There is some disagreement
among Robert Rauschenberg aficionados as to when exactly the great Combine
episode began. Was it with the “Red Paintings” exhibited at the Egan Gallery in
I shall call the first
strategy, for lack of a better formulation, a suspension of viewpoint, meaning that the beholder is never
assigned a proper distance from which to look at a Combine. In his catalogue
essay on Minutiae, Charles Stuckey
recalls his exhilaration on examining the work up close during the 1976
National Collection of Fine Arts in Rauschenberg retrospective at the
He was elated to find among
them “an episode of O. Soglow’s The Little King from some newspaper’s funny
pages showing his majesty attending an exhibition of modern sculpture.” “Bingo!”
writes Stuckey, who proceeds to read the inclusion of this comic as a
self-referential allusion to the work itself. There’s nothing wrong with this
interpretation, provided one remembers that the newspaper detail would have
been available neither to the spectators of Cunningham’s performance (unless
they climbed onto the stage at some point) nor to the performers themselves
(try to decipher the text of a cartoon while doing somersaults!).
So, already in Minutiae’s first public appearance, the
Combines’ signature suspended viewpoint” was emphasized by the physical
distance between the work and the audience (a distance evoked somewhat at the
Met by the low security barriers preventing visitors from following in Stuckey’s
tracks). Indeed, in almost all of the Combines through the late ‘50s, including
even the smallest examples, massive discrepancies of internal scale prevent the
beholder from resting assured in a given viewpoint and thus preclude any
synthetic reading of the individual works, except of the most generalized
nature. Not only is this approach constant, but Rauschenberg pokes fun at those
of us naive-or confident-enough to think we’ll defeat the system by “reading”
his works up close: About a third of the way down the central panel of Wager, 1967-59, a barely decipherable
inscription in a childish hand reads IMPOSSIBILITY/CONTROL, and below that, To
RECALL/THE/ IMAGE/PRECISE. You bet.
The second strategy
dramatized in Minutiae might be
called the “hide-and-seek booby trap.” Rauschenberg is not the first to master
this game; in fact, he learned from its most brilliant and lethal
twentieth-century practitioner, Marcel Duchamp, whose work has plunged
generations of art historians into paranoiac deliriums of overinterpretation.
This tactic functions on two levels, the first of which could be dubbed “thematic,”
as in The Little King’s allusion to sculpture in Minutiae. The second, more literal level might be called “material,”
as in the case of Cunningham’s dancers disappearing into the work by passing
behind the screen or by virtue of their being camouflaged in costumes matching Minutiae’s palette. To this example we
might add the piece of translucent fabric suspended over what looks like a
circular hole in the middle panel of Collection,
1954, which lefts like a skirt at the slightest breeze. In both these works (as
well as in Pink Door, 1954, Interview,
1955, and abort Circuit, 1955, which
all open like cupboards, or even In Untitled,
ca. 1954 [nicknamed “Plymouth Rock”], in which a hidden surface is revealed by
a mirror), the material peek-a-boo goes hand in hand with the thematic one. But
In all the subsequent Combines until 1959, the two levels are usually at odds.
More often than not, the collagen surface of the work suggests a complex
geology; it tells us that there is something behind but denies our access to
it. Frustrated at not being able to dig for the “woman underneath” (to borrow
Balzac’s famous ending of The Unknown
Masterpiece), many of Rauschenberg’s
commentators can’t resist biting at the referential bait he has generously
distributed across his surfaces in, I presume, these semantic traps as tongue
in cheek a manner as did Duchamp. Setting might be considered cruel of him, but
it could also be deemed charitable, keeping art historians busy for generations
to come. As Leo Steinberg wrote in his recent revisitation of his
groundbreaking 1972 essay (based on a 1968 lecture): “We shall have
dissertations galore, including perusals of the fine print In the newspaper
scraps that abound in Rauschenberg’s picturesque.
