screwing things up
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Rauschenberg, “Canyon,”
the Los County Angeles Museum of Art, Los Angeles
The death of
artist Robert Rauschenberg on May 12, 2008 at his home on Captiva Island,
Florida occurred just as I was finishing reading Carolyn’s Brown’s insightful
book on Cage and Cunningham, Chance and
Circumstance. For several weeks before that I had been thrust into these
artists’ world, of which Rauschenberg was an important figure, a close friend
of both Cage and Cunningham—along with artist Jasper Johns, with whom
Rauschenberg lived for eight years—and designer of sets and costumes for
several of Cunningham’s dances.
The Browns, Carolyn and then-husband,
composer Earle Brown, were also close friends to the four men, and in her book
she so brilliantly portrayed Rauschenberg that when news came of his death I
suddenly felt as if I had lost a friend, even though I never met the man.
Born in 1925 on the Gulf Coast in Port
Arthur, Texas, Milton Ernest Rauschenberg (he changed his name to Robert while
attending the Kansas City Art Institute after serving in World War II), grew up
in an impoverished, religiously-oriented family. His mother hoped he would
become a preacher, but after seeing Gainsborough’s famed “Blue Boy” painting at
the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino,
California, Rauschenberg suddenly realized that art was created by
individuals—that works did not simply pre-exist—and he decided on the spot to
become an artist.
Critics through the years have catalogued
his adventuresome spirit, as he moved quickly from Abstract Expressionism—with
close friendships with many of the major figures of that art movement (one of
Rauschenberg’s earliest works was a drawing by Willem de Kooning in which
Rauschenberg painstakingly erased nearly all of the artist’s
lines)—reintegrating recognizable objects into his art and, ultimately,
combining found objects he discovered on his daily walks through his
neighborhood into his canvases or other floor structures such as his major
work, “Monogram,” consisting of a stuffed goat embraced by a tire, placidly
seeming to eat various pieces of debris embedded or painted into the surface
upon which he stands. These “combines,” the most iconic of which are “Untitled”
(from 1954) “Monogram,” “Bed,” and “Canyon”—works influenced by artists and
traditions as various as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, the American quilting
tradition and Rembrandt—represent just one aspect of a constantly shifting body
of work that ultimately included over 6,000 paintings and objects, as well as
numerous performances such as his dance-inspired, “Pelican,” in which Carolyn
Brown first performed on roller skates with a parachute strapped to her back.
Rauschenberg also worked closely with
scientists and engineers from Bell Laboratories and elsewhere to create work
that incorporated various technological discoveries, founding E.A.T.
(Experiments in Art and Technology), experiments that influenced numerous
artists later shown in connection with Maurice Tuchman’s legendary “Art and
Technology” show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a show that included
Rauschenberg’s own “Mad Muse,” a vat made of aluminum and glass, filled with
liquefied clay and hooked up to a compressor that produced sounds akin to the
La Brea tar pits surrounding the museum.
The artist also worked with numerous
printers, producing a substantial number of lithographs with Universal Art
Editions on Long Island and Gemini G.E.L.(Graphic Editions Limited), founded by
Sidney Felsen, Stanley Grinstein [see My
Year 2004], and Kenneth Tyler in Los Angeles .
In short, Rauschenberg was a devoted
experimentalist, refusing to repeat himself and striving to discover new
approaches to his often whimsical and clever—and almost always visually
memorable—art.
In celebration of that art, I decided a
few weeks after his death to revisit “Canyon” and a few others of his work now
showing across the street from my office and a block away from home at the
Broad Museum Building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Although I had long ago read of “Canyon’s”
relation-ship to Rem-brandt’s “The Rape of Ganymede,” I had never seen the
older work, and accordingly did not realize the obvious similarities between
the Rauschenberg combine, featuring a huge stuffed eagle, a pillow (friend
Deborah
Meadows, who
accompanied me to the museum felt that it was perhaps a flour sack instead of a
pillow), a photograph of a young child reaching to the sky, transfers of news-
paper headlines and a picture of the Statue of Liberty, a box painted over, a
wallpaper pattern, paint tubes and excretions of the paint itself, a map of the
solar system and various other
unidentifiable objects.
The story of Ganymede is based upon the
Greek myth—often represented as a justification for pederasty—concerning Zeus’
lust for the young shepherd boy, Ganymede. Transforming himself into an eagle,
the God swept down from the skies and carried away the Trojan boy. Ganymede’s
father suffered such deep sorrow upon his son’s abduction that Zeus sent Hermes
to him, offering him a team of two immortal horses so swift that they
apparently could run upon water. Zeus also guaranteed the father that Ganymede
would become immortal, serving as the cupbearer to the Gods.
As in the Rembrandt painting, where the
child’s backside is revealed, his arm engulfed in the eagle’s beak,
Rauschenberg features the buttock image of the pillow-flour sack attached to a
board which the eagle seems to be bearing in his talons. The image of a child
in the Rauschenberg work features the boy’s raised arm, just as in the
Rembrandt.
However, in Rauschenberg’s combine the
focus is not necessarily on the abduction itself but what lies behind such a
bestial kidnapping. And it is here that every viewer will find his or her own
meaning. On the one hand, the various headlines suggesting words like “Labor”
and “Associated” hints at a world of laborers, and the box laid flat and
painted over seems to suggest that it once contained the products of American
workers. The boy’s raised hand, almost in salute, paralleled by the image of
the Statute of Liberty, along with the eagle—a major symbol of American
culture—might all be read as a near-patriotic salute to the country were it not
for the implied subject matter, the absconding of various products Americans
have created, including a favored son. What first may appear, accordingly, as a
positive image is turned, upon further thought, into something darker, as
images gradually appear more and more foreboding.
The marvel of this work is that there can
be no one interpretation, all
possibilities interlink, and the combine—the perfect word for the way meaning
emanates from the art—remains an open landscape upon which all viewers are
invited to speculate.
Along with the various other Rauschenberg
works—“Red Painting” (1954), “Interior” (1956), “Booster” (1967), “Sky Garden”
(1969), “Untitled” (1963), and “Trapeze” (1964)—of LACMA’s collection I came
away with a sense of wonderment from his art and joy in his insistence to
“screw things up,” to break down what others have determined are the limits of
art.
Los
Angeles, June 7, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (July 3, 2008)
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