Game Theory
I don't have any statistics
handy for purposes of comparison, but if this isn't the largest retrospective
exhibition ever mounted, it is certainly the biggest I've ever seen. The uptown
Guggenheim is almost entirely filled by the first part, with only one of the
five or six side galleries devoted to items from the permanent collection. Part
2 takes up two floors at the SoHo annex; and the adjunct at the Ace Gallery,
while a single work, consists of 189 parts and measures roughly 1,000 feet in
length. If the task of viewing all this isn't a sufficient workout, there are
also two concurrent Rauschenberg gallery shows, a series of frescoes and an
exhibit of photographs, at the Pace Wildenstein MacGill complex on
57 th Street.
Rauschenberg is an amazingly
prolific and formally venturesome artist who, over the past 50 years, has
nearly always risked aesthetic trespass, producing work deliberately just one
degree or two from being merely ugly, banal, kitschy, gimmicky, showy, facile
or, of course, excessive. Those possibilities were what he was pitting himself
against while his contemporaries in the 1950s, for example, were battling the
picture plane. When he has won, he has won spectacularly. He hasn't, however,
always won. He did have an astonishing 25 years or so, though. At least the
first three-quarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral and its sideways
annexes--traveling up--display one dazzling triumph of eye over reflex after
another, some of them iconic by now, others seldom shown and vitally fresh.
Although some very good work
predates it, you might say that the show symbolically begins with his Erased
de Kooning
Drawing of 1953. (Click on each thumbnail to see an
enlargement.) It is exactly that: a few smudged traces of pencil on an
elaborately matted and framed piece of paper. This work has always been cited
as a classic killing-the-father act or a declaration of independence from the
dogma of Abstract Expressionism. It is both those things, but it is also a
declaration of independence from drawing. He did a bit of it early on, but soon
realized that he had two stronger suits, junk assemblage and photography.
He is a virtuoso of both. He
might actually be considered a great neglected photographer, although this
neglect is only a consequence of the fame of his combine paintings and prints
("combine paintings" is Rauschenberg's own term for works that include both oil
and objects on canvas). The photographs in the museum show are primarily tough,
direct found-object still-lifes, clearly descended from Walker Evans and
related to Robert Frank. His interest in both depicting and displaying found
objects also links him to Evans, who, toward the end of his life, was taking
home and hanging up the bullet-riddled stop signs he found on the road rather
than just taking their pictures. Rauschenberg, however, was compelled to alter
such objects, attaching them to canvas, smearing them with paint, and combining
them with all manner of other substances. The wall captions in this show are
much more entertaining than those things usually are, viz.: Odalisk
(1955-58), a combine that includes "oil, watercolor, pencil, crayon, paper,
fabric, photographs, printed reproductions, miniature blueprint, metal,
newspaper, glass, dried grass, and steel wool, with pillow, wood post, electric
lights, and Plymouth Rock rooster, on wood structure mounted on four
casters."
You can imagine the fun
Rauschenberg must have had finding random detritus on the streets, dragging it
up to the loft, and then figuring out the most perversely elegant ways to put
it together. There are a few studio pictures in the vast catalog, but none,
unfortunately, shows the rat's nest of tennis balls, old newspapers, stuffed
birds, cheesy bedspreads, and construction debris that must have filled the
place in the 1950s. Lately a great deal has been made of Rauschenberg's
discretion regarding his sex life, with critics zeroing in on Bed
(1955), a combine that includes a paint- and pencil-enhanced pillow, quilt, and
sheet; as well as Canyon (1959), which features, among other things, a
mirror, a pillow in a noose, and a stuffed bald eagle in full wingspread. Those
works are presumably meant to be Realist and Symbolist (respectively) allusions
to his homosexual identity, and Rauschenberg is chided for not publicly
affirming the same. And such allusions they may well be, although you do wonder
how those critics would then interpret the iconic Monogram (1955-59),
with its stuffed angora goat wearing a car tire around its midriff.
The quest for meaning, a
professor's game, looks pretty pale amid the panache and humor of
Rauschenberg's assemblages and combines. They involve Dada nose-thumbing,
Expressionist brio, an American appreciation of pure funk, a flâneur 's
eye for chance and juxtaposition in the streets, a sensualist's feeling for the
most outré kinds of texture, and a scopophiliac's unquenchable thirst for
images, all kinds, right now, from industrial logos to comic strips to postage
stamps to Velázquez's Rokeby Venus . (He also, incidentally, has quite an
ear, capable of doing more with a one-word title-- Rebus ,
Currency , Interview , Barge , Express --than most
writers.) Meaning has actually tended to be a pitfall for him, as is shown by
his topical posters, only one of which is displayed here, a dully literal item
for Earth Day 1970.
The lower level of the
Guggenheim SoHo displays the tinkering side of Rauschenberg's nature, the works
he made in collaboration with engineers--the star item there is unquestionably
Mud Muse (1968-71), a vat of bentonite (an artificial clay) that bubbles
and gurgles and spits, like a pool of quicksand in a Tarzan movie, triggered by
a sound-activated compressed-air system. This kind of stuff is engaging and,
occasionally, more than that. Upstairs, and on the very highest tiers of the
uptown branch, is where the trouble starts. Over the last 20 years or so,
Rauschenberg has repeated himself, a lot. This may be par for the course of
most artistic careers; the distinction here is that he has repeated himself in
ever more exalted and expensive media (reflective metals, Japanese ceramics,
fresco), which just gild the funk, sapping its life. When employing his
habitual paper and canvas and burlap bags he has tended to go for discordantly
smooth finishes. The Ace Gallery installation, a work in progress that will
eventually reach a quarter mile in length, is a recapitulation of themes that
winds up being reductive in its very gigantism. Meanwhile, the best of the
later work is the very simplest, made from discarded gas-station signs. Maybe
he should just limit himself to materials that cost no more than five bucks a
pound.
