Robert Rauschenberg: Obituary

Robert Rauschenberg, Art Pioneer, dead at 82

Charles Stuckey once wrote that Robert Rauschenberg considered art a gift. In Italy in 1953, Rauschenberg took the great artist Alberto Burri one of his works as a present. He gave gifts to his friends – there one infamous but lovely story where Rauschenberg repainted a black painting he had given John Cage because the composer was a few minutes late and he needed something to do. Rauschenberg created a foundation to help out struggling artists that did not have enough money to live on. His R.O.C.I, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, aimed to bring new art making techniques, technology, and energy to other cultures. Rauschenberg’s generosity was famous, and with his death at 82 on Monday night, he will be dearly missed.

Rauschenberg’s vision of gift giving changed art forever. For not only did he give, he received in a wonderful way. Rauschenberg’s inspired collaboration with people like Cage, Susan Weil, Merce Cunningham, Steve Paxton, Jean Tinguely, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Willem De Kooning, and even Dante (that’s a small fraction of the collaborations just in the 50s) led to a sea change in art making -- a festival of allowances, amendments, and multi-disciplinary experiments that affects everything serious in art today. I will let all the competent critics around the country way in on this fact. You will find a compendium of them here.

I want to tell stories and stories are what brought me to Rauschenberg. The wonderful stories that came from Rauschenberg’s long life are why I love him and will miss him. I love that he grew up in Port Arthur, Texas and ended up in New York. I love that Janis Joplin attended his high school in Texas but that they were not friends. I love it that the first artwork to inspire him was Blue Boy, a painting still hanging at the Huntington where it was hanging when he saw it. He hated Joseph Albers but went on to acknowledge his great influence. He once decided that he wanted to photograph the entire United States foot by foot and actually made it down Black Mountain College’s drive way.

It is wonderful that Rauschenberg and John Cage decided one day to cover the wheels of a Model T with ink and run it over a long sheet of paper in the street. It is still a famous fact that he erased a De Kooning but did it in a way that was not offensive or juvenile. He drank whiskey, a lot of whiskey – always Jim Beam. When he was to have an exhibition at the now defunct and worthy of study Stable Gallery (paging all grad students) in the fifties, he and Twombly had to clean out its basement themselves. In a world of Abstract Expressionism, he decided to illustrate Dante (Canto 31 shown), put a tub of mud in a gallery, and make a paining out of dirt and grass (he watered it himself). And then there is this, absolutely priceless: Leo Castelli and U.S. officials had to sneak his painting into the main pavilion of the 1963 Venice Biennial at night so that the French would consider it for the prize. They did consider it, and Rauschenberg won.

We are still only up to 1963 – this went on to the present.

Who was this guy? How does one man have such a life? A good Texan I’d say – bigger than life, a man who lived such a life. We would like to think it was all a tall tale. It wasn’t. I cannot do Rauschenberg justice. It is all just too big for me, too generous, too wonderful. If you ever get down on art, if you are ever jaded by theory or are not seeing anything you think is worth looking at (you know who you are) – just reach for any Walter Hopps written Rauschenberg catalogue and you will be okay. Just look at Monogram – if you don’t look at that phallic, paint splattered goat and laugh, well, you are too far gone. I can’t help you.

To close, I want to tell my own Rauschenberg story – how, I found him. Believe it or not, I came to Rauschenberg’s work by way of Bruce Chatwin and Alexander Rodchenko. I had read a cryptic, wonderful story about how Chatwin had visited Rodchenko’s granddaughter in Asia. When the writer asked about his famous “Ultimate Painting,” three monochrome panels in the primary colors called Pure Red, Pure Yellow, and Pure Blue, 1921, she led him to her basement where the canvases were rolled up.

I became fascinated by the poetry and irony that the “Ultimate Painting” had been abandoned and was now in a basement. This perfect absurdity seemed to answer the theoretical questions of the death of painting I was reading at the time. It told me that I didn’t need to worry about it – that any endpoint in art is mere rhetoric, a tenure track insider witticism that affects very few people. That same day, I opened up a Rauschenberg catalogue and found out I was right. Art is generous, art goes on, art tells us there is always more to see, more to do. Art is a gift. Rauschenberg knew this. Rauschenberg always had something to do.

IcallitORANGES Rauschenberg links: Shirt Boards and my favorite, an early Black Mountain piece

Paul Lee

Paul Lee

Peres Projects

Show Closed March 29, 2008

When viewing Paul Lee’s work at Peres Projects, I thought of Robert Rauschenberg and an old chestnut that still gets theorists and historians all riled up in the arts, namely that there are two ways of looking at Robert Rauschenberg. Some critics see his work in terms of the critique of modernist painting, especially Abstract Expressionism. For this, most critics focus on the way Rauschenberg re-oriented the way one sees (pushing painting out of the rigors of academic composition and allowing a sort of street vision), the way he uses found objects to form a hybrid of painting and sculpture, and his use of not only multiple mediums but also his ability to push technology for aesthetic purposes.

