A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A CONTEXT by Roger White

The John Riepenhoff Experience is a smallish wooden box attached to the wall about eight or nine feet off the ground. It has a rectangular hole in the top fitted with a piece of translucent plastic, through which a photographer’s floodlight shines, and a circular hole in the bottom. Climbing up a stepladder one at a time, viewers can put their heads inside the box and see some very small art. At the Milwaukee International Art Fair in 2006, The Experience contained drawings on notecards by Tyson Reeder. For his 2010 Nohl showing at INOVA, Riepenhoff upped the ante and commissioned three curators to arrange miniature group exhibitions in each of the three Experiences presented.

The Experience, the artist told me, is an attempt to solve a persistent problem of the Milwaukee artist: having big ideas but scant resources with which to realize them. (“You probably can’t cover the walls of a normal-sized gallery entirely with chocolate,” he said. “But in The Experience, you can.”) It’s also a functional model of the work of contemporary art, which is primarily a context nestled within a series of contexts that is in infinitely extendable in both directions. Maybe navigating this system and registering the forms of value it generates is the experience of The Experience.

Then again, maybe not: Riepenhoff is attuned to the perennial tension between the public and private functions of art. “When you go to a movie theater you’re with a big group of people, but when the lights go down you enter into the film,” he said. “When you’re at an art opening, you’re with a big group of people and they never go away.... [The Experience] gives you both things. You have this intimacy with the work, you can get up close, and you can also have a little chat about it afterwards.”

-Roger White is a painter and author of The Contemporaries (Bloomsbury, 2015).