The Disappearance and Reappearance of GREGORY RUPPE

Picnic Surf Shapes and Picnic Curatorial Projects unfold at The Power Station.

BY DANIELLE AVRAM

What need to become immortal through art or culture? Disappearance is erasing the record, off track, no trail, no history. One is in the disappearance already. All one needs is to lose track, to stop recording, to turn off the tape machine, to disappear, it’s all right… It’s OK to disappear.

— Wildflowers: A Bouquet of Theses

John Landau, 1998

What does it mean to disappear?

Why does the act of disappearing simultaneously fascinate and terrify; one a solace-finding method of mindful disconnection, the other a deep-rooted fear of being lost or forgotten?

Magicians perform calculated acts of prestidigitation designed to astound willing audiences. Countless people go missing each year, seeming to simply dissolve into the ether. Others, such as artist Bas Jan Ader, vanish while performing feats that skirt the edge of madness, forever frozen in time. Toil through the mundanity of daily life and one day realize you’ve aged into another form. Survive a sudden shift, a world-altering change—say, a pandemic—and the life you used to know, the person you once were, is suddenly gone.

Like so many others, the pandemic forced artist Gregory Ruppe into an unintentional state of disappearing, a reflective stasis that had the potential for radical change.

Prior to Covid, Ruppe found himself contending with growing disillusionment about his place within the art world. Over the years he’d worn many hats and tried many things: studying printmaking and sculpture at the University of North Texas and Texas Christian University, respectively; forming the Fort Worth-based art collective, Homecoming!; joining a seven-member psyche-doom band called Solar Lice; creating the space Culture Hole with longtime collaborator Jeff Gibbons, and the brief, but impactful, Swim Club 수영 클럽 with SooMi Han.

“Collaborating, for me has been a means to challenge concepts of authorship, the institution, and one’s own ego, a way to disappear into others to get outside of self,” explains Ruppe. “Over the years and nevertheless, I found these challenges to persist no matter how hard I tried to conceptualize them away. I was leading up to finding ways of (and being okay with) dropping out completely, professionally speaking—at least in my approach to art life.”

Ruppe has also served as the director of exhibitions for The Power Station since 2013, a role that, like many in the arts, has a degree of excitement oriented around collaborative project-hopping. Yet these behind-the-scenes positions possess an inherent sense of institutional cyclicality bolstered by affluence, excess, and an unsettling combination of preserving sanctity through disposability. The art machine is an egregious polluter, one that seems to be making very few strides towards rectifying the need for using an entire home’s worth of construction materials for a single exhibition. Needless to say, Ruppe had grown weary of building and tearing down the same wall over and over again. Beginning a few years ago Ruppe led a change in practices, reducing the carbon footprint of The Power Station’s exhibitions, which today use recycled materials exclusively.

With art programming on pause during the 2020 lockdown, Ruppe leaned into disappearing, ecology, and simply getting back to making for the sheer joy of it. Utilizing the space around The Power Station, he designed and built a hydroponic gardening system, a greenhouse, and a solar-powered building that melded a traditional wooden Japanese teahouse with a corrugated metal shack inspired by Texas parks and recreation buildings.

Then he began to think about surfing.

Ruppe grew up in Houston and started surfing in high school, primarily along the coast of Galveston. He also grew up woodworking and supported himself by working in construction for many years. He employed this skill set to start handcrafting hollow-core stand-up paddleboards (SUPs) and surfboards, overlaying them with custom doodles of trippy characters and imagery rooted in his early years of playing in punk bands. He named the project PICNIC, after a conversation with a friend that heralded the idea of a “picnic for one” as a radical act of self-care.

“When I first saw some of the earliest prototypes,” says Pinnell, “I was struck by the intricate detail and stunning beauty of the boards. They seemed highly personal to me. I wanted to get involved in bringing these designs to a larger audience.”

PICNIC has since expanded to become Picnic Surf Shapes, a functioning surf shop, and Picnic Curatorial Projects, an endeavor that allows Ruppe to continue a conceptually rigorous, collaborative program. Ruppe and Pinnell celebrated the brand’s launch in early March with an exhibition of works by artists who also produce custom pieces ancillary to their primary artistic practices. Works by SOUP [ceramics], Specific Objects, Squiggle and Dash, Super Hit Press, and Reagan Kendall mingled alongside limited-edition PICNIC offerings including a zine, T-shirts, and koozies made from repurposed wetsuits.

Ruppe’s project is reminiscent of the humble beginnings of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. A former billionaire who dedicated his fortune to fighting climate change and centered his company around the motto Let my people go surfing also declared, “If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks. I’m going to go do my own thing. ’” P