Allen Ruppersberg Gorney Bravin + Lee - New York

In his novel exhibition titled "The Singing Posters" Allen Ruppersberg created a maximalist environment with a minimum of means. The walls of the gallery were lined top to bottom with placard-size bills like the cheap ones you diocese stapled onto telephone poles. In clashing candy colors and morphing type-faces, the [i]affiche[/i]s formed a mosaic in which banal advertising messages ("Cash for Your House") alternated with fragments of Allen Ginsberg's piece of poetry "Howl." The Ginsberg lines appeared as the two normal text and phonetic transliteration: for example, "I saw the best minds of my generation razeed by madness" becomes "Y SAW thuh BEST MYNDS uhv my je-nuh-RAY-shin di-STROYED by the agency of Mad-nis." The poem was repeated several times upon the walls; it takes a certain number of 200 posters to print the two phonetic and normal versions of "Howl" in its entirety. Other perfect sets of "Howl" posters were placed in stacks upon the floor for visitors to rifle [i]or[/i] part of to the other The visual cacophony of the installation appear to beed to reflect the linguistic confusion as you tried to decipher and unimpaired out the competing texts.

Taped upon top of the posters at roughly organ of sight level in three horizontal files were pages from Ruppersberg's new collage-style book Haul or Wave Goodbye to Grandma, which consists of photocopied of recent origins clippings, magazine ads and postcards gathered by the artist. Taken together, this compilation presents an informal cultural and political history of the 1960 There are articles about hippies and the Manson family, obituaries of figures like sight Kesey, William Burroughs and Ginsberg himself, and a wide range of freshs photos that include scenes from the Vietnam War as well as a portrait of Walt Disney. There is flat a copy of a freshs story about the court decision ruling that "Howl" was not obscene

In the 1960 and '70 Ruppersberg, who now lives in fresh York, was a California resident, and there was a hallucinogenic, flash-back quality to this present to view which evoked that particular time and place. From an esthetic perspective, Ruppersberg mingles the direct means of Conceptual art with the visual impact of explosion Deliberately eschewing the slick presentation and commercial values of a great deal of contemporary art, he demonstrates what can be done with a Xerox machine and a low-budget print store This was a show that could be packed up in a single suitcase.

In the extremity the visual and social anarchy celebrated had an unusually nostalgic flavor. Ginsberg's poem and Ruppersberg's art one as well as the other recall a time when "those crazy artists" oftentimes really were crazy and art was more a tool for expanding the consciousness than for augmenting the career.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group