Since the 1960s, paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, and books have been among the media through which Allen Ruppersberg explores the intersection of art, literature, and life. Like those of Allan Kaprow, Ruppersberg’s projects are participatory, anticipating the ideas of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carsten Höller, and other 1990s practitioners of Relational Aesthetics. Ruppersberg's installation The Never Ending Book Part 2/Art and Therefore Ourselves (2009) was a selection of thousands of photocopied pages from the artist’s collection of books, which he installed in a theatrical environment of props and posters; the pages were stacked in boxes and free for viewers to take home and create their own unique “books”.

Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) was raised in suburban Cleveland and became interested in animation and commercial art after visiting Disneyland as a young boy. He graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute in 1967 and initially worked as a painter. He soon became fascinated with pulp fiction novels, magazines, posters, and films—the stuff of everyday life and culture—and made them the content and form of his work. Al’s Café (1969), an art project masquerading as a restaurant, was followed in 1971 by an installation in a craftsman-style house called Al’s Grand Hotel, which Ruppersberg ran as an actual hotel over the course of six weekends.

All images  © Marcus Leith. Courtesy of Greengrassi, London

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