Robert Rauschenberg

Abstract

expressionism was lofty and dramatic and created by older heterosexual men, the heroic nature of their practice was challenged by Rauschenberg who desired art that was married to life rather than to itself. Rauschenberg proposed flatbed or work-surface picture planes as the foundation of an artistic language that dealt with a new experience. The art critic Leo Steinberg described this period of Rauschenberg’s practice as the invention of a pictorial surface that allowed the viewer ‘back in’ amongst the elitist notions of abstract expressionism. Rauschenberg’s desire to use symbols and semiotics were incongruous with available types of pictorial surfaces that were too exclusive and homogenous. As a result, he moved away from the idea of the painting as a vertical surface towards a compositional method that Steinberg called the flatbed picture plane, upon which objects or images could be scattered. “Against Rauschenberg’s picture plane you can pin or project any image because it will not work as the glimpse of a world, but as a scrap of printed material. And you can attach any object, as long as it beds itself down on the work surface.” While the painting of the abstract expressionists was visionary and prophetic, Rauschenberg’s ability to accommodate recognisable objects and present them in a democratically understandable way was extremely revolutionary. Rauschenberg redirected the viewer's attention from the psyche of the painter onto the outside world. Branden Joseph described his artistic position as “anti expressive, anti subjective, and anti authoritarian” that was responsible for a broadening of cultural expression by introducing a radically different point of view. Rauschenberg rejected the concept of the metaphorisation of paint marks for conflict and struggle that was heralded by critics as the true genius underlying abstract expressionism. Instead, he used his materials in a neutral manner, attempting to present facts rather than representations. Using assemblage, he united real life objects, often of three dimensions, together with painting to present a more logical and transparent art. Rauschenberg termed these pieces as combine paintings, which lay between painting and sculpture, some hanging on the wall others resting on the ground. Canyon (1959) blurred these boundaries even further, incorporating elements that exist in real space, such as a eagle, protruding from the canvas, or subject to actual gravity like the pillow that hangs from the base of the piece. Rauschenberg mostly worked within “syncopated grid,” a formal structure where he weighted and 1 Leo Steinberg, “Reflections on the State of Criticism” in Robert Rauschenberg, Branden W. Joseph (ed.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Athens, GA, USA, 2002, p. 35 2 Ibid., p. 32 3 Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-AvantGarde, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 2003, p. 67 composed lights, colours, and shapes. In Canyon he has the weight of the hanging pillow offsetting the strength of the eagle’s wings as it pulls upward into the imageladen sky. Two narratives are brought together by Rauschenberg in this piece, America’s role in the Space Race, and a retelling of the legend of Ganymede who was seized as by an eagle to be cup barer for Jupiter. Stuffed animals were a reoccurring material in Rauschenberg’s work, and separated him from Marcel Duchamp’s preference for mass produced objects which he used for his ready-mades, or to Pop art’s concentration on consumer culture. In this piece, he uses the eagle as a double motif, both for it’s role in the Ganymede legend and as a symbol of American power. Similarly, the image of the night sky represents both the heavens into which Ganymede was raised, and a symbol for the aspirations of the USA to beat the Soviet Union into outer space. This piece is heavy with allusion, metaphors and narratives, all of which are ideas in direct contrast to the philosophy of abstract expressionism. While Rauschenberg utilises vigorous brushwork to draw together the items in his combine, they do not contain the same sense of emotional commitment. Rauschenberg was critical of the search for symbolism and meaning through colours, and the emotional content that they were projecting upon the canvas. Collection (1954) was a significant work in Rauschenberg’s challenge to celebrated modes of representation. At the top of the field is a reference to abstract expressionism and the notion of mark making, with the empty areas of white, acknowledging the “confrontation of the artist with the blank canvas arena”. Rauschenberg then presents the rest of the canvas as a collage, as a comment on the limitations that paint creates. He uses his paint strokes as another form of combine, all separated and detached, and refusing to amalgamate to become an overall aesthetic construction. The colours do not mix, and while they are applied in an active fashion, they are also not reflectionary. Rauschenberg uses both paint and crayon to scribble and scrawl over the picture plane to add another layer of meaning, deliberately challenging the abstract expressionists spontaneous and affective use of paint. 4 Mark Stevens, “Collage Education”, nyMAG, December 15 2005, accessed 24 May 2011, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/15332/ 5 Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, p. 110 6 Ibid., p. 112 White Paintings were an innovative exploration in to temporality and served as a direct contestation to the dominant hegemony of abstract expressionism. The earliest of these works, White Painting with Numbers (1949) is made up of scattered and strewn lines and numbers which compose a surface that cannot be construed into anything else. In these pieces, Rauschenberg explored the idea of emptiness and negation. At the time of his Stable Gallery exhibition in 1953, Rauschenberg commented that the White Paintings were “either too full or too empty to be thought, thereby they remain visual experiences. These pictures are not art.” The response to the exhibition was mixed, with the pieces considered practical jokes by sections of the audience, and more favourably as strong challenges to the status quo by others. Rauschenberg was associated with many of the more established New York artists, and while they respected and liked him as a man and contemporary, they disregarded his art as “fooling around, not really being serious”. These pieces which were originally based on the application of printed matter and other flat materials to the canvas, soon developed to incorporate a wider range of assemblage. Rauschenberg further explored the critique of an artists underlying feelings generating their art in Factum I and Factum II (1957), which offered a satirical comment on the emotional spontaneity that was a heralded aspect of the abstract expressionists. One of the canvasses is an adapted example of the abstract expressionist style while the other is an identical copy, right down to individual brushstrokes. The viewer is unable to determine “which came first, or which was the product of spontaneous creativity”. These two pieces are excellent examples of Rauschenberg’s contesting nature. The artist commented that even he could not tell the difference between the emotional content of one and the other after painting them. Factum undermined the concept of the uniqueness and authenticity of the art object at a time when gesture was celebrated. 7 Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, p. 57 8 Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg: Art and Life, Abrams Books: New York, NY, USA, 2004, p. 70 9 Ibid., p. 79 10 Ibid., p. 90 11 Jonathan Fineberg, “Robert Rauschenberg's Reservoir”, American Art, 12, no. 1, EBSCOhost, accessed May 24, 2011 Of all the abstract expressionists, Willem de Kooning was the artist who Rauschenberg admired the most. In a testimonial for de Kooning Rauschenberg quoted a conversation the two had. Rauschenberg asked de Kooning whether he was bothered that most of the New York artists painted like him, and he replied that it didn’t worry him, as they “couldn’t do the ones that don’t work”. Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) is Rauschenberg’s most daring and iconoclastic piece. Rauschenberg went to de Kooning’s studio and told him that he’d like to erase one of his drawings as a work of art. de Kooning was intrigued by the idea, but purposefully chose to give Rauschenberg a drawing of ink and crayon that would be difficult to erase completely. Rauschenberg spent one month attempting to get the page completely clean – to a state similar to that of his most blank White Paintings. Rauschenberg’s practice was based on the idea that the artist’s feelings at the time of work were unimportant, and this piece represents that notion. He was effectively destroying a work of art created by someone who he celebrated in order to create a grand ‘gesture’ of his own. Despite stating the he “erased the de Kooning not out of any negative response” and merely needed an artist of his stature to create the necessary tension in the piece to push the work out in to the world. Whilst he was adamant that his actions were not motivated by critique or negation, the symbolism of Rauschenberg’s philosophical action is perhaps his bluntest contest to abstract