The Skirball Cultural Center presents The Singing Posters: Poetry Sound Collage Sculpture Book, artist Allen Ruppersberg's homage to poet Allen Ginsberg's famous poem Howl (1955-1956). It will be on view from May 7 through August 23, 2015. Ruppersberg first conceived of the work when he discovered that his students at UCLA had never heard of the poem. For the artist, it was a way to introduce Howl - which marks its sixtieth anniversary this year - to a new generation. By examining this seminal work of Ginsberg - a prominent American Jewish poet, free thinker, and voice of the Beat Generation - Ruppersberg revives the spirit of the era.
For the installation, Ruppersberg transcribed Howl into phonetic spellings and printed the "new" text on approximately 200 vibrantly colored posters reminiscent of commercial advertising. These are installed floor to ceiling on gallery walls. The phonetically spelled text compels viewers to read the poem out loud and experience it not only as a historically significant written work, but also as a vivid spoken-word experience that resonates to this day.
Drawing upon graphic design styles of the period when Howl was published, Ruppersberg sought to communicate the "high culture" of poetry via the common language of advertising. The layout and typography of the posters are visually chaotic, like the barrage of images conjured up by the poem. The installation also includes Ruppersberg's personal scrapbooks, which contain an accumulation of images, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, and other miscellany that the artist has collected throughout his life, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Singing Posters: Poetry Sound Collage Sculpture Book is presented by the Skirball in conjunction with its major spring/summer exhibition, Bill Graham and the Rock & Roll Revolution, also opening on May 7. Both exhibitions share the context of the counterculture movements that proliferated in San Francisco in the mid-twentieth century. The epicenter for the Beat Generation - which rejected materialism and conformity and embraced poetry, jazz, Eastern religion, and experimentation - San Francisco was where Ginsberg purportedly began drafting Howl and where it debuted at a reading in 1955. It was within this cultural landscape that would-be concert promoter Bill Graham (1931-1991) would come to produce programs in the 1960s that offered an eclectic mix of jazz, poetry readings, and rock & roll; Graham's Fillmore Auditorium shows became a breeding ground for experimental music and a community hub for young people who shared a common culture.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl debuted in 1955 at a reading in San Francisco and quickly became a hallmark text of the Beat Generation. The poem contains a jumble of images and buzzwords that vividly depict the socio-political climate of America in the 1950s. Its chaotic format emulates the state of affairs at the time. On March 25, 1957, 520 copies of the poem were seized by U.S. Customs and the San Francisco police. A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Books, the poem's publisher. Nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case, with the court deciding the poem was of "redeeming social importance." The highly publicized case ensured the wide readership of Howl, now considered one of the most significant modern American poems.
Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944) is an American pioneer of conceptual art who lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. His work includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, and books. In 1967, he graduated with a BFA from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now California Institute of the Arts), where he developed significant relationships with John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, William Wegman, and Allan McCollum. Ruppersberg belongs to a generation of artists whose practice attempts to bridge the distance between art and life through artistic languages that employ everyday objects such as magazines, commercial ads, postcards, and records. His work is socially engaged, even provocative, and accessible to the everyday person.
