Allen Ruppersberg’s autobiographical Conceptualism tracks his day-to-day life, without a trace of nostalgia for the metaphysics of self. It is in the elimination of its autonomy that the subject fears for itself, not based on an idealism whereby experience, in its immediacy, would rush in to fill the gap, but, rather, with respect to the mediation of multiple fictions, narratives, and stories that captivate the subject. Ruppersberg’s “Me” is a nomadic passage from narrative to narrative, a transference between life and fiction. Conceptual art is here a way of turning literature against the mythic

“La Collection de Galeries” (all works, 1991) is, as the title suggests, a collection of galleries that Montreal artist Gilbert Boyer has acquired, symbolically at least, over the past two years. The point of the exercise, beyond the obvious role reversal it entails, is to delineate the contours of the gallery as a generic entity: a name, a place, a space, and a set of practices that are variously esthetic, commercial, political, and social. To date, Boyer has succeeded in convincing 99 galleries from Montreal to Melbourne, and all of the major centers in between (and only two refusals), to