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Something out of the ordinary

The essay ‘Something out of the ordinary’ was originally written for the Camden Arts Centre to accompany Allen Ruppersberg’s solo show in 2008. Slyce’s essay examined the everyday as a resource for Ruppersberg’s art, drawing on research in and around Ruppersberg’s practice as a central figure in establishing conceptualism on the West Coast of the USA. Slyce contextualised Ruppersberg amongst the leading figures exploring post-studio practices and creating an ‘art of the everyday’ that adopts the archive as not only a resource but also as the material from which art might be made.

The essay was republished in the catalogue Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take (2010), which accompanied Ruppersberg’s exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (12 September–19 December 2010). For this publication, the essay was integrated into a catalogue that Ruppersberg designed as an artwork in itself, modelled on a 1956 edition of a California and Las Vegas travel guide called The Guest Informant. Slyce’s essay, along with texts by other authors, including the guest curator Constance Lewallen and the cultural critic Greil Marcus, were superimposed over the original pages of the travel book.

Slyce gave a lecture about Ruppersberg’s work in relation to experimental film in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the symposium ‘Double Agents: Wallace Berman and Allen Ruppersberg’ held at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and organised in collaboration with Camden Arts Centre in November 2008.