Howling at the Walls

The grids of luridly colored posters covering the walls of the Rice Art Gallery looked like they might be the sort of cheap advertising that announces a furniture closeout sale, the circus, or a monster truck extravaganza coming this Sunday! SUNDAY!! SUNDAY!!! But on closer inspection, the posters, which were part of an installation by renowned conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg, carried the phonetically written text of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl among the advertisements and announcements.

The installation, appropriately titled “The Singing Posters,” was conceived when Ruppersberg, an art professor at UCLA, discovered that his students had never even heard of—let alone read—Ginsberg’s landmark mid-1950s poem. He could have distributed Xerox copies of the work to his students, told them to read it, and been done with it. Instead, he decided to explore it as a visual piece.

Ginsberg’s poem—the antithesis of a prissy recitation of verse—is a writhing, gritty, shocking rant retched from the buttoned-up belly of 1950s America. For Ruppersberg, bold, graphic posters became a provocative way to re-present Ginsberg’s work. The artist took each line of the poem, reproduced the words as phonetic sounds using capitalization to emphasize syllables, and blew it up to placard size. The text becomes a formal element in the artwork as Ruppersberg plays with typefaces and scale in each piece.

Ruppersberg’s phonetic transcriptions render iconic lines like “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” as “Y SAW thuh BEST MYNDZ uhv my je•nuh•RAY•shin di•STROYD BY MAD•nis.” Rather than offering recognizable words on the page, Ruppersberg’s phonetic transcriptions make viewers puzzle out the sounds as if struggling through an adult literacy class. It makes the language more real and meaty—you feel the words as you silently form the sounds in your mouth.

Ruppersberg uses crass and shocking colors for the posters, interspersing them with actual advertisements that function like random samples collected from the stream of American popular culture: Do you want cash for your house? Child custody? Would you like to attend a Carnival at Peck Park, a Gospel Benefit Concert, a Chili Cook-Off, or a Senior Citizen’s Dance? Do you need an alarm for your home? Are you interested in a new shower door? How about a divorce? The cacophony of these messages and Ginsberg’s text creates a stark commentary on America’s wants, needs, hopes, and dark desires.
Ginsberg was almost a generation older than Ruppersberg, but the feeling of discontent and upheaval that the poet gave voice to resonated for Ruppersberg’s generation and still does today. In a time in which a recent national study of high-school students conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut revealed that one in three of them thinks the First Amendment goes “too far” and only half of them believe that newspapers should be able to publish stories freely without government approval, Ruppersberg’s installation is an attention-getting jab in the ribs. Howl was famously the subject of a 1957 obscenity trial, and it is only available to us because it was protected by the First Amendment.

In a side gallery, Ruppersberg presented Haul or Wave Goodbye to Grandma, a binder of clippings and images from the 1960s and 1970s, when he and other young people were questioning and protesting and upsetting conventions and norms during the Vietnam War.

Prominently stuck in the installation’s mix is a large poster that reads “NO WAR, Question Motivation, Explore Alternative Solutions.” It is the most obvious element in the show. It’s the sort of poster that looks 35 years old, yet has a new relevance. In a society in which only 83 percent of the high-school students polled believe that citizens should be allowed to express unpopular views—as opposed to 99 percent of their high-school principals—Ruppersberg’s installation is about the future of outspokenness and is an effort to challenge that younger generation.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer