Robert Rauschenberg

Acting in the Gap

“Each person is their own adventure—it can’t be right, can’t be wrong.”

I love this picture of Robert Rauschenberg. Here’s a guy who says he was considered white trash growing up in Texas in the thirties. After having that attribution as a kid, he said that he was prepared to suffer anything later in life. It made him brave—unafraid to be curious, unafraid to collaborate, unafraid to fail, unafraid to succeed, unafraid of his instincts, unafraid of his own thoughts. Unafraid to be joyful.

I read a book last year called Ninth Street Women. It was the best book I’ve read detailing the day-to-day lives of the Abstract Expressionists. It followed the lives of the women in the movement—Lee Krasner, Elaine DeKooning, Helen Frankenthaler, etc.—describing their living conditions at the time and how they persevered, reaching deep into themselves to sustain and express their lives. A lot of misery gave birth to the amazing and enduring artworks of the New York School. But in the fifties and sixties, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were not inclined to repeat that particular affliction.

“Work is my joy, work is my therapy. I don’t know anybody that loves to work as much as I do.”

He lived it. Not just making art, as he said, but living it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. “You go to work,” he said. “You work.” I think about this like Springsteen talks about performing. It’s kind of an exorcism—a way of, at once, keeping the demons down and releasing a transcendent exhilaration. You work. The process is the thing that can reveal the secrets we keep from ourselves and make of them powerful expressions that tap into the zeitgeist for all to own and reimagine.

Propelled by atomic curiosity, Rauschenberg worked fast. He made decisions fast. What he was after, I think, was flow—who isn’t?—and his particular rhythm left all the preciousness of picture-making behind as he placed his screens or applied his paint. He was so involved in the making, the cutting and pressing and physicality of movement, that he appeared to neither know nor care about the outcome until he stopped. Brice Marden, his assistant, said he never met anyone who worked so hard, so fast, and with such deep concentration as Rauschenberg. And yet, for all the chaos and furious motion, the slashing paint and tilted angles, and sundry objects, the pictures—let’s call them that—have a structural logic that looks like inevitability. Somewhere in Rauschenberg’s sensibility, he was building these pictures like a lysergic-tripping architect. They should fall apart, but they don’t.

It’s like a crystal—clear and hard inside—and light hits it from somewhere. From where?

Even though he didn’t, as he said, know about painting until he was out of the Navy, his work has the coherency of Cezanne. You can feel his instruction behind all of the screens and paint and sheets and towels and junk. Whatever this innate sensibility that Rauschenberg had, whomever he was channeling for help, from the beginning his unlikely contraptions held together.

Take Monogram, Rauschenberg’s goat Combine from 1956–59, for example. In the same way that the paint keeps the apples from tumbling out of the painting in a Cezanne still life, the tire around the ram in Monogram affixes it to its own undeniable space. Rauschenberg said, after several attempts to use this secondhand goat—on the wall, in front of a screen—that the ram didn’t look enough like art. Which is exactly the same endpoint as Cezanne; he made the apples something that are, at once, fruit and, at the same time, paint. So when Rauschenberg put the ram on the floor (at Jasper Johns’ suggestion) and placed a tire around it, he was satisfied that the character of the goat had been sufficiently alchemized into art. Of course, Robert Hughes said of this particular move that it was the greatest ode to homoerotic art in history. Probably so, but for the artist, for Rauschenberg, he was trying to make the picture work. The rest seems to reside in the unconsciousness of decisions. “Yeah, good enough, I’m satisfied, I’m on to the next.” And so Monogram, the institution, the myth, was born.

I saw Monogram a couple of times. It struck me when I first saw it in the early eighties how physical it was. Yep, right there. You could touch it—metaphorically (don’t even think…). And then I saw it again in New York many years later and was struck by this idea about the centrality of this single artwork in our consciousness. Trundled around the world. Honored. Technicians lined up to take it apart, package it in separate perfectly crafted crates, and reassemble it somewhere else. Kind of incredible when you think of it—how valuable this little goat has become. What secrets it must decode in our collective subconscious.

There’s a picture of a dejected-looking Rauschenberg in his studio from 1958, surrounded by artwork he created, each of which would become iconic. Jasper Johns had sold out his first show at Leo Castelli, and Rauschenberg had yet to find a paying audience for his inventions. His time would come, and with it, deserved appreciation for their incalculable influence on subsequent generations of artists and culture alike. In the decades after peak Combine creation—1954–1964—Rauschenberg continued to cement his legacy with work ever more ambitious in complexity and scale. Leveraging his fame with gleeful hope, Rauschenberg’s work in subsequent decades became increasingly linked to his social justice agenda. He believed that artists could create dialogue where politicians and nations had failed, and with self-funded programs like ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange) his outreach became global.

The term “white trash” had changed Rauschenberg in his childhood; the trash he found and used to make art changed the world. His assemblages were conglomerations that were neither art nor life but lived somewhere in the transmutation. And I think maybe that’s why Rauschenberg’s zen flow production was so immense in its influence: it captures the thing when it is still unborn yet fully realized, still changing yet altogether complete. Maybe that’s where we want to live—in Rauschenberg’s joyful, hopeful space where art and life intersect—where our dreams and our aspirations can become real, if we are willing to live as bravely as he did.