Robert Rauschenberg: Botanical Vaudeville Some 20th century American artists are household names in Scotland, and others are better described as artists’ artists. Some fit neatly into the story of modern art, and others? Others are like Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg, who died just three years ago, is not as easy to spot as Ed Ruscha or as notorious as Andy Warhol. But without him, neither of those artists would have got off the starting blocks. Rauschenberg was the man who came to New York and threw out the rulebook, changing the game for artists all over the world. A new exhibition just opened at Edinburgh’s Inverleith House will show us how. Rauschenberg didn’t always want to be an artist; he didn’t always even know that art existed beyond the pictures on a deck of cards. Born in 1925 to fundamentalist Christian parents in Port Arthur, Texas, it wasn’t until he went on shore leave from the navy that he first encountered fine art, in the form of two late 18th century portraits, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie. “It was the first time that he had seen that people made paintings,” says Ealan Wingate, director of one of New York’s two Gagosian galleries, and co-curator of the Edinburgh exhibition. “He was about 19 years old,” Wingate continues, “and he was smitten. He became completely committed to doing that with his life.” Rauschenberg took up studies in Kansas and Paris, before attending the radical Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he became lifelong friends with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and was taught by Bauhaus legend Josef Albers. The young Rauschenberg loved to bait his teacher, who pursued a stubbornly systematic approach to painting. The older man “was the block that Bob constantly punched against,” says Wingate, “and Albers constantly just stayed there as a block, and never gave in. But Albers came from the Bauhaus mentality and Bob came from a very streetwise mentality.” While Albers conducted pristine colour experiments, Rauschenberg took to the junk yards to find material for his artwork. The whole world was his palette, for shifting works of art which involved animals both alive (a chicken) and stuffed (a goat), along with elements of performance, sculpture and painting. Rauschenberg became famous for these Combines of the 1950s, though typically for him, there is an anecdote which disguises the concept in whimsy. “Some people criticised him,” explains Wingate, “because they thought he was making a sculpture and it looked painterly, and some people thought he was making a painting and it had sculptural elements, and to whimsically get them off his back, he just said he was making a Combine.” Rauschenberg famously said he wanted to work “in the gap between art and life”, and in 1955, well before Tracey Emin was born, Rauschenberg took rumpled bed clothes, spattered them in paint, and mounted them on the wall. The queues for that exhibition were round the block, and on seeing works such as these, the Italian Arte Povera movement found its voice. It wasn’t just Arte Povera which Rauschenberg helped to unleash on the world; it was Pop Art too. The young artist brought new energy to the medium of collage, combining found images with a silk-screen process which had until then escaped the attention of artists. The ever-tightening rules of Abstract Expressionism lost their grip on a new generation, which was inspired to play with real life ephemera. “The Abstract Expressionists tended to get to a sublime,” says Wingate. “They were looking for finite answers; Bob kept looking for infinite questions, and impishly ran away when answers were proffered.” Rauschenberg, the man who famously erased a de Kooning drawing as an artistic act, also erased the rules. And there’s more. Rauschenberg was an early pioneer of electronic art, co-founding Experiments in Art and Technology in 1966. He loved to explore the viewer’s role in a work of art, not just with reflective surfaces, but with sensors which activated lights and moving parts when someone came near. “Bob’s work from 1950 to 1960 causes the rest of art movements for the States, until time present,” says Wingate, “because you can find an origin for a freedom, a license to do something in a certain direction, that he began – that had not been exerted before his grabbing that license.” In the 1980s, Rauschenberg took that revolution to the four corners of the world, in his six-year self-funded art tour, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI). Its impact was unprecedented. “He was on the ROCI tour in Russia and China,” says David White, who worked with Rauschenberg for 30 years, “and places where the artists had not experienced anything like this before, so they speak of China before Rauschenberg and after Rauschenberg as far as the art making there is concerned.” “It was huge,” adds Wingate. “All the extroversion that we have now in Chinese art is because they saw not only a Western art, a New York based art, but an artist who said it was all possible – and in fact urged all that possibility rather than the constraints of a rigorous limitation.” So why is Rauschenberg not more famous? I ask this question of the two men and they look slightly puzzled. “He was the first American to ever win the Venice Biennale,” Wingate points out. “He was chosen by the Smithsonian Institute to be the bicentennial artist to represent America in 1976. He had enormous accolades foisted upon him: in his twenties he had a retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York.” But then the co-curators hit on two possible answers. “His generosity also promoted other artists around him,” says Wingate, “so he didn’t say ‘hey, what about me in the limelight?’. He did do various things like ROCI, but it was more as a cultural emissary, not banging his own chest or telling his story but trying to exchange culture with cultures.” “It’s also in part the enormous variety in the work,” adds White, gesturing to a highly reflective metal painting on the wall, and a rusty metal assemblage on the floor. “People don’t necessarily recognise a Rauschenberg the minute they see this, if they’re used to looking at this, whereas a Lichtenstein is pretty often recognised as a Lichtenstein right away.” It’s clear that if Rauschenberg is not a household name here, he should be, and the show at Inverleith House is a first step on the way. “What’s exciting is that this Rauschenberg show,” says Wingate, “is the first in 30 years here in the United Kingdom, and it will be followed up at the Tate in several years with a full-fledged retrospective. It will certainly give so many people the chance, in those big spaces, to see what his contribution was, and to say, ‘Oh! That’s where it comes from!’”
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