Word: rauschenbergs
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...least of the many things that Robert Rauschenberg will be remembered for. But in summing up the great legacy of the artist, who died on May 12 at 82, let's pause to remember that he won a 1983 Grammy Award for the cover of the Talking Heads album Speaking in Tongues. Something about that feels right. It's hard to think of a better match for Rauschenberg, a demiurge of creative disorder, than the band that said, "Stop making sense...
...What Rauschenberg passed on to everyone who came after him was an idea of art as a very freewheeling transaction with the world. Marcel Duchamp may have staked out something like this position sooner, but Rauschenberg gave it a more raucous charm. True, many artists have used it since as permission to make lazy, slapdash work. So did he. But every time you see anyone doing anything that isn't supposed to be art--and calling it art--Rauschenberg is there...
Collage and assembly were techniques that had already been used meticulously by Picasso and Kurt Schwitters. Rauschenberg jammed his found objects together with a different kind of abandon. He produced industrial-strength "combines," big pieces in which worlds collided with a bang. Monogram, from 1955 to '59, featured a wooden platform on which stood a stuffed Angora goat with a tire around its waist. It was typical...
...Rauschenberg's early thinking crystallized in the late 1940s and early '50s at Black Mountain College, where he shared ideas with the composer John Cage, who was using chance and randomness as operating principles in his art. One famous Cage composition, 4'33", was just four minutes and 33 seconds of nothing, in which the silence and whatever random noises people heard (or made) in an auditorium became the music...
...advantage of this exhibition, organized by Paul Schimmel of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and installed in its New York City venue by Nan Rosenthal, that it doesn't have to give space to Rauschenberg's all too massive later output, that endless madcap extrusion. The combines were among his indisputable triumphs, and seeing them on their own makes you realize all over again their liberating power. They offer you a puzzle and dare you to unpuzzle it. Go ahead and try?as long as you're not the type who needs all the pieces...