited the specific area of Sunset and Gardner,
where his former studio was and where Location Piece was constructed, in a contribution titled A Walk to
Remember to a 2005 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) exhibition organized by curator Jens
Hoffman. Ruppersberg conducted a walk around this neighborhood and created a supplemental binder full
of images chronicling the area in the 1970s and in the 2000s, again a lost L.A.

75
Returning once more to the dérive, this time in relation to the title of this thesis,
Art on the Edge of Visibility: For Debord, the dérive is a strategy that makes one
cognizant of how the physical impacts the emotional and the intellectual, or rather how
the visible influences the invisible. Ruppersberg‘s work, inasmuch as it engages ideas of
perception, experience and psychogeography, touches on these varying degrees of
visibility through not only its intellectual engagement but also through its execution and
manifestation; many of these works‘ intentions would be obscured if one were not
acutely aware of their own engagement with an artwork. In many ways re-contextualizing
Ruppersberg‘s work from 1968 to 1972 within the framework of Los Angeles has
become a dérive in itself, making one attentive to how the works‘ physical parameters
impacted how they were psychologically received, and noting that the artist‘s intention
of removing art world viewers from the context of the gallery instrumentalized these
feelings of being conscious of the interplay between the visible and invisible. In effect,
Los Angeles was indivisible from Ruppersberg‘s production process during this time, and
acknowledging this relationship between the artist and his location provides a deeper
understanding of the work.

76
BIBLIOGRAPHY
―Allen Ruppersberg,‖ Nachtregels = Night lines : words without thoughts never to
heaven go. Centraal Museum (Utrecht, Netherlands). [Netherlands]: ABN-
AMRO, 1991.

Augé, Marc. ―From Places to Non-Places,‖ Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology
of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso Press, 1995), 75-115.

The Cool School: How L.A. Learned to Love Modern Art. Dir. Morgan Neville.
Australia: Tremolo Productions, 2007.

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971.

Debord, Guy. ―Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,‖ Situationist International
Anthology. Edited by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981),
8-12.

Debord, Guy. ―Theory of the Dérive,‖ Situationist International Anthology. Edited by
Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 62-66.

Garver, Thomas. ―Los Angeles.‖ Artforum, Summer 1969, 67.

Glueck, Grace. ―New Place to Go: Ersatz Beanery.‖ New York Times, November 25,
1965, 45.

Goldstein, Ann, and Anne Rorimer. Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975. Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995. Published in conjunction with the
exhibition ―Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975‖ shown at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Grenier, Catherine, ed. Los Angeles: 1955-1985 Birth of an Art Capital. Paris: Centre
Pompidou, in association with Musees Panama, 2006. Published in conjunction
with the exhibition ―Los Angeles: 1955–1985 Birth of an Art Capital‖ shown at
the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Ianco-Starrels, Josine. ―Art News: Medieval Books Due at the Getty.‖ Los Angeles
Times, October 2, 1983, R97.

Ianco-Starrels, Josine. ―Art News: Celebrating Our Home Sweet Homes.‖ Los Angeles
Times, October 16, 1983, R97.

Lippard, Lucy, ed. Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972:
a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of
a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents,

77
interviews and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called
conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated
areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth or process art, occurring now in the
Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political
overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973.

McCollum, Allan. ―Allen Ruppersberg: What One Loves About Life Are the Things That
Fade,‖ Allen Ruppersberg: Books, Inc. Limoges, France: F.R.A.C. Limousin,
1999.

Obituary of Eugenia Butler, ―Eugenia Butler, Art Collector and Dealer,‖ Los Angeles
Times. January 19, 2001, Obituaries.
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jan/19/local/me-14272 (accessed February 10,
2011).

Plagens, Peter. ―Los Angeles.‖ Artforum, December 1970. 86-7.

Plagens, Peter. ―Wilde About Harry.‖ Artforum, April 1975. 68-9.

Ruppersberg, Allen, Christophe Cherix, and Liam Gillick. 23, 24 & 25 Pieces. Los
Angeles: Cneai, 2000.

Ruppersberg, Allen. ―50 Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday,‖ 1984, Allen
Ruppersberg: The Secret of Life and Death, Volume I 1969–1984. Edited by Julia
Brown. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association
with Black Sparrow Press, 1985. Published in conjunction with the exhibition
―Allen Ruppersberg: The Secret of Life and Death‖ shown at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
New York City.

Ruppersberg, Allen. ―Allen Ruppersberg Artist Talk.‖ Artist talk in conjunction with the
exhibition ―Art Since the 1960s: California Experiments‖ shown at the Orange
County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, September 20, 2007.