Now another group of critics see Rauschenberg in terms of iconography – all of those knickknacks, images, and junk store items add up to picture of Rauschenberg’s life, a life that is often coded and hidden. On this side of the criticism, most focus on Rauschenberg’s life as a gay man in the 1950s, his relationship with Jasper Johns (this criticism goes on and on to the disservice of both artists), and the codes and secrets that those two plot points involve on the surfaces of his work. (see Jonathon Katz’s recent essay on Johns’ Watchman in the Smithsonian’s journal).

The moral of the story is that we need both sides of the story to get a clear picture of both the history of Modernism and the history of Rauschenberg. You cannot have one without the other.

Paul Lee seems to inhabit this Rauschenbergian world where one’s private life and one’s grappling with art history are the same and rightly so. He, like Rauschenberg, uses the strategies found in the history that preceded him in a personal way -- in Lee’s case, the history is a mixture of Minimalist painting and sculpture with the more ad hoc constructions of artists like Jessica Stockholder and Tony Feher. Also like Rauschenberg, homoeroticism and domesticity are pervasive in Lee’s work, but thankfully also like Rauschenberg, this content is not an overwhelming slogan but an essential, interesting part of the work.

Most of Lee’s references are easy to recognize – you have Malevich’s Black Square painted on tambourines, you have an early Brice Marden panel painting made of grey and black beach towels, there’s a Fred Sandback made from a clothing seam sagging in one corner, and then there are the light bulbs – a material that in Lee’s context recalls both Johns’ lead sculptures as well as Dan Flavin’s early work (so visible in the recent retrospective). Basically with Lee, you find references to work made by men now reclaimed and remade by another man who is perhaps more attuned to the masculine stereotypes that can be implicit in that history. In other words, Lee is more inclusive about what the history of those robust masculine artists can allow.

Of course all of that is old hat (see post-minimalism et al.), but as a unit, Lee’s work offers enough nuance to be consistently compelling – there is something elegant in the way he can get such a wide impact with just a few nubs of material. They are also sly. For instance, several works in the show featured simply hanging towels on pastel fields. Every time I wanted to center in on a reference (for instance, the centering of an object in a Joseph Kosuth text/object painting, the broom that appears in Johns’ great work, Fool’s House from 1961, or those infamous Rauschenberg socks and ties), Lee does a light sidestep of the issue.

Lee’s towel is not simply an object seeking definition (Kosuth), a device to activate a visual field where representation and objects split from each other (Johns), or perhaps a coded personal reference (Rauschenberg). Instead, Lee’s towel is cleverly all three at once. We might say that Lee’s towel functions somewhere between Johns’ deadpan delivery of iconic visual philosophy in Fool’s House (writing an arrow that labels “this is a towel” and “this is a broom) and all of those mad iconographers running around chasing every splatter, and tracking every drip in a Rauschenberg. The towel is inert (maybe the correct word is limp) and is positioned in such a coy, gentle manner that one feels the object fill up with personality above anything else. Most Lee sculptures have this effect, and to this writer, this effect is both historical and human at once – a good thing!

A Note on El Anatsui

This morning on Modern Art Notes, I read the post on El Anatsui, and in response, I would argue that Barbara Pollack’s quoted line (although misusing the word “African” – Anatsui was born in Ghana but lives and works in Nigeria, he seems specifically Nigerian, and it is wrong to use African as a blanket term) is at least on to something. Culturally specific creative resourcefulness is indeed found in certain Sub-Saharan African countries (Nigeria included), a resourcefulness that exists in a different way than it existed for Robert Rauschenberg as a Texan, George Herms in L.A. , or Arman in France.

I never felt like Rauschenberg, Herms, and Arman’s trash and resourcefulness were very culturally specific – in other words, Rauschenberg’s trash does not tell a cultural story, it seems no more Texan than Herms seems Angeleno. Anatsui’s work seems specifically Nigerian to me, and I say this not from just the allusions to Kente cloth or the reference to the colonial sale of liquor (though both contribute greatly to the work's cultural specificity). I say this because of the works' economy and its elegance in execution – it is not Rauschenberg striving to reinvent seeing by looking at neglected overlooked objects or Herms' use of rubbish to alter our experiential surroundings. Anatsui’s trash earnestly wants to be an elegant art object the same way that for example, Kenyans use bits of wood to create refined sitting stools. It is an aesthetic that recalls folk art practices where people have very little, but do what they can with it.

In parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, you constantly see personal journeys towards a conception of “refinement” that people may get from the east, west, or elsewhere – people write Nike on their tee-shirts, traditional bands cover Kenny Rogers songs (weird, I know, but true), small huts with television sets call themselves theaters. I guess the question I’m asking is that if these phenomena are not “creativity at the heart of resourcefulness” and are not culturally specific, how would one talk about them?