General
The individual search for the secret of life and death. That is the inspiration and the key.
The reality of impressions and the impression of reality.
The ordinary event leads to the beauty and understanding of the world.
Start out and go in.
Each work is singular, unique and resists any stylistic or linear analysis. Each work is one of a kind.
Personal, eccentric, peculiar, quirky, idiosyncratic, queer.
The presentation of a real thing.
The ordinary and the rare, their interconnectedness and interchangeability.
There is a quotidian sense of loss and tragedy.
Collect, accumulate, gather, preserve, examine, catalogue, read, look, study, research, change, organize, file, cross-reference, number, assemble, categorize, classify, and conserve the ephemeral.
Art should make use of common methods and materials so there is little between the talk and the talked about. (...)
A sort of journalist reporting on the common, observable world.
Suicide is often the subject because it is representative example of the ultimate moment of mystery. The last private thought.
Look for narrative of any kind. Anti-narrative, non-narrative, para-narrative, semi-narrative, quasi-narrative, post-narrative, bad narrative.
Use everything.
The artist is a mysterious entertainer.
Specific
(...) I want to reveal the quality of a moment in passing. Where something is recognized and acknowledged but remains mysterious and undefined. You continue your way, but have been subtly changed from that point on.
I try to set up a network of ideas and emotions with only the tip showing. The major portion of the piece continues to whirl and ferment underneath, just as things do in the world at large.
It is constructed to work on you after you have seen it.
The act of copying something allows the use of things as they are, without altering their original nature. They can then be used with ideas about art on a fifty-fifty basis, and create something entirely new.
It operates on a basis of missing parts. The formal structure, a minimalist strategy of viewer completion and involvement, is one of fragment, space, fragment, space, fragment, fragment, space, space, space.
The form of each piece is determined by the nature of its subject. (...)
I'm interested in the translation of life to art because it seems to me that the world is fine just as it is. (...)
Allen Ruppersburg, extracts from "Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday." The Secret of Life and Death (Los Angeles and Santa Barbara: The Museum of Contemporary Art/ Black Sparrow Press, 1985) p. 111-114
Reprinted in Stephen Johnstone, ed. The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art (London, Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press, 2008) p. 54-55