The referential frenzy
elicited by Rauschenberg’s tease can be purely iconographic, and then It is
pathetic. (Schimmel’s catalogue text is nothing but a long litany of decoded “references,”
that word or one of its variants appearing in nearly every paragraph.) But the
decoding can also become more properly iconological, to Invoke Erwin Panofsky’s
distinction between the lithographer who is content to Identify the referent
and the iconologist who attempts to Interpret it. To the latter camp, we might
assign Stuckey’s famous 1976 decryption of Rebus,
1955, and Thomas Crow’s beautiful allegorical Interpretation of the Combines in
the present catalogue. I behave, however, that even in its elegant
(iconological) form, this search for the “hidden meaning” is misguided—not
because it is wrong (there can be no “wrong” interpretation of Rauschenberg, as
John Cage noted), but because It is too limited. Or rather too limiting:
Profoundly antithetical to Rauschenberg’s Cagean leveling of hierarchies, this
approach edits out the noise and selects, among many possible elements, those
that can be synthesized into a narrative through a chain of association.
That the primary response
to the Combines’ lack of center, to Rauschenberg’s paratactic collection of
detritus, should aim to recompose a synthesis is not but it that whatever
surprising. It is an anxious response, certainly, signals Impetus lies behind
the artist’s avowed motto of bridging the gap between art and life still has
some sabotaging power. What is curious, however, is that although the
iconological mining of Rauschenberg’s work vastly dominates the literature,
some participants in this canonizing enterprise believe themselves to be In the
minority. (I say “canonizing” because this iconological method surreptitiously
transforms Rauschenberg’s Combines into old-master pictures.)
Crow, for example,
criticizes Cage and Steinberg for refusing to singularity specific iconographic
elements in their pioneering analyses of the Combines--a refusal indispensable
both to Cage’s conception of the Combine as an assembly of Indifferent
differences and to Steinberg’s famous concept of the “flatbed picture plane”--and
he laments that Rauschenberg’s choice of Individual elements is “ruled out of
serious consideration in most quarters,” a somewhat disingenuous claim given the decoding frenzy I’ve already
mentioned. One thing is true, however: Despite the many texts of the iconographic/iconological
bent exploring a gay subvert In Rauschenberg’s work (by Jonathan D. Katz,
Kenneth Silver, and many others), the exhibition and catalogue are nearly mum
on the topic, save for a few passing references in Schimmel’s essay and a wall
text summarizing Kenneth Bendiner’s reading of Canyon, 1959, as an elaboration on the myth of Zeus’s abduction of
the beautiful boy Ganymede. My favorite example of this sheepishness concerns “Plymouth
Rock” which is dissected ad nauseam by two of the catalogue’s authors. We learn
about many of its affixed elements, right down to a newspaper clipping about a
beauty pageant won by Rauschenberg’s sister that is visible reversed in a
mirror only after considerable gymnastics on the part of the viewer. But there’s
nary a peep about the faded photo of a youthful Jasper Johns staring the viewer
In the face at eye level. There, the sexuality- inclined iconologists have a
point: Playing the hide-and-seek game might still have some social function
today-at least with regard to a topic like homosexuality in the
Yet the question to ask is this: What does
the identification of a face-even one that alludes, for those in the know, to
the private life of two extremely secretive artists-fundamentally add to our
understanding of the work? Given the dozens of conglomerated atoms in Plymouth
Rock,” including photos of various scales (among them several family
snapshots), reproductions of works of art, a Cy Twombly scrabble, a stuffed
hen, a mirror, and a pair of shoes, what could the pinpointing of individual
elements achieve, especially as they might branch into different stories in the
minds of the iconographer-sleuths? Would we finally have found Waldo?
