Disappearing acts : Allen Ruppersberg's ephemeral impulse
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation analyzes the work of the American artist Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944), positioning his use of ephemera as a model for understanding the circulation and afterlives of undervalued objects. Ephemera is a mutable term, but it is typically used to refer to materially slight objects originally designed for passing use. This detritus--things such as pamphlets, postcards, newspaper clippings, pulp paperbacks, and roadside posters--is altered, rearranged, and repurposed within Ruppersberg's complex and often-humorous installations, collages, and drawings. In contrast to his peers in the Conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whose work focused on the primacy of the idea over the object, Ruppersberg is concerned with the aesthetic and narrative potential of forgotten or outmoded items, which attain fresh resonance in the face of an increasingly disembodied, digitized media landscape. The aims of the dissertation are two-fold: one, to examine the implications of Ruppersberg's heterogeneous artistic project, in particular his engagement with the discarded materials of vernacular American life, and two, to examine how the unstable category of ephemera bedevils conventional medium hierarchies and metrics of worth, creating space for subversive, idiosyncratic considerations of value.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Waldow, Jennie Claire |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Lee, Pamela |
| Degree supervisor | Meyer, Richard, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Lee, Pamela |
| Thesis advisor | Meyer, Richard, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Phelan, Peggy |
| Thesis advisor | Troy, Nancy J |
| Degree committee member | Phelan, Peggy |
| Degree committee member | Troy, Nancy J |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jennie Waldow. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/xp615rr1601 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Jennie Claire Waldow
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