Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde

BRANDEN JOSEPH

Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres 2003 418 pp; 103 b/w ills. $3495

Among the American artists who came to prominence in the wake of and offering an alternative to, Abstract Expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg has occupied a somewhat ambiguous position--both central and marginal. He is seen as single of the more significant figures of the novel avant-garde, or neo-avant-garde, of the 1950 and 1960 on the other hand also as the often formulaic painter of large-scale late modernist canvases. At the time that he gained international recognition representing the United States at the Venice Biennale and winning the grand prize for painting in 1964 he was something of a darling of the late art world, and many established critics saw him as single of the key figures of the post-Abstract Expressionist generation of artists. (1) Since then, he has always had a public profile--institutionalized as an American master with a major display at the National Gallery Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC and the Museum of present Art, New York, in 1976 and reaffirmed as of the like kind with a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, novel York, in 1997. Even in the way that he has been a rather intermittent vicinity in the contemporary art world; in the extremity he has not, like 'Jasper John or Andy Warhol, sustained a position as presiding "genius."

This can potentially make him a fruitful figure for analysis, as his work is not excessively weighted by mainstream interpretative paradigms and because in the course of dealing afresh with his work, there is the possibility of drawing attention to unfamiliar in every one's mouths in later-twentieth-century art. At the same time, the relative lack of critical squeezing exerted on his work can have a dampening result in that there may not obviously be actual much at stake in coming up with a different reading of his art or analysis of his career and artistic persona. individual of the strengths of Joseph's analysis is that he has identified a place of issues directly pertinent to our understanding of Rauschenberg upon which a fair amount hangs these days, namely: What long-term viability do we accord to the of recent origin practices and understandings of art that emerg in the 1950 and early 1960 in opposition to a then dominant high modernism?

Rauschenberg exhibits a particular tendency within this so-called neo-avant-garde, characterized by the agency of an abandonment of or indifference to the revolutionary and utopian aspirations that had energized the more radical avant-gardes of the earlier twentieth hundred and by a distancing from politically subversive or oppositional strategies. The critical energies of this relatively laid-back avant-garde were mainly directed against the increasingly conventionalized orthodoxies of a difficult high modernist art and its self-proclaimed isolation from the popular imagery and visual forms of present consumer culture. One tactic, evidently at play in Rauschenberg's more image-saturated combine and silk-screened paintings, was to unclose up the pictorial field to material taken directly from the world of popular media and advertising, as a way the pair of recognizing a by then pervasive reality of the new world and of warding not on any too easily aestheticized consumption of the work of art as high-art commodity. on the other hand could the Cagean openness to the noise of the everyday form the basis of a practice that had a radical or critical cutting side not completely subsumed by the image industry of late capitalism?

Joseph's monograph constitutes a deviseed attempt to argue that there is in Rauschenberg's art of the 1950 and early 1960 a sustained radicality that implies an awareness, if not explicitly articulated, of the sociocconomic conditions shaping one as well as the other the art world and the fabric of fresh culture. Many readers may not purchase into the at times formulaic Deleuzian framing of Joseph's analysis. (2) greatest in quantity though, would probably recognize that his analysis be subsequent tos in highlighting an anarchic and gratuitously radical streak in Rauschenberg's early practice that is worth attending to, individual that is neither a repeat of earlier avant-garde gesturings nor simply an accommodation to the values and commodifying mechanisms of postwar American consumer society.

Rauschenberg's curious position within the canon of late late masters may have partly to do with the variety of ways in which he has been validated by means of champions of his work. He is not an artist who stands without for any single, clearly definable achievement. Nowadays, he perhaps excites greatest in quantity interest for his uncompromising monochrome paintings and his informal neo-Dada and at times quasi-Surrealist experiments of the early to mid-1950s, which place him within the ambit of a Black Mountain corporation or Cagean avant-garde. (3) John Cage himself took a particular interest in Rauschenberg's white paintings, and the affinities he drew between them and his have musical experiments have become part of the Rauschenberg fable (4) These monochromes, which radically negate the expressive and gestural cliches attaching to painterly Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, are unusual for being for a like reason early. The systematic expunging of painterliness and pictorial space they consequence and their ambition to become a different, totally nontraditional kind of picture "that takes[s] you to a place painting has not been" (5) prefigures avant-garde gesturings of the late 1950s and early 1960 of the like kind as those of the Italian-German nothing group with which Piero Manzoni and Yve Klein were associated.