Ruppersberg, Allen. Allen Ruppersberg: The Secret of Life and Death, Volume 1 1969–
1984. Edited by Julia Brown. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, in
association with Black Sparrow Press, 1985. Published in conjunction with the
exhibition ―Allen Ruppersberg: The Secret of Life and Death‖ shown at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York City.

Ruppersberg, Allen. Guest Informant. Santa Monica: Santa Monica Museum of Art, in
association with JRP Ringier, 2009. Published in conjunction with the exhibition
―Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take‖ shown at the
Santa Monica Museum of Art.

78

Ruppersberg, Allen and William Leavitt. ―Before MOCA: Two Artist‘s Perspectives of
Los Angeles in the 1970s, William Leavitt and Allen Ruppersberg in conversation
with Carol Ann Klonarides.‖ Lecture in conjunction with the exhibition
―Collection: MOCA‘s First Thirty Years‖ shown at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles, November 14, 2010.

Ruppersberg, Allen, Allan McCollum, and Frédéric Paul. Allen Ruppersberg: Books, Inc.
Limoges, France: F.R.A.C. Limousin, 1999.

Ruppersberg, Allen, and Ulrike Groos. Allen Ruppersberg: One of Many—Origins and
Variants. Dusseldorf: Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 2006.

Ruppersberg, Allen, Yves Aupetitallot, and Marie de Brugerolle. Where's Al? Grenoble,
France: Magasin, 1996.

Seidenbaum, Art. ―Scenery in Hollywood Beanery.‖ Los Angeles Times, October 22,
1965, C1.

Sharp, Willoughby. ―Outsiders: Baldessari, Jackson, O‘Shea, Ruppersberg.‖ Arts
Magazine, Summer 1970, 42.

Singerman, Howard. ―Allen Ruppersberg: Drawn from Life,‖ Allen Ruppersberg: The
Secret of Life and Death, Volume 1 1969–1984. Edited by Julia Brown. Los
Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Black Sparrow
Press, 1985. Published in conjunction with the exhibition ―Allen Ruppersberg:
The Secret of Life and Death‖ shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.

Stern, Steven. ―Note to Self - Allen Ruppersberg,‖ Frieze : Contemporary Art and
Culture, vol. 92, 2005.

Terbell, Melinda. ―Los Angeles,‖ Arts Magazines, September-October 1971, 53.

Wilson, William. ―Al‘s Grand Hotel: Rooms with Environmental Art,‖ Los Angeles
Times, May 30, 1971, N47.

Wilson, William. ―The Art Galleries,‖ Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1985, H12.

Wilson, William. ―Art Walk: A Critical Guide to the Galleries,‖ Los Angeles Times,
March 2 1979, F6.

Wilson, William. ―Both Sides of Process Art—Ping! And Not-So-Ping!,‖ Los Angeles
Times, November 12, 1972, N69.

79
Wilson, William. ―Three Artists in Museum Spotlight.‖ Los Angeles Times, October 5,
1970. G9.

William Wilson, ―Works by Lere and Ruppersberg at MOCA,‖ Los Angeles Times,
March 5, 1985, G5.

Winer, Helene. ―Introduction,‖ Allen Ruppersberg, Claremont, CA: Pomona College
Gallery, Montgomery Art Center, 1972.

Winer, Helene. ―How Los Angeles Looks Today.‖ Studio International, October 1971,
130-1.

Winer, Helene. ―Scenarios/Documents/Images II.‖ Art in America, May–June 1973, 69-
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Interpreting participatory art

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Creator Johnson, Alexis Marissa (author)

Core Title Allen Ruppersberg: Art on the edge of visibility, 1968–1972

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/03/2011

Defense Date 05/03/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s,1970s,Allen Ruppersberg,Al's Cafe,Al's Grand Hotel,art,Art History,artist,Chouinard,conceptual art,contemporary,contemporary art,dematerialization,Eugenia Butler,Getty,Hollywood,L.A.,LA,Los Angeles,mapping,Margo Leavin,MOCA,Norton Simon,OAI-PMH Harvest,Pacific Standard Time,Pasadena Art Museum,PST,psyschogeography,Ruppersberg

Place Name California (states), Los Angeles (city or populated place), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Simpson, Bennett (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Fox, Howard N. (committee member)

Creator Email alexismarissa@gmail.com,alexismj@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3866

Unique identifier UC1335926

Identifier etd-Johnson-4505 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-443348 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3866 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Johnson-4505.pdf

Dmrecord 443348

Document Type Thesis

Rights Johnson, Alexis Marissa

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu