WILDE ABOUT HARRY
Allen Ruppersberg’s show at the Pasadena Art Museum is the worst exhibition I’ve seen since assuming this (L.A.) Letter.
—Peter Plagens, Artforum, December, 1970
Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel-switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders.
—Arthur Symonds, An Introduction To The Study Of Browning
Allen Ruppersberg’s videotape, A Lecture on Houdini (for Terry Allen), 1972, is the best 40 minutes in five-odd hours inside the world’s smallest Twin-Vue walk-in east of the Hudson, the video chamber of the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. It might be the best artwork in an exhibition which, in its sentimental regional-neophyte beneficence, abdicates any sensual cohesion (it looks like a swap meet) in favor of acting asa brokerage service for unattached artists. Houdini begins with Ruppersberg, attired in a straight-jacket and seated behind a long table which exits screen left, announcing:
Good morning. Today’s talk concerns a man whose name has been a household word for almost three-quarters of a century. . . .
He then proceeds to read—the sheets of text laid out side by side, and Ruppersberg scooching his chair over periodically to gain the next page—his enthralling account of the great “mysterious entertainer’s” career, with particular emphasis on Houdini’s love-hate struggle with spiritualism. (The man who was the subtlest purveyor of sheer physical tricks the globe has ever known, as well as the most ruthless, zealous debunker of “mediums,” desperately wanted to believe in communication with the dearly departed, especially after the death of his own mother. But his fanatical skepticism couldn’t refrain from poking, piercing, double-checking, flaying every phenomenon of the “occult” until, bringing forth tears of both sorrow and joy to the master’s eyes, it cracked open like an underwater steamer trunk. On his deathbed with gangrenous appendix, Houdini, however, left a password that, should his widow Bess ever hear it from a third party, would signal yes, there is another shore.) Ruppersberg’s literary style is romantic-academic, like an art history professor I once took, who could brighten that ubiquitous millstone called “Survey I” with a lecture on Rembrandt that’d bring tears to the eyes of all us sorority girls. You find yourself, while gazing at the only Biennial tape that isn’t self-impressed into paralysis/tedium at its own media-hipness, floating into a Houdini reverie.
Meanwhile, Ruppersberg plays Lacoön with the straight-jacket. Will he burst the bonds before he finishes the lecture? No. Puffing, straggle-haired, he looks up at the camera after recalling Houdini’s final, aborted performance in Montreal, and concludes softly, “Thank you,” still bound. That Houdini is coherent where other tapes are not, that it’s low-key and suited to the tube where the others fairly beg to be arty film or “little” books, that it’s got the grace and flow of good fiction (albeit “fact”) where the others are counter culturally bureaucratic documentaries, are just the initial qualities. Upon reflection, you realize Ruppersberg is Houdini, that Harry H., via the “spiritualism” of video (the Whitney room could use a séance or two), might well be lecturing to us on Ruppersberg. The artist as/is magician—subliminal and convincing. Next, there’s the business of time—the tape, lecture (Ruppersberg talking), escape attempt, and Houdini’s “life” itself run out before our eyes and ears. For whom are you choking up (I did) at the end—Ruppersberg or the indefatigable magician?
Thus, Ruppersberg manages to be structuralist (i.e., examines the properties of his art form and the nature of its “meanings”) in an insidiously poetic way, distracting you with entertainment. Not unlike Houdini.
Houdini, unfortunately, is the only videotape in Ruppersberg’s oeuvre; The Picture of Dorian Gray, shown last year at Claire Copley Gallery, is of the same ilk but different material. It comprises a handwritten (felt-tip pen) copy of the entire text of Oscar Wilde’s novella occupying 20 6’-square stretched canvases hung bing-bing-bing . . . along the gallery walls (it’s one piece; Ruppersberg refuses to break the set). The story of Mr. Gray concerns, as everyone knows, a man whose commissioned portrait grows old for him while he remains youthfully smooth—until the painting is destroyed. Mr. Ruppersberg’s work, as everyone should know, is only a decoy, reposing mutely while it goes to work on nearly every imaginable permutation and layer:
Wilde’s Dorian Gray is, among other things, writing about art.
Ruppersberg’s Dorian Gray is art about writing about art.
But Ruppersberg’s is a distanced comment on writing-as-art, both in the literary and Conceptual sense. Ivan Albright notwithstanding, Wilde’s Dorian Gray never existed as a picture.
Ruppersberg’s does, as a comment on the conceptualizing of pictures via the pictorializing of conceptual stuff, i.e., the canvas as printed page. Etc.
And, like Houdini, the magic element pervades. Can Houdini really talk from the dead? Can the portrait really save Dorian Gray from his deserved putrescence? Of course, Houdini does speak from the grave, indirectly, via Ruppersberg’s tribute; and Dorian Gray—a figment anyway—is renewed every time someone cracks the book or (for the few) peruses the Ruppersberg canvases. Ironically, the task of actually reading the story on canvas (I didn’t) is tedious to the point of accelerating aging.
Although Ruppersberg shares with some other Southern California artists—Alexis Smith, William Leavitt, John Baldessari, John White—a certain narrative clarity, he’s not a “story” artist, if such a category exists outside condescending convenience. He beguiles, sure, and much of his work (the earlier Al’s Cafe and Al’s Hotel, and Are You An Artist?) is joke-based. But at the bottom of every good joke is a cosmic non sequitur, an epistemological white dwarf that collapses upon itself. If it weren’t for the illuminating initial joke, we couldn’t see it out there . . . signaling to us from the dead.
—Peter Plagens
