Word: rauschenbergs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Irreconcilable Appearances. "Painting relates to both art and life," says Artist Robert Rauschenberg enthusiastically. "Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two." His most spectacular feat of gapsmanship was his trend-setting Angora goat with rubber tire. It seems that Rauschenberg was struck by the incongruity of a stuffed goat in an office-furniture store window. He tried to paint the image. No good. But two years later, he laid a canvas on the floor, bought the goat, and set it on top of the canvas with a rubber tire around its middle...
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...
...consisting of a red horizontal stripe on an orange ground, went for $26,000. A 1951 Clyfford Still garnered $29,000. Mark Rothko's hovering red panel fetched $15,500. Two Franz Klines were bid up to $18000 and $19,000. What about pop? Only one work, Robert Rauschenberg's elaborate montage Express, was put on the block; it was knocked down for a record...