The Real Rauschenberg
- Malcolm Ryder
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Pre-Screening Photography
There are many ways in which history and philosophy mythologize each other. But one overt pattern is that a philosophy acts as a filter of historical pursuit, while history makes arguments about what value a given philosophy has.
In art this dynamic most often appears as a pairing of an artist’s motivation to change how to work, with a subsequent discovery of how a change influences what we recognize as being art. Artists are credited with innovation, but the value of the innovation may not be attributed until long after the work has been completed or even stopped.
Visiting a show of authentic Rauschenbergs comes with the ambition to have his ultimate innovation feel like it bursts into your consciousness the way it is said it burst onto the art scene. But in this case what is on display is more about watching the work gradually emerge from humble beginnings, while the artist simply progressed in a way that didn't show any dependency on anyone else. We're already used to the innovation. For artists viewing the show, the value is in its demonstration of being tenaciously original.
From the outside, Rauschenberg’s very long career can be seen as a continuous exploration of what qualifies as art. But that then features several different phases distinguished by working methods.
Rauschenberg did not begin his art career as a photographer. But the current show, Robert Rauschenberg's New York: Pictures From The Real World, at the Museum of the City of New York, appropriately begins by featuring his attention to what makes New York typically recognizable -- showing that recognition primarily through his camerawork, then ending with examples of silkscreened photocollages.
The exhibit first highlights, more than anything else, his creation of photographs that collect urban iconology by framing and reframing the items figuratively rendered. The items in the earlier pictures usually appear to have been selected because of the “meanings” that they already had. But overall, the exhibited pictures show him as an observer with a pronounced sensitivity to the found, arbitrary or indifferent coincidences of them – coincidences that occurred at any given location as a matter of the densely diverse active interests there.
Accentuating his characterization of “city-ness”, Rauschenberg frames both found and organized items with the same apparent interest that he possibly had with staging in the theater, one of his very strongly preferred experiences and working environments.
It is not hard to indulge the practical connection between intentional theatrical staging and the arbitrary nature of creating a scene from found objects. In both cases the goal is to discover how their arrangement generates a meaning.
But Rauschenberg also appears to have an early preoccupation with removing the ordinary context from visible items, enough to re-contextualize them himself for a variety of reasons including irony, humor, subversion, surrealism, poetics... or other alternatives to the reasons people perceive images the way they typically do.
As seen in the show, Rauschenberg utilizes three different approaches to the items he displays in his views, with the effect of making them visual material for his idiosyncratic arrangements, in particular, appropriation.
The most interesting challenge of appropriating found images is the effort to neutralize how they are recognized in their conventional contexts, which pushes them to a less specific and more abstract state leaning towards formalism.
But when treating visual items as if they were arbitrary, they could also get used precisely because their existing typical meanings collide, or converse, or together catalyze new ideas not already held in the respective separate items. The photographs don't predict what Rauschenberg would do in collage, but much of the collage work winds up reiterating his way of treating form within the boundaries of the photograph's framing.
Finally, his compositions can operate as catalogs (evidence), as scrapbooks (memory), or as expressionism (metaphor). The consequences are what he is pursuing, whether by improvising or by planning,
Over the timespan of the show, Rauschenberg’s photographs explore the conversion of Figures into Icons into Motifs.
And with regard to the title of the show, this is arguably a transformation of what was a notion of real being “objective” discovery into real being “idiosyncratic” truth. Generally, now, we watch him experimenting with his own personal language.
Comments