Tom Marioni. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art; installation view, Smart Museum of Art, 2012.

The list of artists—particularly those working in the 1960s and ’70s—pulled me into the exhibition. With my art-historical roots firmly planted in the West Coast, I was excited to see names like Tom Marioni, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara T. Smith, and Allen Ruppersberg alongside Gordon Matta-Clark, Daniel Spoerri, Alison Knowles, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay. Marioni, a San Francisco-based artist and the founder of the now defunct Museum of Conceptual Art, presented an installation version of his ongoing work, The Act of Drinking Beer Is the Highest Form of Art, which he performed for the first time in 1970 and continues to practice every week as a social action. In Marioni’s installation, we find a fridge and counter, a small table and chairs, and a wall-mounted case filled graphically with yellow-wrapped bottles of Pacifico. A flat-screen video monitor, hung vertically on the wall, reflects the golden color and effervescence of a cold glass of beer.

Bonnie Ora Sherk. Public Lunch, 1971; performance at the San Francisco Zoo.

Sherk, another Bay area artist, is represented through photographic and film documentation of two projects, Public Lunch (1971) and The Short Order Cook (1973–74). In the film and still images of Public Lunch, we see the artist seated at a table inside a cage in the lion house of the San Francisco Zoo. At feeding time, Sherk consumes her human lunch in front of a crowd of onlookers, while the tigers in the cages on either side of her consume meals of their own. Photographs also stand in for Allen Ruppersberg’s project, Al’s Café (1969), in which Ruppersberg transformed an LA storefront into a temporary diner. For three months, customers could order a variety of vaguely edible sculptures off the glossy menus—favorites include “Simulated burned pine needles à la Johnny Cash served with a live fern” for $3.00, and the “Patti Melt,” a “Patti Page photo (or reasonable facsimile) covered with toasted marshmellows” [sic] available for just $2.00. Ruppersberg’s Café was intended as a gathering place and social hub for the Los Angeles art crowd, the focus obviously not on food itself, but on the social space that food carves out.

Allen Ruppersberg. Al’s Café, 1969; installation, Los Angeles.

In these works from the 1960s and ’70s, as well as those taken from more recent years, the social and political connections posed by food, drink, and conviviality are taken up as radical possibilities. While many of the earlier works propose to radicalize the everyday—turning the act of drinking beer, or perhaps consuming Knowles’ Identical Lunch, with the artist—into actions designated under art’s then-broadening umbrella. For many of the artists, it seems that the radical action may lie not in the sharing of food itself, but in the circulating conversations that come out of these intentional situations. Michael Rakowitz’s project, Enemy Kitchen (A Food Truck) (2012), extends the artist’s interest in using traditional Iraqi foods to begin conversations about international conflict. Placing Iraqi chefs and recent American veterans inside the same space is just one of the ways in which Rakowitz seeks to spur a political discussion built around the cultural specificities of food. For the collective Red76, the meal also becomes a catalyst for a deeper political discussion, with their Revolutionary Table events (begun in 2007) serving as a meeting place to discuss democracy, speech, and collectivity within what was then a conservative political climate in the U.S. Photographs and copies of Red76’s zine-like publications document both the Revolutionary Table projects and the related Occupy Yr. Home (begun in 2012).

Red76. Occupy Yr. Home Dinner, 2012; detail of performance and installation, Chicago.

Feast proposes to chronicle groundbreaking acts of sharing, conviviality, and food, but the exhibition’s very premise is also its biggest challenge: How can a museum represent time-based, interactive artistic practices in fresh and compelling ways? The usual approach—to use photos, videos, and objects to stand in for experiences—is recycled here. The radical actions become, once again, rather banal when seen through this accumulation of documentary materials. The photographs of live events cling dully to flat surfaces, and the videos play silently (headphones available for each) on sleek monitors. Lengthy didactics are stuck to the walls; objects and photographs are encased behind Plexiglas. For an exhibition that invokes “hospitality” and “radicality” as central concepts, the design of the exhibition itself offers little of either. The only moment for interaction lies on the floor beneath the entry wall text: One of Felix Gonzalez Torres’ iconic “candy spill” pieces, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) (1991), offers the only chance to actually partake in a physical way.

