Allen Ruppersberg - Modern & Contemporary Editions New York Tuesday, June 2, 2009 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Catalogue Essay

    Siste Viator (Stop Traveler), a project for the Dutch city of Arnhem, revisiting the tragic World War II battle in the area that claimed the lives of eight thousand soldiers in nine days of September 1944. The project consisted of republishing twenty popular books of the time, five from the best-seller list of each of the four countries most involved in the battle: Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany. As Allan McCollum noted; "I doubt if anyone could portray his intention more beautifully than he himself did in his proposal for the project:
    " This work is a collection of narratives. It is about the telling of stories both fact and fiction. A memorial to individual memories and the reading of books of the private imagination combined with the public, political history. A link is established between the private experience and public memory. As this era of World War II recedes from the realm of immediate experience, I propose to create in the public mind a new personal memory that is not just another replaceable image. Dignity in a memorial is usually associated with stone and statue, with pose and gesture and with the body. I propose a similar attitude with words, as was once done with an epitaph. A comparison of words, a collision of worlds, nationalities, ideas, ideals, and kinds of literature. This work then is a reconstruction and an exhibition of history in free association to create a continuity between various narrative acts which give shape to the random acts of history."  Allen Rupersberg
     

157

Siste Viator

1993
The complete set of two WWII era bookends and 20 facsimile books with WWII era bookplates, five titles in four languages (English, Dutch, Polish, German), one book in each languge printed in its entirety, the others printed covers only,
various sizes
each hand inscribed by the artist with a soldier's name, from the unnumbered edition of 50 (there were no artist's proofs), published by the artist, very minor wear along the edges of some of the book covers, otherwise in very good condition.

Estimate
$2,000 - 3,000 

Sold for $3,000

Modern & Contemporary Editions

2 June 2009, 2pm
New York