Allen Ruppersberg - and Writing

Allen Ruppersberg (born 1944) is among the first generation of American conceptual artists. Allen Ruppersberg: and Writing presents a wide array of the artist’s text-based works from the late 1960s through to his most recent projects. A companion volume to Allen Ruppersberg Drawing, it gathers writings (and visual works containing writing) from series and projects such as Al’s Cafe, From the South Forty to the Bunkhouse, Great Acts of the Imagination, Le Mot Juste, Free Poetry, Obits and Studies, and excerpts from The Novel that Writes Itself and Great Speckled Bird. In his introduction to the book, poet Bill Berkson writes: Ruppersberg’s co-exemplars are John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha … Because they are visual artists first, they present language foremost as image–color, shape, light and scale being conditioned often enough by lettering, the quality of handwriting or font, or the format of a book. The upshot is a blithe alchemical switch of sign into symbol.