Raushenberg

Sure, I dug Jackson Pollock. But from 1962 until I stopped going to galleries around 1970 I was a Pop guy--and not, please, because I thought Pop was "satire." If Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Wesselmann are mocking anything, it's the art world's need to explain away their affection for their subject matter. And with my two other favorites, sculptor George Segal and the much less famous painter Bob Stanley, satire isn't even an issue. Certainly I am positive that my friend and mentor Stanley was down with the rock stars, athletes, and porn queens he rendered in bright, hard-edged, polarized images as "strong" as anything to come out of the Cedar Tavern. He loved music, he loved sports, he loved sex, and that was that.

Guided by Bob, I boned up on art history back then, recent included. And so I checked out Pop forebears Jasper Johns, who seemed a bit fuzzy but OK, and Robert Rauschenberg, who I had trouble with. Simply put, I thought his work was ugly. One of the many ways Pop wasn't satire was that it celebrated the clean colors and surfaces of the technological environment reified by commercial art--and rejected the muck and agony with which self-appointed avant-gardists purported to transcend that environment. Formally, it was utopian about the present. And though I was never utopian, even after I became a radical I didn't blame the present on technology or commerce--I blamed it on the way capitalism perverted those human activities. For me, Pop's imagery was a sharp reproach to an elitist leftism that would get America nowhere. And not only that. In my heart of hearts I suspected (or hoped) that the contradictions between production and consumption would produce a new world in which that reified technological environment would stand revealed as essentially humane--good for people in a way left elitists were incapable of understanding.

Well, without going into detail, let's just say I was wrong. Which I think is the main reason why, when on October 3 I walked into the Guggenheim to look at more Rauschenbergs than anybody except Rauschenberg had ever seen, I was more or less bowled over. I doubt my epiphany would mean much to most museum-goers, who are imbued with the 20th-century assumption that rendering the "ugly" "beautiful" is what art's spozed to do. Indeed, from its rough African-derived vocal textures to the deliberate dissonance, raucous noise, and bum notes of generations of guitar bands, most of the rock and roll I live for works that way. Nevertheless, the first three floors, right from the beginning--a conceptual print consisting entirely of words, paintings black as Ad Reinhardt's with gravel or newsprint besmirching the pigment, plain shirt-cardboard collages from the Hotel Bilbao--hit me as a riot of imagery, a literally unimaginable visual glut that swamped any suspicion that Rauschenberg was better contemplated than seen. What excess! What mess! What a feast!

One constant pleasure was the newsprint, as ground or collage element. A black painting over the Asheville Citizen immediately evoked the whole Black Mountain Cage-Cunningham-Creeley nexus where Rauschenberg came up, but more often the operative signifier was layout-mediated historical ephemera per se--so momentous in their moment, so purely formal now. Rauschenberg's interest in this aging process was most vivid to me in the aforementioned collages, which utilized both drawings (of machines, buildings) that were clearly antique in 1952 and laundry tickets from the hotel that were fresh as today back then, yet now seem of almost the same vintage as the drawings. But the newsprint also pitted not-quite-pop representation (which already had a long history in the 20th-century avant-garde) against the angst of abstract expressionism, a pervasive conflict in his painting that he then played for violence and rough edges. And in the combines, which plainly owe Duchamp and dada--from the so-called Music Box, rusty (but were they rusty then?) nails driven into a wooden box that my wife tried to pass off as a thumb piano and my 12-year-old daughter realistically declared a torture chamber, to the big familiar weird constructions that so often incorporate stuffed animals (what chickens! and what a hell of a goat!)--this conflict is expanded to include not just representation but reality itself.

The overall mood of this plethora of work is one of vital struggle with intractable contradictions. This artist wants it all. He wants history and he wants media; he wants nature and he wants technology; he wants paint and he wants sculpture; he wants irony and he wants suffering; he wants art and he wants the world. He knows about beauty--the sheer loveliness of 1959's renowned rubbed drawings for Dante's Inferno remains unsurpassed--but he sees no way for this entire mess (as opposed, perhaps, to a contained work of art, even one as far-reaching as The Inferno) to be rendered simply lovely. There's humor in this struggle, and plenty of exuberance. But it's hard. And it doesn't seem to hold out the potential for easy resolution.

And then, in 1964--around the time, Bob Stanley reminded me when we talked about it later, that Rauschenberg won the Venice Biennale--the work changes radically. The turning point might as well be the famous Retroactive I, dominated by the blue silk-screened image of a pointing JFK with a big man-in-space photo occupying most of its upper left quadrant. There are drips defacing Kennedy, and his tie has been painted green, but heroically, he prevails. Kennedy's assassination certainly saddened many well-meaning Americans, myself including. But in historical perspective this is a revoltingly sentimental painting--complacent in its image-mongering as the earlier work never is. As will prove the rule, the boundaries of the collaged images are respected; they tolerate a few mild incursions only to establish their capacity for noblesse oblige. And for the entire top half of the show, 30 years worth, the complacency is almost unrelieved. The chi-chi fabric work, the calculated desecrations of old masters, the paintings and combines prepared in collaboration with various corporations or the (nonprofit, really) Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange--all seem untroubled, escapist, decorative without the guts to say so. Stanley tells me that Rauschenberg has been very generous with his untold wealth, setting up foundations that pay poorer artists' medical expenses and even rent. Perhaps--no doubt--he's exerted his largesse outside the artistic realm as well. But rather than demonstrating "the power of art and artistic interchange to bring about social change on an international level" or the artist's "long-term commitment to human rights," as a wall card assured us, the main thing the late work proved to me was the power of money to sap the spirit as it works its ugly magic in the material world.

The only exception was some circa-1971 corrugated-cardboard pieces off in a side gallery--huge shipping crates, mostly flattened although one was more like a hanging sculpture, with scraps stapled or paint splattered on. My wife claims I just liked them because people are always mailing me cardboard too, but no, I liked their rawness, their foundness, their renewed sense of art as physical process rather than visual achievement. All were marked "Collection of the Artist." Stanley tells me he saw one at Roy Lichtenstein's once. I guess Rauschenberg thought it better to keep this sort of thing in the fraternity.

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