Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective. - book reviews

The first work by means of Robert Rauschenberg to enter a public collection was a pair of black and white photographs purchased through Edward Steichen for the Museum of present Art's photography department. In light of the noisy clap 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 companion students and where Rauschenberg received his first photography instruction from Hazel Larsen Archer, Rauschenberg says he was temporarily tested to become a photographer. Ultimately he took a les focused course, making art into "the kind of adventure [he] be delighted withed like walking down the street" oftentimes nevertheless, with a camera in hand.

As befits its make submissive - a painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, dancer, performance artist, theater put designer, fresco painter, mud-muse maker, world traveller, of recent origin technologies buff and first postmodernist - "Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective" is a gargantuan present to view In New York, it filled the one and the other the Guggenheim Museum's uptown and Soho locations, then spilled above into Ace Gallery, a veritable crib of commercial gallery space upon the fringe of Soho, where "The 1/4 Mile or 2 poles Piece," a large-scale, Pop-operatic installation that has been unfurling since 1981 was upon view. Organized for the museum by dint of Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson of The Menil Collection with an important contribution upon Rauschenberg's performance by the Museum's be in possession of 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 twitchs 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 regard with affection of the encyclopedic. This exhibition is nearly a catalogue raisonne in the circular For the viewer, it's a destiny - really too much - to absorb, and no doubt would be better serv through fewer works. But for the Rauschenberg zealot (myself included), this was an opportunity to diocese the work on its hold super-abundant terms and to explore in detail the characters and guises of one of its greatest in quantity consistent means: photography.

Rauschenberg was introduced to the photogram technique in 1950 by dint of 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 hold from blowing away in the wind that is billowing her skirt. It's a of the soul image, fixing in blueprint the shadows that Rauschenberg originally envisioned flitting across his unstained white paintings of 1951. (At the Guggenheim the White Paintings were restoreed purely conceptual [really defunct] by the agency of barriers on the floor that hold 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 lay open in his art - loom large above these first gestures by Rauschenberg.

What makes Rauschenberg's work with equal reason compelling (and perhaps prolific) is that the opposite impulses - to make pictures, to narrate, to build 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 two 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 boundarys 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 simple 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 make 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 boundary 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 means of importing wholesale to his art the sights, wholes and stuff of the world. There are pictures of things reproduc in snapshots, volume and newspaper pages, and the things themselves: chickens, shoe mirrors, dirt, paint. This is not art as a mirror, on the other hand 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 single third of the way up the Guggenheim spiral. For photography, direct the eye 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, elderly 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.