Review: Wit and wordplay abound in the comic collages of Allen Ruppersberg
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“As the Planet Earth began to crumble in the early 21st century so followed what was known as the Art World,” reads the first panel in Allen Ruppersberg’s print “Sunday Funnies #3” (2017). “A vast global network comprising everyone and everything involved in the culture and concept of art and its making collapsed in on itself.”
Ruppersberg doesn’t summon a superhero to avert the disaster, but he does act as wry chronicler of the implosion. He sets his own strip atop a base layer of classic comics, countering their clarity and narrative momentum with a nonlinear sequence of frames, each congested with floating texts and fragmented images.
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Nostalgic futurism butts up against speech-bubble book titles, “Suggested Reading” in art, astronomy, poetry and theory, jazz, folklore and mass culture. It’s an engrossing confusion, a self-canceling origin myth, a scrawling love letter and savvy joke. Like Ruppersberg’s multifarious work across the decades, it revolves around basic questions of representation and storytelling: Who are we, and what do we make of this thrilling and ordinary world? How can we render the experience of processing our experience?
“Past Present Future” at Marc Selwyn Fine Art includes five such comics collages, three of them retaining the tactile traces of their various components (C-print, color Xerox, ink, paint) and two printed anew with a uniform photo finish. Materials and image-based wordplay abound in these pieces and others.
The mounted pictures (taken at sunset on Sunset Boulevard) that Ruppersberg spins on a turntable in “The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles (Photo/Object/Sculpture/Record)” (2012) are also photo albums — records twice over.
Two light-box triptychs, riffing on the panoramic “Shot on iPhone” billboards seen around town, merely skim the surface where myth, marketing and the mundane come together, but overall, “Past Present Future” is a rousing show. The “ultimate Los Angeles artist,” as curator Helene Winer called him, continues to deliver.
Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 9953 S. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. Through April 1; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 277-9953, www.marcselwynfineart.com
Follow The Times’ arts team @culturemonster.
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