Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Rauschenberg's Death
Rauschenberg's death is a great loss to the art world. His combination of energy, play, and enormous graphic talent, pushed art in a benevolent direction. He allowed in the ambiguity of experience, the popular culture was used to his own purposes, as were the materials that surrounded him. His aesthetic was a sunny and welcoming jazz like improvisation. Enemy of purity, he instead opted to create art.
Rauschenberg took the painterly default — where the paint ebbs and flows, forming the image from a sorting out, losing drawing and finding it in a chancy exchange, the sea erasing the shore only for it to re-emerge, and integrated that purely aesthetic dialectic with familiar images. He enlarged the conceptual basis of the visual arts, but it wasn't an intellectual widening or emotional extension — he didn't care about the pop images themselves, except as useful placeholders; much as the pop culture uses images itself. Material, and the morphology of the image's presentation, would often trump an expression of the interior life — the soul of art — in Rauschenberg's work.
I sometimes felt Rauschenberg didn't rise above his materials and concepts. Using pop culture images, which by their nature are shallow, can yield shallow results. “Contextualizing” these images, within works of art, doesn't necessarily give them expressive power or personal meaning. He involved others in his creative process, in the privacy that is so valuable in the creation of images. There is a convivial spirit expressed in this, but art isn't by its nature a shared expression. Rauschenberg made contemporary art, which was ponderous at the time, so desiccated you could hardly care, interesting to look at. Rauschenberg appreciated the wonder of a fully integrated image — a world presented; an image that works.