Crow criticizes Cage for
having written that “there is no more subject in a combine than there is in a page from a newspaper. Each thing that
is there is a subject . . . any one of them could be removed and another come
into its place through circumstances analogous to birth and death, travel,
housecleaning, or cluttering.” Cage may have been a bit coy but I believe he
was right: The logical correlate of combination,
at least in the structuralist formation, is permutation—that is, in
order to find out if a combination works, you permute one of its terms. Roland
Barthes was fascinated by the Argo, “each piece of which,” according to him
(though he apparently got the story wrong), “the Argonauts gradually replaced,
so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either
its name or its form.” Rauschenberg, I think, is akin to one of Barthes’s
Argonauts. As Branden W. Joseph elaborates in the catalogue, the artist even
made the strategy of permanent permutation lateral in Black Market, 1961, perhaps
the most successful late Combine. Not only is transience underlined by the
reflective surfaces of the four metallic clipboards attached to the canvas, but
the objects contained in the wooden suitcase that lies at its base are meant to
be replaced at will by viewers, on the condition that they draw the new items
on the writing pads below the metallic flaps.
One of the results of
permanent permutation is an entropic equalization of all things, which was
precisely Cage’s point. And the reason Rauschenberg’s Combines provoked such
scorn at first, while Abstract Expressionism stall reigned supreme, was that he
applied this leveling strategy to the act of painting itself. He probably would
have had an easier time if he had Just stated in his art that painting was “dead”—a
ritual in twentieth-century art that had already been enacted by Duchamp in
1913, Malevich in 1918, Rodchenko in 1921, etc., etc. No, what he declared
instead, as early as the “Red Painting” I
mentioned at the outset (which is why it could have made just as good an
introduction to the show as Minutiae),
is that there is no fundamental difference between a collage element and a
painted one. In his work, any atom—whether industrially, mechanically, or
manually produced—is, as it were, in quotation marks.
This is particularly
striking in what could be called the Rose Period of Rauschenberg’s Combines. In
works from this time, the painted marks always look as if they were
stereotypical emblems of the activity of painting, Darks whose arbitrariness
(not to say fraudulence) is nowhere more highlighted than in the random choice
of their color. (The dominance of pink stems from its ubiquity in the unlabeled
industrial paint cans for which the young artist was able to wrangle a special
price: Had the color been a favorite in 1954 home decoration rather than being
overproduced and then discounted by retailers, Rauschenberg’s early Combines
might have had another dominant hue.) As he said to Schimmel in a statement
that could have been cosigned by his teacher, Josef Albers, though with an
entirely different meaning-there is no such thing as a bad color. Very often,
this quotation marks” quality-something Gerhard Richter would master much later
with his squeegee-is not produced by a brushstroke (too delicate? too skillful?
too much associated with the traditional craft of the old masters, even, save
Jackson Pollock, the modernist ones?). Instead, these passages are often
produced with a can of spray paint and drip down abundantly or are spurted
straight out of the tube in excremental rainbow configurations.
There is another reason why
I think the 1954 Untitled “Red Painting” would have been a good beginning for
the show, something touched on by Rosalind E. Krauss in her extraordinary 1974
essay, “Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image.” Building on Steinberg’s
earlier text, Krauss noticed that the surface of Rauschenberg’s “flatbed” is
not necessarily very flat but has a thickness in which objects are embedded.
This thickness, she asserted, came directly from the corpus of Duchamp’s
paintings displayed off the wall, such as To
Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass), 1918, or The Large Glass, 1915-23, in which
depicted images are sandwiched between two transparent panes and thus appear as
corporeal things. Krauss’s most telling example of Rauschenberg’s use of the
support as a material in which corporeal images are embedded is perhaps Red Interior, 1954, which contains a
portion of velvet on which letters are embossed (the fabric having been ironed
over metallic signs). But she dates this embedded mode to the earlier “Black
Paintings” and to the series of “Red Paintings” (one of the last of which is
our 1954 Untitled), in which “a collage surface of various types of paper,
including strips of newspaper, was impregnated with pigment.” In such works,
she argues, “the tonal and chromatic differences in the color across these
surfaces became then a function of the material to which it was applied, or by
which it was absorbed. So that the impression of color within what was a
conventional picture field was seen to be a function of the color of things. This
attitude toward color prepared for the subsequent attitude toward the image.”
However, she concludes, <<It was, itself, something that Rauschenberg did
not pursue further.”
