Allen Ruppersberg : the secret of life and death, volume I 1969-1984

Ruppersberg works like a writer, researching his subjects and reinventing them, selecting, rearranging and isolating images so one sees them in a new way. His definition of art as part of everyday experience, of finding the magic and mystery of the ordinary, opens up all our surroundings as an arena for this artist and for the discovery of meaningful images.
Ruppersberg’s images are less made than they are chosen, found, and subsequently placed of arranged in such a way as to pint out their complexity and layers of meaning. He works in an ambiguous space between image and illustration, retaining a distance from what is seen and the consciousness always of something that is being looked at. The artist is there in the work as the initiator and the observer, making, frequently, a picture of an image.
Ruppersberg’s work is practical and matter of fact, paying attention to his surroundings: Los Angeles architecture, its rooms and the objects inside them, movies, books, magazines, and posters, TV, and conversations. It is involved with the ways in which our lives have been influenced by language, through the worlds (emotional and pictoral) that have been formed in literature, the vocabulary we use, the nature of our conversation, and the way things are named.