Allen Ruppersberg

Allen Ruppersberg brought together his longstanding interests in books and posters in the billboard he created for this exhibition. Ruppersberg approached the billboard at face value, asking what does a billboard do? As an answer to this question, he created an unsolicited advertisement for an upcoming exhibition project, Pacific Standard Time. This large undertaking, with leadership and funding from the Getty Foundation, will take place at a number of Southern California arts venues and focus on the history of postwar art of Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980. As an artist participating in Pacific Standard Time, and as a key figure in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s, Ruppersberg has both a professional and personal relationship to the exhibition project and the era it highlights.

The image of the book on the billboard is an alteration of the catalog The Art and Technology Program, 1967-71, which documents the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's well-known project that paired artists with high technology corporations. The cover of that publication features a grid of portraits of some of the artists, scientists, and corporate officials that participated in the program. For his unofficial, highly humorous advertisement for Pacific Standard Time, Ruppersberg drew from his own personal archive and library for portraits of artists active in Los Angeles from the 1960s and '70s. In this way, he references the sweeping scale of both LACMA's Art and Technology Program and the Getty's Pacific Standard Time project, while inserting his own history as a part of the larger cultural narrative.
By Kimberli Meyer

LOCATION: Venice Blvd, west of Midvale Ave, on the north side of the street, facing east.
METRO: Venice Blvd. Metro Bus 33, 333
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Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944)
Allen Ruppersberg is from Cleveland, Ohio, and has been working in Los Angeles and New York since the late 1960s. Focusing on a mixture of text and image in his drawings, prints, photographs, installations, and artist books, Ruppersberg has fashioned an artistic practice that continually calls for viewer participation, from ordering one of many unique dishes at Al's Café (1969) or renting a room in Al's Grand Hotel (1971) to being given free pages in Art, and therefore, Ourselves at the Santa Monica Museum (2009) and The Never-ending Book Part 1 (2007). He is represented in major collections, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and Whitney Museum of America Art, New York.