Rauschenberg: solutions for a small planet

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Roni Feinstein

A massive traveling retrospective highlights Robert Rauschenberg's achievements in a wide range of mediums and techniques. Here, the author unravels the complex imagery that reflects the artist's personal history and political involvement.

Asked by this journal to write about "Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective," which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last September, I approached the exhibition with trepidation. I was troubled: how was I going to deal with the later work? In 1990, I completed a doctoral thesis entitled "Random Order: `The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg's Art, 1949-64" at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts; the same year saw the opening of "Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-64," an exhibition I curated for the Whitney Museum of American Art. The focus of my study on Rauschenberg was on the artist's early production -- extending from the first existing paintings, through the Combines, to the Silkscreens -- the work that has traditionally been viewed as the most historically significant and influential of his career. For the purposes of my research, the year 1964 presented a natural breaking point. As has often been recounted, when Rauschenberg won the first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in the summer of 1964, he telephoned a friend in New York and asked him to destroy the screens that had been used to make the Silkscreen Paintings, thereby ensuring that he would not repeat himself but would move on to something new. During the remainder of the 1960s, he devoted himself to printmaking, art performances and technology-based art.

I thought that when Rauschenberg returned to more conventional forms of art-making (i.e., painting and sculpture) in the 1970s, much of the work was too heavily indebted to the early Combines and Silkscreens. Although some of the new series struck me as fascinating and beautiful, for the most part I found the later work lacked the profound brilliance, sensuality and breakthrough quality of what had come before. The newer work seemed repetitive, uneven and flawed. I thought Rauschenberg too prolific and wondered if his legendary drinking was affecting his ability to produce works of quality. I felt justified in my evaluation of his later work by the fact that most Rauschenberg scholarship -- almost all of the "serious" art writing -- focused on the Combines and Silkscreens. Moreover, criticism of Rauschenberg's later work always seemed to me tinged with an enforced politeness, as if writers were at best ambivalent about the work and sought not to offend an established older master. (It is rare, though, to find words like "pathetic" used to describe his new work, as in a passing reference made by an anonymous critic in a recent issue of The New Yorker.)[1] The comparatively low prices the later work tended to fetch in the market-place seemed futher confirmation.

For me, the Guggenheim retrospective proved a revelation. I had been wrong in my assessment of Rauschenberg's later work and blind to the true nature of the break that occurred in his art. To be confronted with a half-century's worth of the artist's production in its full range -- paintings, sculptures, collages, prints, drawings, photographs, performances, dance theater work, technology-based pieces and so on -- was no less than staggering, It is now clear to me that although Rauschenberg's production since the 1960s has been uneven (some series seeming to exploit invention for its own sake), the late stages of his career are replete with works of quality and vision. I recognize that Rauschenberg's output of the past 35 years is not lesser, but other, requiring a different approach, a new set of standards and fresh criteria to evaluate and understand. These works feature not only new methods, materials and manners of execution, but proceed from new motivations and intentions.

During the course of the 1960s, Rauschenberg redefined for himself what the role of an artist can be. He moved from working alone in his studio to working in collaboration. He shifted his focus from local concerns (autobiography, the self and his immediate urban environment) to a broader involvement with American politics and society, which then expanded to an engagement with global issues, international cultures and the state of the world. Rauschenberg also changed the mode of address employed in his work; rather than being geared to a lone individual standing before the work, it addressed a larger audience, the tendency toward the poetic and poignant in his work thereby giving way to the operatic and grand. It will be demonstrated, however, that the basic language spoken by Rauschenberg's work throughout his career remained unaltered.

The travelling retrospective gives us the opportunity to review the whole of Rauschenberg's multifaceted, multidirectional career -- to identify lines of continuity that can be drawn between the earliest and most recent works, as well as major shifts and departures. As Rauschenberg's exhibition comes on the heels of the major Jasper Johns retrospective presented at the Museum of Modern Art a year ago, certain aspects of the artistic relationship between these artists who became linked at a crucial period in their work will be considered. The primary purpose of this piece, however, is to demonstrate that Rauschenberg's achievements of the past 35 years are equal to -- though substantially different from -- those of his early career.