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

Los Angles, USA: MoCA LA, 1999

27 x 35.5 x 4 cm.

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

Allen Ruppersberg’s interest in jigsaw puzzles reportedly began with reading the classic 1978 Georges Perec tour-de-force Life: a User’s Manual (below)

In the novel(s), the protagonist plans to spend his remaining years (and fortune) traveling the world painting ports and transforming his watercolour works into puzzles, which he then disassembles and reassembles. 

From the book’s Preamble: 

“To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object – we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present case, a wooden jigsaw puzzle – is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link “this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of go. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up – which the English word puzzle indicates so well – not only loses its raison d’être, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear. The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.”

The puzzle has appeared in Ruppersberg's practice for over thirty years, as has the subject of the library, and collecting. 

Elsewhere on the blog (not hashtagged, sadly) are puzzles by William Anastasi, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Micah Lexier, Michael Dumontier, Ben Patterson and Dieter Roth. 

“[I]n the exhibition is a jigsaw puzzle, made by Ruppersberg in 1999. Its title is written in two parts, like the two parts of a story, and with two different fonts, A Mystery Of Nobokov's Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours... On the box’s lid, each of the titles seems to refer to one of the two images below, as a guide for the "player" to reproduce each side of this puzzle.

The first image is the reproduction of a room, of which only the bed is visible, with its bedding matching the wallpaper. The second image reproduces a library. However the experience of the player is disrupted or complicated by the artist, who established a protocol during the production of the work:

The artist bought puzzle boxes of different sizes on a flea market. On each of these boxes lids, he adds a title and two images. He made a double-sided jigsaw puzzle, using shapes that are not the most common with a variation increasing the difficulty of the game. The artist placed each puzzle in a different box and randomly removed some pieces from each boxes...”

- Michèle Didier, Press release