Cover Art (The Last of Everything)

More than any other Conceptual artist from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ruppersberg brings the strategies and concerns of literature to the making of visual art. Since the mid-1980s, the artist increasingly used his voluminous vernacular collections of picture material and ephemera--mostly of mid-century vintage--gathered from secondhand stores. This work is from a series of covers for for non-existent books by an otherwise non-existent writer alter-ego of the artist's named Al Reed. For Cover Art (The Last of Everything), Ruppersberg collages together high-key 1950s color reproductions of the kind left over at a flea market to create an ersatz apocalyptic tract that doubles as a witty comment on then ascendant postmodernism--the mirthful and resigned idea of cultural exhaustion in which boundaries between high and low are terminally rent and the real has receded into an image of itself.