Allen Ruppersberg | The Mystery Of Nobokov's Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours

Allen Ruppersberg 

The Mystery Of Nobokov's Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours

Self-published, 1999

18.5 × 25 × 5.5 cm

Edition of 50

"Since the early 70s, Allen Ruppersberg has been making artworks in many ways function as puzzles, as to say a collection of elements arranged to make up a meaningful whole. It is not a coincidence if Allen Ruppersberg has decided to directly work on puzzles since one of his principle resides in transposing and reusing his own previous works or some of their fragments. The artist has continuously created a particular connection linking each art piece to his entire work and turning every exhibition into a new occasion to revisit his work by questionning its ways and modes of display.

In choosing to make puzzles, Allen Ruppersberg allows the audience, the puzzler, to take on his role as an artist. This way, the puzzler must glean amongst the pieces provided by Ruppersberg in order to assemble the whole picture.

As an addition to the idea of assembling, associated with puzzles, is the notion of absence. Substraction is an operation commonly used by Ruppersberg and "The Mystery Of Nobokov’s Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours" is no exception. Regarding this artwork, a hand- ful of pieces have been randomly removed from the box making the puzzle difficult if not impossible to assemble.

Every "The Mystery Of Nobokov’s Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours" puzzle are there- fore incomplete but they all offer to reconstitute two different pictures, one on the front side and the other on the back side of the pieces. The number of pieces is proportional to the box size on which the two pictures are pasted. The boxes have been purchased by Allen Ruppersberg at ea markets. Each one has a proper size and a speci c origin, beeing old puzzle boxes or chocolate ones."

- Michèle Didier