Rauschenberg: solutions for a small planet

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Roni Feinstein

Throughout his career, by stimulating patterns of sight and thought, Rauschenberg has sought to reveal that order can be discovered within apparent randomness. He has called this defining principle of his art "Random Order."[9] He takes images out of context and juxtaposes them with other, similarly displaced images, so as to generate complex interlockings of meaning and form, the underlying grid of Cubism providing the structure within which elements are an arranged.[10] Like elements of a pictographic language, the objects and images engage in an associative dialogue across the surfaces of the works, their nonhierarchical clusters evoking a multiplicity of references.[11] The work remains multidirectional and open-ended, poetic and evocative; meaning is inherent but impossible to pin down precisely.

While so massive a celebration of Rauschenberg's art as found in the Guggenheim retrospective is the artist's due, I believe it is detrimental to the art -- or, more correctly speaking, to people's perceptions of the art -- as it seems to promote what Brian O'Doherty, writing in these pages in 1973, termed the "vernacular glance," the city dweller's rapid and disinterested scan, which refuses to recognize any meaningful connections among the objects and images.[12] Yet Rauschenberg's work demands close looking -- the very antithesis of the "rapid scan"; as the artist himself said some years ago, "looking [like listening] also has to happen in time."[13] His self-proclaimed aim was "to make a surface which invited a constant change of focus and an examination of detail"[14] a surface sufficiently rich in form and content to reward scrutiny by both the eye and mind.

Although Rauschenberg has always tended to work spontaneously, inspired by the images at hand and his concerns of the moment, his is a highly self-conscious art in which innumerable formal and iconographic decisions are made in the process of working. Rauschenberg does not merely hold a mirror up to the world's multiplicity; rather, he exploits multiplicity to reveal something universal and profound about consciousness and mind in the contemporary era. Although not didactic, his work demonstrates how to receive and process information and how to find order and connectivity in an apparently haphazard and discontinuous world.

In perceiving order and linkages, we find some measure of solace; we are given a sense of control in a world we cannot control. "Random Order" might therefore be recognized as more than just a principle of artmaking for Rauschenberg; it assumes the quality of a mission. As a child Rauschenberg was a devotee of the Church of Christ; he had wanted to be a minister with the power to reach people, to do good works. Without preaching or striking poses, by continuing to operate with wit, curiosity, vigor and joy, he took a different path toward the same goal.

To demonstrate the continuity of "Random Order" as a guiding principle in his art and as a distinctive quality of his thought and vision, one can look from Should Love Come first? to the Factum twins to such works as Master Pasture (Urban Bourbon), 1989, exhibited at the Guggenheim SoHo. Executed in acrylic on mirrored and enameled aluminum, the work features a seemingly disjunctive collection of marks and images which fuse upon close inspection. The image of a herd of cows in a pasture staring out at the viewer shares a frontal plane (and a casting of shadows) with the image of cloth on a clothesline that appears alongside. The orange and white image of the clothesline is overlapped by a series of gestural strokes, which are echoed by larger orange and white paint strokes at the upper right. A child's drawing of a person (a photograph taken by Rauschenberg in Chile) is juxtaposed with the image of caryatids on a classical building, establishing a contrast between different modes of representation (linear/ sculptural, informal/formal), while the reflection of our own heads in the shiny mirrored section below further complicates the dialogue. The virtual flatness of the mirror opposes the illusionism of the pale orange cubic form upon which the laundry is screened, which also plays against the angled volume of the classical architecture and the image of a modern scaffold beside.