Of course, it is difficult to assess an exhibition outside of its native context—in this case, the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. While the pieces would have been selected, framed, sized, and activated (theoretically) according to the specificities of the Smart’s galleries in the first go-round, exhibitions on tour have to adapt, somewhat like a living organism, to unfamiliar and perhaps imperfect physical parameters. At the Weisman, the documentation of these works appears slightly stale, like the crusty traces of uneaten food and smoked cigarettes encased in Spoerri’s Tableau Piege, 17 Juni 1972 (1972). According to the website and the catalog, the exhibition was much more active—and interactive—at the Smart Museum, yet the Weisman’s activation of works by Marioni, Red76, and others occurred only at their $250-per person gala event that coincided with the exhibition’s opening. Now what remains is a set of documents, some installations and sculptural works, and videos. While it covers a truly fascinating subject matter, Feast is perhaps better served as a book—in the beautiful catalog documenting many under-recognized projects from the past eight decades—than in a gallery setting.

Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art is on view at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota through May 10, 2015.

Allen Ruppersberg. Self-Portrait Making a Face Like Barney Bear, 1975; pencil on paper; 23 x 29 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

In these works, Ruppersberg depicts both images and words to produce what he describes as a “‘comparison’ of reading and looking and the ‘confusion of the two.’”[1] As Leslie Jones, Curator of Prints and Drawings at LACMA, notes in her insightful catalogue essay: “Choosing to draw it [the book] points to the graphic affinity between writing and drawing as well as the experiential distinctions between reading a book and drawing it, between interpreting its linguistic contents and rendering visually it as an object.”[2] Drawing and writing are constantly at play as drawings of books, drawings of words, and drawings of illustrations all compete to be recognized for their veracity. Reading Time (The Elements of Style), a drawing from 1973–74, captures this playful questioning of truth as Ruppersberg depicts a simple line drawing of the Strunk and White classic above a reading time of two hours and fifty-eight minutes written (drawn?) in expressive cursive. Following from Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), Ruppersberg questions which is the more accurate representation: a basic drawing of a book or his subjective temporal experience of reading it.

Allen Ruppersberg. Reading Time (The Elements of Style), 1973-74; pencil on paper; 23 x 29 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. Photo: Jake Wotherspoon.

Books are a major inspiration for Ruppersberg, both as literature and as object. A series from 1989, The Gift and the Inheritance, depicts individual titles from his collection, high and low, from Shakespeare to a basic drawing manual. Rendered with detailed specificity, each drawing is a portrait of the object, showing Ruppersberg’s relationship to that particular copy. This relationship is then extended to the purchaser of the artwork: After Ruppersberg’s death, the owner of the drawing will receive the actual book depicted. A relatively straightforward picture of a book is expanded to include a story well beyond the boundaries of the frame.

Allen Ruppersberg. Self-Portrait as Bugs Bunny, 1975; pencil on paper; 23 x 29 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Before turning to fine art, Ruppersberg studied illustration at Chouinard Institute (now CalArts), and this “practical” art features prominently in many of his drawings. Images of typical Americana appropriated from picture postcards (taken from his massive collection) are blown up to five or six times their original size with the aid of a projector. A five-panel piece, On Possession and Sexual Loss (1979), begins with a drawing of a generic book cover, followed by drawings of a woman with flowers, a woodcarver, a cowboy, and an old-fashioned inn, all rendered with faithful adherence to their mass-market origins. The titular phrase is written out, starting on the first sheet (On Possession), and continuing onto the second (and Sexual Loss), reinforcing the notion that the work is to be read like a book. By appropriating these everyday images and combining them with evocative text, Ruppersberg is suggesting a new narrative, in keeping with his statement that “Art should be familiar and enigmatic.”[3]

Allen Ruppersberg. On Possession and Sexual Loss, 1979; pencil on paper; Five Parts: 23 x 29 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Ruppersberg also looks to popular imagery to comment on identity construction. In Self-Portrait Making a Face like Barney Bear (1975), the cartoon character smiles sheepishly out at us in front of a bright orange, crosshatched background. Ruppersberg’s version of the bear recalls the original, but the hand of the artist is clearly present. A similar Self-Portrait as Bugs Bunny (1975) does a better job of capturing this duality, perhaps because of the character’s popularity. These are not the airbrushed and silkscreened cartoon characters of Pop Art. Instead, they express something of the connection between artist and cultural artifact.

