Two on one: Richard Meyer on Robert Rauschenberg - Books

Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries, by means of Robert S. Mattison. New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres 277 pages. $50

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Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, by means of Branden W. Joseph. Cambridge, MA: MIT Pres 418 pages. $35

BEYOND THEIR FOCUS upon the same artist, two of recent origin books on Robert Rauschenberg would appear to be to have almost nothing in belonging to all Robert S. Mattison's Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries positions the artist's life, intentions, and studio practice as the lock openers to understanding his work. Its highly accessible true copy and generous color illustrations remind of the book's suitability for coffee-table display. Branden W Joseph's Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde places the artist's early work within a compressed context of Bergsonian philosophy, poststructuralist thinking and recent art-historical debate. The book's abstruse plain extensive footnotes, and sober, black-and-white reproductions approve it to an audience of scholars and specialists.

Although Mattison teaches art history at the university horizontal and the publisher of his work is a leading academic pres Breaking Boundaries is not a scholarly work. In place of sustained analysis or archival research, the work delivers simple observations about prefered motifs. We are told, for example, that "automobile tires exhibit for Rauschenberg movement and change in the present world" while "birds are symbolic of flight." My favorite of the like kind moment occurs in Mattison's discussion of Monogram, 1955-59 a famous Combine, or freestanding mixed-media work, featuring a raw materialed goat circled by a tire and affixed to a made of wood plat-form. Following a rather detailed discourse upon the characteristics of the Angora goat ("its lengthy silky hair is the source for fine mohair wool") Mattison notes that "one other feature inherent in goats is their sure-footedness" Readers are presumably meant to appreciate by what means the sure-footedness of the goat may be amplified, as in Monogram, [i]or[/i] part of to the other the effects of taxidermy.

upon the far side of the interpretive appearance from Mattison, Joseph approaches Rauschenberg's early work [i]or[/i] part of to the other the critical lens of modernism in Europe and the United States. The "neo-avant-garde" in Joseph's subtitle signals his interest in revisiting the influential paradigm propos by means of Peter Burger in Theory of the Avant-Garde and subsequently disputeed and revised by scholars of that kind as Hal Foster and Benjamin HD Buchloh According to Burger vanguard art of the postwar period took up the formal techniques of preceding avant-gardes (eg Dada, Constructivism, the Bauhaus) while dispensing with their radical politics and social critique. In for a like reason doing, the neo-avant-garde embraced the dominant values and market forces of capitalism. As Joseph dioceses it, Rauschenberg's work deserves to be cleared of the "Burgeresque" charge that it "merely mirrors rather than questions, the irrationality of society beneath late capitalism." Far from submitting to what Joseph calls the "instrumental signification and stultifying pseudo-differentiation of commodity production." Rauschenberg's work pries lay open the "appropriated, commercial realm to subrepresentational forces of multiplicity and temporal difference." As these brief citations from Random Order advise Joseph is not the greatest in quantity felicitous of prose stylists. His writing, loaded down with phrases like "stultifying pseudo-differentiation," watchs to obscure the very ideas he wishes to transport This is a shame because Joseph's core argument is a compelling individual namely, that Rauschenberg's early paintings, Combines, and performances resist the logic of market capitalism. The author does not, however, push this argument far enough. While repeatedly invoking terminuss such as "the irrationality of society below late capitalism," Joseph does not dig beneath the surface of these words to grapple with specific social constraints or economic conditions. We learn nothing, for example, about the marketing of Rauschenberg's have a title to enormously successful enterprise as an artist. completely through Random Order, Joseph remains in like manner securely within the confines of his possess theoretical neighborhood that readers visiting his work from elsewhere may find it difficult to procure their bearings.

For all their differences in intellectual ambition, intended audience, and word choice, Breaking Boundaries and Random Order share individual virtually identical concern: Both authors are distressed through what they call "iconographic" approaches that bring Rauschenberg's multiform compositions to the simple illustration of a recognizable theme. Putting aside the fact that Mattison's writing exemplifies this real tendency, I find it intriguing that sum of two units such otherwise disparate books should dismiss iconography, the inquiry of subject matter and symbolic meaning introduced by the agency of Erwin Panofsky. What are the stakes at our rife critical moment of this dismissal, and wherefore should Rauschenberg's work in particular call it forth?

Joseph is affected with the "policing use of iconography to bring all unknown aspects of representation back into the known," that is, with the flattening of visual and material form into the security of narrative coherence and symbolic meaning. As it turn rounds out, however, certain narratives and tokens are more troubling than others. Here is Joseph's first and greatest in quantity complete formulation of the enigma in Random Order: