Rauschenberg: solutions for a small planet

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Roni Feinstein

"Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective" was organized by Walter Hopps, who also curated Rauschenberg's last major U.S. retrospective, held at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the National Museum of American Art) in Washington, D.C., in 1976; the exhibition traveled nationally, being seen in New York at the Museum of Modem Art. In 1991, Hopps was also responsible for "Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s," organized for the Menil Collection, Houston; this exhibition also traveled nationally, being presented at the Guggenheim SoHo in fall 1992 [see A.i.A., Apr. '92]. The massive new exhibition, which is being shown in slightly reduced form elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, consisted in New York of over 400 works. It occupied almost the whole of the uptown Guggenheim Museum (the exception being the single side gallery reserved for the permanent display of the Thannhauser Collection), the entire Guggenheim SoHo and the capacious Ace Gallery on Hudson Street, where The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981-present) was displayed. The exhibition catalogue, at well over 600 pages, is equally huge. It brings every aspect of Rauschenberg's career and production into focus, some, like the artist's longstanding preoccupation with dance and philanthropic endeavors (the latter recounted in the "Chronology"), more clearly than ever before.

The uptown Guggenheim presented work from about 1950 to 1990, organized chronologically beginning near the bottom of the ramp; the side galleries offered detours into pieces produced in a wide variety of mediums, although most of the works on paper were seen here. Rauschenberg's technology-based works and performance-related pieces of the late '50s and '60s were shown on the ground floor of the Guggenheim Soho, while paintings and sculptures from about 1985 to the present were exhibited on the second floor. In addition to the display at Ace Gallery, which was part of the Guggenheim show, Rauschenberg's production was featured in many commercial galleries around town: works from Rauschenberg's most recent series, the Arcadian Retreats, were shown at PaceWildenstein Gallery on 57th Street; PaceWildenstein/McGill featured a miniretrospective of Rauschenberg photographs reprinted using the newly available digital ink-jet printing process; Jim Kempner Fine Art in Chelsea offered a mini-retrospective of Rauschenberg prints; at Quartet Editions in SoHo, Graphicstudio showed individual photographs related to Rauschenberg's 100-foot-long photographic project Chinese Summerhall (1982-84); and Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl presented prints and multiples by Rauschenberg from the artist's collection being sold to benefit Change, Inc., a foundation he established in 1970 to provide emergency funds to artists in need.

One of the first works to greet the visitor near the bottom of the ramp at the uptown Guggenheim was a dynamic and prophetic work: a double-portrait photogram of Rauschenberg made around 1950 in collaboration with his then wife, the artist Susan Weil. Created by lying naked directly on blueprint paper and then exposing the paper to light (a sunlamp), it presents a flattened., life-size index of the human form; the work looks ahead to the tracing of the naked form in Wager (1959), the X ray of Rauschenberg's body in Booster (1967) and the multitude of traced figures in The 1/4 Mile Piece. As a double, reversed image, it anticipates the doublings and reversals that are a mainstay of his art to the present day. The fact that he appears to be balancing on his own head, like an acrobat or dancer, looks ahead to his collaborations in the fields of dance and performance. Metaphorically speaking, in this work executed at the very inception of his career, Rauschenberg supports his own weight; in later work he assigns himself a more formidable task -- bearing the weight of the world.