Word: rauschenberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...although its prizes have sometimes been awarded as a result of flackery, they are often rewards for achievement in new fields of art. In 1964, for the second time in the Biennale's history, the U.S. won the top international prize, for the litter-ish paintings of Robert Rauschenberg (Alexander Calder's sculpture won in 1952). This year, despite a powerful push behind the U.S.'s pop-eyed Roy Lichtenstein, whose work has evolved from hyperintense comic-book panels, the grand international prize in painting went to a relatively unknown kinetic artist from Argentina, Julio Le Pare...
...form." Other goodies on view include a stuffed ocelot, a stuffed owl and a stuffed boar (Serra's wife is an amateur taxidermist), bidets crammed with conch shells, beaten-up boxing gloves, and broom bristles. Of his crass menagerie, Serra says: "People didn't know whether Robert Rauschenberg's goat with a tire around it was art. Now they know. If an artist goes on making goats, though, he's hung up." Serra tries to stay loose, and designs his works to last. Says he proudly, "I take great care to glue every feather down...
Cope the critics did, and Rauschenberg, in 1964, won the Venice Biennale Grand Prize...
Actually, Rauschenberg makes no claim to being the first to play the game. The cubists, he points out, long ago began incorporating materials from the real world (labels, newspaper clippings, playing cards) into their stuck-together collages. The surrealists later cottoned to the idea, as Max Ernst put it, of "coupling two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them." Dadaist Marcel Duchamp hung up mass-produced snow shovels and labeled them ready-made...
...undertaken with relish and good humor, much as a Claes Oldenburg delights in making a mattress-sized Popsicle on a limp stick. Beauty seems no longer at stake; the word itself is rarely used. But tough, satirical commentary abounds. "An artist should be an evangelist for looking," says Rauschenberg. Yet in creating a second, magical reality, the artist often ends up with whole stage-sets, creating a future problem: What's to keep the museums of the future from looking like a decayed Disneyland, or the whole back...