Robert Rauschenberg: Botanical Vaudeville When entering the Rauschenberg exhibition at Edinburgh’s Inverleith House – the first big UK show of the artist in 30 years – you are faced immediately with a polka-dot purple pig, wearing a hint of a perky grin. The pig – cast from a real stuffed pig – sports a saddle composed of dozens of neckties; swirly, dotted, striped and every other pattern under the sun. There is no explaining it, but if anyone can, it’s the three men with me in the room: David White and Donald Buehler, who looked after Rauschenberg’s studio for 30 years until his death in 2008 and beyond, and Ealan Wingate, director of one of New York’s Gagosian Galleries. The artist was in Tibet, Buehler tells me, on his Overseas Cultural Interchange, when the stuffed pig was spotted behind an exhibition hall. “Bob saw it,” says Buehler, “and said, ‘Can I get that, can I get that?’. Buehler made enquiries and soon the pig was shipped in a makeshift crate to Japan. “In Japan,” Buehler continues, “the customs agent said, ‘That’s not on the list. What is that?’…We opened the crate and it looked rough – there was fur and all that – so he said, ‘Close it quick, I don’t want to see that. I don’t want customs to see that. Ship it to New York right away!’ So it went on the next plane.” The story reveals much that is true about Rauschenberg. The world was his palette: he would pick up anything that interested him wherever he found it. Years earlier, he had stood a stuffed goat on a painting when such things were completely unheard of. He was never afraid of breaking the rules; in fact, he was the man who laid the foundations for a new freedom in art, the world over. And his seriousness about art was often buried deep under a mask of humour and absurdity. “He said he liked to take objects,” White tells me, “and have them still be identifiable as what they originally were, not collaged away so you can’t tell. So it’s very obvious those are neckties turned into a saddle. I don’t know how one explains the colours and the polka dots, but there certainly is a playfulness.” Wingate sums it up with arms open wide: “One doesn’t explain!” he proclaims with gusto, “One revels!”. Rauschenberg was a rule-breaker from the off. A thorn in the side of his teacher, Josef Albers, he joined forces with John Cage and Merce Cunningham to break the tyranny of Abstract Expressionism. Without his revolutionary energy, the story of late 20th century art might have been a lot less interesting. This exhibition focuses on the last three decades of Rauschenberg’s career, with work that has never been seen here before. Aside from that pig, there are two key strands: shiny reflective collages on sheet metal, and dirty, crumpled assemblages of metal junk. The collages are printed and painted on vast sheets of brass, bronze, copper and aluminium, mirroring the viewer and hiding as much of their content as they reveal. Fossil Lace (Borealis) is a beautiful example. Details of a lace curtain are picked out with a tarnish which has subtly discoloured the brass. Just as the lace casts a veil on the world beyond, so this technique has the viewer shifting from foot to foot, trying to catch an image which dances around the edges of peripheral vision. The Borealis series represents a long-held fascination of the artist’s, dating right back to his days at Black Mountain College. Rauschenberg loved everything that was “in a wonderful state of floating and evanescence,” says Wingate, “of things appearing and then disappearing.” These elusive pictures form a shiny counterpoint to the artist’s heavy constructions assembled from old, rusty metal: street signs, corrugated aluminium, dashboards and tools, picked up with enthusiasm from streets and junkyards. Set against the clean white walls and leafy views of Inverleith House, they draw attention to themselves as unsung pieces of urban poetry. No Wake Glut rhymes a pair of corrugated ducts, bent and torn, with a circular road sign and the curve of another old metal object to complete the visual harmony. The text on the sign reads IDLE SPEED / NO WAKE, making out of the work a kind of concrete poetry. Rauschenberg loved to play with words, to the extent that there is at least one terrible pun in this show. It’s impossible to see these assemblages without thinking of Arte Povera, that Italian movement of the late 1960s which brought everything from live horses to bed frames into the gallery. Rauschenberg, it turns out, was bringing live chickens and beds into galleries 15 years before. “There is definitely a connection,” confirms Wingate, “and I think they would be the first to say that Arte Povera artists were deeply affected by Rauschenberg’s work.” That’s the thing about Rauschenberg: many artists, and many movements, have been deeply affected by his work, but it’s still easy to be confused about his output. How do you pigeon-hole a man who is best known for erasing another man’s drawing (de Kooning’s, in 1953)? Prodigiously inventive, Rauschenberg means many different things to many different people. So it’s about time we had a show like this, which allows a whole new generation to see for ourselves what the fuss should all be about.
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