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When a critic called an essay on Allen Ruppersberg “An Artist Who Doesn’t Tell You Something You Already Know,”1 he was being both ironic and descriptive. Ruppersberg, after all, is the one who in 1974 hand copied, in ballpoint pen on twenty, six-foot-square canvasses, the entire text of Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Ruppersberg’s inventively enigmatic works often bring together photographs and text. These may have some shared source; more likely, their only correspondence is in Ruppersberg’s choice to combine them. As often as not, the pictures show the words to be out and out lies (or perhaps it is the words that prove the pictures false). Howard Singerman highlights this aspect of one piece from 1973: “Ruppersberg’s captions are, as Roland Barthes describes all text against photographs, ‘parasitic’; they ‘load’ and ‘burden’ the image… They are misreadings, bad influences.”2
Between the Scenes, 1973 , is a more elaborate fiction which plays four narratives against each other. Three of these combine to place a film-goer (Ruppersberg plays the part) between the film “scene” and the art “scene,” between old movie images on the wall and progressively more potent Surrealist artists’ names in the credits. The artist’s names, which float across the proscenium separating our world from the world in the photograph, include Ruppersberg’s as writer, Marcel Duchamp’s as producer and, in the final scene, Jacques Vaché, an obscure artist who convinced a friend to join him in suicide because “to die alone is boring,” as director. The fourth narrative, which may be the authoritative script, runs parallel to the others, calling an ominous end to all the stories at the moment they converge.
The piece poses yet another question of fact, however. For a careful examination of the sequence suggests that it is we who are the movie, to be watched or ignored by an alternate world that sits in the dark as our story—a fifth narrative—unfolds.
Charles Desmarais 