Rona Barrett's Hollywood

Allen Ruppersberg made around 25 photographic pieces between 1969 and 1975, when he was a pioneering instigator of Conceptual Art in Los Angeles. Ruppersberg explored text-image combinations and mimicked vernacular culture, always with a dry sense of humor and subtle intelligence. For Rona Barrett’s Hollywood, Ruppersberg took a copy of Barrett’s famous gossip magazine into a photo booth. He held the magazine up to his face, hiding all but his eyes, and let the machine snap one picture of each page (four pages per session). Viewing and reading were made into nearly equivalent operations—nearly but not quite. For it is impossible to overlook the artist’s eyes, looking back at us as we try to read, or to ignore that, with his hippie hair and attractive features, Ruppersberg could be male or female, perhaps Rona Barrett herself.