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Rauschenberg and the Big Question
| Article
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18634 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
1,604 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
In art, the late 1950s in New York was a watershed time, as younger artists rebelling against the lofty aspirations and self-involvement of Abstract Expressionism looked for--and found--ways to place art in closer contact with everyday life. For artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg this entailed introducing real-world objects into the field or ground of painting.
On a good day, there is still something a little shocking about a work like Rauschenberg's Bed, a 1955 "combine painting" involving a bedspread, sheets, and a pillow slathered with paint and hung on a wall. (It now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art.) It's part blunt violation of a domestic object, part art gag (an ironic dig at Abstract Expressionism by applying its characteristic paint handling to a lowly bed), part act of artistic desperation (the artist claims he was driven to using it because he couldn't afford canvas), and part self-conscious attempt to marry art and the real world. Its meaning is located somewhere within all of those things.
The sheer bluntness of Bed gives it its impact; its uncompromising "realness" combines with our awareness that this thing has still crossed over into another realm, that of art. Rauschenberg's gift in those early days--and it lasted for about a decade--lay in his precise sense (almost like a musician's perfect pitch) of where the line lay between art and the real world, and thus art and nonart. His best works of these years straddle that line with precision.
But over the last two and a half decades, Rauschenberg has lost that perfect pitch, and just how far over the edge into nonart nonsense he's wandered is painfully evident in the National Gallery's exhibition of his recent works, the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, or ROCI, as it is known.
The works--some 150 paintings, drawings, and sculptures--are the product of a five-year, multination tour to promote world understanding and peace: the artist as goodwill ambassador. It's a parody of the old grand tour, when young men entered maturity by seeing first hand the masterpieces of Europe, and even of the museum exhibition as we know it, beneath whose hard scholarly carapace lies a dream about the civilizing powers of art.
It's a long, garrulous, prodigal venture. Installed on the Concourse level of the National Gallery's East Building, but mainly in the basement galleries, it covers an enormous amount of space for such a slender body of
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