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Allen Ruppersberg
"Fishing is Fun," 2005
Two-sided hand cut puzzle
Completed puzzle measures: 50 x 62.5 cm.
Box measures: 29 x 37 x 5.5 cm.
Edition of 15
Published by Christine Burgin

"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'etre, 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."
-Georges Perec, "Life a User's Manual"

In the preamble to his 1978 novel "Life a User's Manual" Georges Perec attempts to explain the strange nature of jigsaw puzzles, an enterprise of profoundly perfect yet simultaneously futile solutions. He does so by way of introducing Percival Bartlebooth, the main character of the story to follow, an artist who devotes his life to the elaborate creation and destruction of jigsaw puzzles of his own making. Perec's musing on this subject might also help to ellulidate the work of Allen Ruppersberg. Since the early 70s, Ruppersberg been making artworks that in many ways function as puzzles: a collection of elements arranged to make up a meaningful whole. In a recent series entitled "Honey I Rearranged the Collection," for example, Ruppersberg rearranges elements of his own works from the 70s into new configurations. He accompanies these new works with imagined quotes from a fictional "collector" who explains the reasoning behind such a new arrangement of the "collection."

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