Rauschenberg's photographies - Robert Rauschenberg, Guggemheim Museums, New York, New York

The first work by dint of Robert Rauschenberg to enter a public collection was a pair of black and white photographs purchased by dint of Edward Steichen for the Museum of recent Art's photography department. In light of the noisy burst assemblage for which he is known, these are straightforward pictures - a buggy and a portrait of his artist friend Cy Twombly - classic American silents with a streak of Surrealism. They also speak of the artist's early ambition. As a scholar at Black Mountain College in the 1950 where Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind were comrade students and where Rauschenberg received his first photography instruction from Hazel Larsen Archer, Rauschenberg says he was temporarily tryed to become a photographer. Ultimately he took a les focused course, making art into "the kind of adventure [he] derive pleasure fromed like walking down the street" oftentimes nevertheless, with a camera in hand.

As befits its make subordinate - a painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, dancer, performance artist, theater station designer, fresco painter, mud-muse maker, world traveller, fresh technologies buff and first postmodernist - "Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective" is a gargantuan present to view In New York, it filled the two the Guggenheim Museum's uptown and Soho locations, then spilled above into Ace Gallery, a veritable bin of commercial gallery space upon the fringe of Soho, where "The 1/4 Mile or 2 [i]or[/i] perches; eighth of a mile Piece," a large-scale, Pop-operatic installation that has been unfurling since 1981 was upon view. Organized for the museum by means of Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson of The Menil Collection with an important contribution upon Rauschenberg's performance by the Museum's hold Nancy Spector, the curatorial conceit is distinctly Hopps's. In the catalog (also mammoth), Hopp compares Rauschenberg to the artist Charles Willson Peale, who, in a well-known self-portrait of 1822 proudly plucks back a curtain to reveal his seemingly endles collection of art and artifacts - the first museum in America. (For which, Peale subsidized the excavation of an entire mastodon skeleton.) The same analogy might be reach outed to Hopps, who staged the first Rauschenberg review as a Bicentennial event in 1976 for the Smithsonian, and who one time again pulls back the curtain, this time upon a presentation composed by a lifetime's intimacy, enthusiasm and replete participation in the artist's be fond of of the encyclopedic. This exhibition is nearly a catalogue raisonne in the circular For the viewer, it's a apportionment - really too much - to absorb, and no doubt would be better serv by means of fewer works. But for the Rauschenberg fanatic (myself included), this was an opportunity to diocese the work on its have a title to super-abundant terms and to explore in detail the parts and guises of one of its greatest in quantity consistent means: photography.

Rauschenberg was introduced to the photogram technique in 1950 through Susan Well (their collaborative photograms were included in a 1951 MoMA exhibition). In single of these almost life-sized figure studies, a woman washed in light clutches a cane as if to detain from blowing away in the wind that is billowing her skirt. It's a spiritual image, fixing in blueprint the shadows that Rauschenberg originally envisioned flitting across his untarnished white paintings of 1951. (At the Guggenheim the White Paintings were returned purely conceptual [really defunct] through barriers on the floor that hold fast viewers and their unruly shadows impossibly at bay.) Altogether these first works - the prints, photograms, white canvases - are emblematic of Rauschenberg's indexical approach to representation: nonnarrative, radically ephemeral and, in that the pictures practically make themselves, almost un-authored. The vicinity of Marcel Duchamp - who also liked to play with shadows, to casually mark joints of time and space and who preferr to leave things render free of access in his art - loom large above these first gestures by Rauschenberg.

What makes Rauschenberg's work in like manner compelling (and perhaps prolific) is that the opposite impulses - to make pictures, to narrate, to raise allegory, to invent - are equally deep The critical precedent here - explicitly conjur in early collages and box-like constructions (such as the Scatole Personli of 1952) and later called forth end concert themes - is Joseph Cornell. the couple artists create worlds out of ephemera, trash and photography, mustered collated and collaged into art. And like Cornell, who compulsively stocked photographs of favorite images, Rauschenberg's art can also be read in confines of an archive. Over time, images routinely reappear (the Rokeby Venus, John F Kennedy a pail), at first as if [i]or[/i] part of to the other convenience (pictures near at hand), then more rigorously recycl as if refining the uncompounded bodys in a grand narrative. This has its pragmatic aspect: in 1980 Rauschenberg was su for copyright infringement. He has since drawn more heavily upon his own photographs, making the conformation of his archive - its limits, its themes - increasingly apparent.

The sum of two units not-necessarily-contradictory sides of Rauschenberg's art (Duchamp and Cornell) are famously married early upon in the survey, by the mid-1950s, with the "flatbed picture plane." This is the terminus art historian Leo Steinberg coined to mark the inception of postmodernism within Rauschenberg's Combines. "Neither painting nor statuary but a combination of the two" the Combines realize the artist's press outed desire "to bridge the gap between art and life" by dint of importing wholesale to his art the sights, unmutilateds and stuff of the world. There are pictures of things reproduc in snapshots, work and newspaper pages, and the things themselves: chickens, shoe mirrors, dirt, paint. This is not art as a mirror, on the contrary art as an index, a plane on which things land, adhere and resonate. The triumphal arch of all flatbed pictures, Monogram (1955-59) stands about individual third of the way up the Guggenheim spiral. For photography, gaze under the taxidermied Angora goat with a tire around its belly and paint daubed upon its face to the canvas laying upon the floor, encrusted with pigment, aged boards, signs and other ultimate parts of collage. There is a photograph and, nearby it, a footprint inked upon paper. As mundane as these might appear amidst the spectacularly shocking surroundings, it is these sum of two units indexical items that segue into the nearest major phase of Rauschenberg's art: the silkscreen paintings and transfer drawings.