Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, its bulk (some 400 works in all media) creates the fatigued impression that everything in Rauschenberg's vast and uneven output has been dumped into the hopper and left for the individual viewer to sort out. Which is fine if you've followed the artist's work over the decades, but it must be intimidating if you're new to it; and the younger part of its audience will...
Hopps compares him in a catalog essay to Charles Willson Peale, the artist of the Revolutionary War period who created the first American museum, a highly personal wunderkammer of his own portraits of American heroes mixed with natural-history specimens. When you think of Rauschenberg giving new life to a stuffed angora goat in Monogram, 1955, or repeatedly silk-screening the effigy of John F. Kennedy, there's some truth to this. But his closer affinity is with an equally polymorphous ancestor, Walt Whitman, the entranced celebrant of American variety...
Rauschenberg became to American art in the 1950s and '60s what Whitman was to American poetry in the 1880s--the Great Permitter, with his declared hope to "act in the gap between art and life." This, one wants to say, is the artist of American democracy, yearningly faithful to its clamor, its contradictions, its hope and its enormous demotic freedom, all of which find shape in his work. Other American artists have had this ambition--one thinks of Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters at the turn of the century--but none fulfilled it so well...
...also, without living peer, the artist of free association. Within the languages of art, Rauschenberg started more hares than he could possibly chase, including performance. His work with Cunningham and Cage, always under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, made artistic collaboration seem feasible, after the image of the artist had been monopolized by the go-it-alone individualists of the New York School. Younger artists of every kind latched on to his work, which meant that, particularly from the '50s to the '70s, there was hardly an area of "advanced" American art that didn't contain some...
...takes away the egotistical loneliness of creation." Then he wryly added, "But the downside is that you have to wake up with an idea that will keep eight people busy for eight hours." It was true enough to be a difficulty: the basis of Rauschenberg's genius as an artist, despite his love of collaboration, has always been his autographic touch, the sense that one sensibility was at work on the world, picking up and discarding things, fine-tuning personal responses. In some of the later work the collective effort shades over into an almost corporate look--not slick, exactly...