Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective. - book reviews

Afterimage, March-April, 1998 by Ingrid Scaffner

The first work by Robert Rauschenberg to enter a public collection was a pair of black and white photographs purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art's photography department. In light of the noisy Pop assemblage for which he is known, these are straightforward pictures - a buggy and a portrait of his artist friend Cy Twombly - classic American silents with a streak of Surrealism. They also speak of the artist's early ambition. As a student at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, where Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind were fellow students and where Rauschenberg received his first photography instruction from Hazel Larsen Archer, Rauschenberg says he was temporarily tempted to become a photographer. Ultimately he took a less focused course, making art into "the kind of adventure [he] enjoyed, like walking down the street," often, nevertheless, with a camera in hand.

As befits its subject - a painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, dancer, performance artist, theater set designer, fresco painter, mud-muse maker, world traveller, new technologies buff and first postmodernist - "Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective" is a gargantuan show. In New York, it filled both the Guggenheim Museum's uptown and Soho locations, then spilled over into Ace Gallery, a veritable bunker of commercial gallery space on the fringe of Soho, where "The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece," a large-scale, Pop-operatic installation that has been unfurling since 1981, was on view. Organized for the museum by Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson of The Menil Collection with an important contribution on Rauschenberg's performance by the Museum's own Nancy Spector, the curatorial conceit is distinctly Hopps's. In the catalog (also mammoth), Hopps compares Rauschenberg to the artist Charles Willson Peale, who, in a well-known self-portrait of 1822, proudly pulls back a curtain to reveal his seemingly endless collection of art and artifacts - the first museum in America. (For which, Peale subsidized the excavation of an entire mastodon skeleton.) The same analogy might be extended to Hopps, who staged the first Rauschenberg survey as a Bicentennial event in 1976 for the Smithsonian, and who once again pulls back the curtain, this time on a presentation composed by a lifetime's intimacy, enthusiasm and full participation in the artist's love of the encyclopedic. This exhibition is nearly a catalogue raisonne in the round. For the viewer, it's a lot - really too much - to absorb, and no doubt would be better served by fewer works. But for the Rauschenberg devotee (myself included), this was an opportunity to see the work on its own super-abundant terms and to explore in detail the roles and guises of one of its most consistent means: photography.

Rauschenberg was introduced to the photogram technique in 1950 by Susan Well (their collaborative photograms were included in a 1951 MoMA exhibition). In one of these almost life-sized figure studies, a woman washed in light clutches a cane as if to keep from blowing away in the wind that is billowing her skirt. It's a ghostly image, fixing in blueprint the shadows that Rauschenberg originally envisioned flitting across his pure white paintings of 1951. (At the Guggenheim the White Paintings were rendered purely conceptual [really defunct] by barriers on the floor that keep viewers and their unruly shadows impossibly at bay.) Altogether these first works - the prints, photograms, white canvases - are emblematic of Rauschenberg's indexical approach to representation: nonnarrative, radically ephemeral and, in that the pictures practically make themselves, almost un-authored. The presence of Marcel Duchamp - who also liked to play with shadows, to casually mark junctures of time and space and who preferred to leave things open in his art - looms large over these first gestures by Rauschenberg.

What makes Rauschenberg's work so compelling (and perhaps prolific) is that the opposite impulses - to make pictures, to narrate, to construct allegory, to invent - are equally profound. The critical precedent here - explicitly conjured in early collages and box-like constructions (such as the Scatole Personli of 1952) and later called forth through concert themes - is Joseph Cornell. Both artists create worlds out of ephemera, trash and photography, collected, collated and collaged into art. And like Cornell, who compulsively stocked photographs of favorite images, Rauschenberg's art can also be read in terms of an archive. Over time, images routinely reappear (the Rokeby Venus, John F. Kennedy, a pail), at first as if through convenience (pictures near at hand), then more rigorously recycled, as if refining the elements in a grand narrative. This has its pragmatic aspect: in 1980 Rauschenberg was sued for copyright infringement. He has since drawn more heavily on his own photographs, making the structure of his archive - its limits, its themes - increasingly apparent.

The two not-necessarily-contradictory sides of Rauschenberg's art (Duchamp and Cornell) are famously married early on in the survey, by the mid-1950s, with the "flatbed picture plane." This is the term art historian Leo Steinberg coined to mark the inception of postmodernism within Rauschenberg's Combines. "Neither painting nor sculpture but a combination of the two," the Combines realize the artist's expressed desire "to bridge the gap between art and life" by importing wholesale to his art the sights, sounds and stuff of the world. There are pictures of things reproduced in snapshots, book and newspaper pages, and the things themselves: chickens, shoes, mirrors, dirt, paint. This is not art as a mirror, but art as an index, a plane upon which things land, adhere and resonate. The triumphal arch of all flatbed pictures, Monogram (1955-59), stands about one third of the way up the Guggenheim spiral. For photography, look under the taxidermied Angora goat with a tire around its belly and paint daubed on its face to the canvas laying on the floor, encrusted with pigment, old boards, signs and other elements of collage. There is a photograph and, nearby it, a footprint inked on paper. As mundane as these might appear amidst the spectacularly shocking surroundings, it is these two indexical items that segue into the next major phase of Rauschenberg's art: the silkscreen paintings and transfer drawings.