ALLEN RUPPERSBERG / Greetings from L.A.

Allen Ruppersberg
Greetings from L.A. : A Novel  1999
Artists book, pictorial wrappers, offset-printed, glue bound, black-and-white
20.5 x 13.5cm, 240 pages
Self-published book

Condition: Excellent, with minimal wear

Beginning in the 1960s select Los Angeles artists began to mimic the look and feel of commercial marketing strategies by treating viewers as consumers. In this vein, Allen Ruppersberg produced a series of books that demonstrate an interest in the products of popular culture. One of these was 'Greetings from L.A.', the subtitle for which declares it to be a novel. A flip of its pages reveals only occasional bits of narrative, with the most of the pages left blank. It is an artist's book in the guise of a faux novel.

The back cover, meanwhile, features a parody of the exaggerated and breathy prose used to sell airport fiction and cheap thrillers.  The piece is striking for this contrast between its content, a high-culture exploration of text and spacing that nods to the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and its seeming appearance as low-culture pulp fiction.

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”.