Allen Ruppersberg. The Gift and the Inheritance (Why Not Draw?), 1989; pencil on paper; 19 ½ x 26 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. Photo: Jake Wotherspoon.

Another self-portrait, Autobiography 1. Autobiography 2. (1980), uses various sources and methods of depiction to tell the artist’s story. This work in two parts includes bucolic images of a mother hen sitting atop a litter of kittens and a country cottage, paired with musical notation for Neil Young’s “My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue)” and a recipe for egg salad. Mass media, music, food—drawing, musical symbols, and writing—are all valid means to convey something of Ruppersberg’s identity. Although he is not literally pictured, these borrowed signifiers tell us a great deal more about the artist than would be possible through photographic representation.

Perhaps because of the contemporary ubiquity of art that traffics in language and appropriation, it’s difficult to get a true sense of Ruppersberg’s influence. Echoes of this work can be seen across the spectrum, from Raymond Pettibon to Richard Prince to Fiona Banner. By focusing on an underrepresented aspect of Ruppersberg’s output, Drawing and Writing provides a much-needed reappraisal of his legacy.

Allen Ruppersberg: Drawing and Writing 1972–1989 is on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills through May 17, 2014.

A button York Chang designed for Arco Madrid. It quotes a Latin American artist Chang invented.

York Chang always wanted to be a Latin American artist. The complication with this was that he wasn’t: wasn’t from Latin America, hadn’t grown up there, didn’t have family from there. As he described Wednesday, at Paper Chaser’s X-Ten Biennial, an evening over which arts professionals talked for ten minutes each about their influences, he solved the problem in a fairly labor intensive, metafictional way, creating a Latin American art movement, making the work of its artists and working to convince others it actually existed. But, still, it’s the weirdness of the situation that interests me more than the solution. What can you do when you want, impossibly, to be something you can’t be?

Director Jason Reitman, of Juno fame, will be doing something impossible next Thursday (Oct. 20). He’ll be restaging The Breakfast Club with a collection of unannounced, perhaps unconfirmed, performers. Reitman’s “cast” will gather at LACMA, and then just do it, launch into the 1985 teen classic with no rehearsals to help them along. It’s the situation that audiences will come to see, and the potential is immense. Despite it’s seeming feel-good message–stereotypes don’t go past the surface, all people are deeper than they appear–the movie is almost like a piece of endurance theater, with amazingly absurd vignettes.

Still from "The Breakfast Club"

Molly Ringwald puts lipstick on with the tube between her breast. Emilio Estevez breaks glass like a mad man. And then they just sit in the library for hours on end.Who should play Allison, “the mute,” who puts chips in her sandwich and chews loudly? Aubrey Plaza? Maybe that’s too obvious. Winona Ryder, a troubled dark-haired beauty? And what if Estevez’s jock was played by someone not really cool or athletic at all? Fred Armisen? Somehow, I’ve got Mad Men’s John Hamm locked in my head as the criminal John Bender character. He doesn’t have the beady eyes, but I’d like to see him as the bully.

Another longer-lasting “situation” begins tomorrow, when the Museum of Public Fiction opens its California Hotel, a fully functional hotel suite that will operate out of its Highland Park space for a month. Artist collective Grizzly Grizzly will be the full-time residents and the public will be welcome on Saturdays, from noon to 6. There’s a mini-bar, a televised concierge and Wi-Fi.

Museum of Public Fiction's announcement for The California Hotel

Letter and brochure for Al's Grand Hotel, May 2, 1971, designed by Allen Ruppersberg.© Allen Ruppersberg. The Getty Research Institute, Gift of Michael Asher, 2009.

Allen Ruppersberg did something similar in 1971, and his “Al’s Grand Hotel” is the inspiration for Public Fiction’s rendition. Rupperberg used a house on Sunset Boulevard, decorating guest rooms according to themes (there was a Jesus-themed room and a bridal suite), and then presenting Saturday concerts by artist-musician Terry Allen. None of the stories I’ve heard about what happened there are outrageous. It’s just the fact that Al did it that remains interesting; he created a space for people to come and experience each other, where outrageous, memorable things could have happened. “I use my art to transform my life, I use my life to make my art,” Rupperberg wrote in his 1985 essay Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday. Neither life nor art always pan out to be something amazing, but they never stop having that amazing potential.