With this last statement I
beg to differ. If Rauschenberg did not further explore this embeddedness at the
level of color, it nonetheless governs his attitude, until 1959, toward the “support
of inscription” (for lack of a better term). What I have in mind is the way in
which the support is part of the
image, which is to say that it is no longer a support. Or it is to say that the
support, made up of a conglomeration of superimposed or juxtaposed shards, is
just as fragmented as the “picture” it bears.
And this, of course, means that the support does not really bear the picture
any longer, because its disaggregation—its lack of coherence as an entity-makes
it impossible to really bear anything
at all.
Consider Levee, 1955 for example. The caption in
the catalogue says that it is made of “oil, paper, printed paper, printed
reproductions, fabric, and necktie on canvas.” Simple enough, but which is the
canvas “on” which every- thing is grammatically affixed? Between a reproduction of a Cranach portrait and an Image of a lake
behind tree thanks, there is a dirty blank rectangle that seems to be carved
into the work as if sometime had been peeled away to reveal at its periphery a
whole mattress of superimposed fabrics. It is hard enough trying to figure out
what lies on what when looking at the crest of this stack of fabric, but this
gap within the overall tissue prompts one to ask: Where does it stop? Is it, as
Dr. Seuss would say, turtles all the way down?1
Or look at Untitled, ca. 1955, with its flattened
toy parachute and pendulous catenary strings. There seems at first to be a
homogenous support on which very few objects or images are glued (the
parachute, a dirty sock, a photo of a pair of birds, several small rectangles
of monochrome fabric, and, at the top, a postcard of grazing cows): Peace at
last! But repose is evasive. Several embroidered gaps within the fabric of the “support”
(a long horizontal line along the top and a smaller vertical one at left), as
well as thin margins on the left border, an empty rectangle at the bottom left
corner, and a small square “hole” just above it, reveal the “real” ground to be
a black canvas almost entirely covered by the collage elements.2 This foray into the recesses of the
material support is also matched in the reverse direction: We soon realize that
another portion of the fabric with the embroidered gaps (identified as a
tablecloth by the accompanying wall label) is pasted next to the dirty sock,
and, furthermore, the staccato pattern of the gaps has been mimicked in a line
of light blue paint traversing the picture from edge to edge. The piling up
stops there, but It could go on. For a
good whale, all of Rauschenberg’s “supports” were patchworks—or rather
palimpsests—of excruciating complexity and varying assembly (sawing being
almost as common as pasting), a practice that extended to his habit of
partially obscuring his collagen photographs behind veils of translucent fabric
or wash. Again and again, the peekaboo trap is laid, leaving us always to
wonder what lies beneath.
Rauschenberg’s layering of
the material “support” is ubiquitous until 1959. (There are a few exceptions,
of course, notably Factum I and Factum II, both of 1957, but there the
doubled of the canvases and the elements within them displaces the problem of
the ground.) I say “ubiquitous,” but I might also have said essential, for, above all, the physical
superimpositions are the key to the Combines’ success—they are what lend the
works their dynamism and mystery. Why? Because in performing materially for us
the children’s game of topping hands, which fascinated Barthes, this layering
forces our reading to participate in the play.
Speaking about the act of reading a text,
Barthes envisioned two systems. The first “goes straight to the articulations
of the anecdote, It considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of
language” (this type of reading, for him, is prompted by Jules Verne). Barthes
continued:
The other reading skips
nothing; it weighs, It sticks to the text, it reads, so to speak, with
application and transport, grasps at every point In the text the asyndeton
which cuts the various languages-and not the anecdote: It is not (logical)
extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths, but the layering of
significance; as in the children’s game of topping hands, the excitement comes
not from a progressive haste but from a kind of vertical din (the verticality
of language and of its destruction); it is at the moment when each (different)
hand skips over the next (and not after
the other) that the hole, the gap, is created and carries off the subject of
the game—the subject of the text.1
This mode of reading, concludes Barthes, “is the one suited
to the modern text, the limit-text,” that
is, the non-narrative text. The myopic grazing that Rauschenberg’s Combines
invite is of the same order.
I cannot date precisely
when Rauschenberg’s Combines abandoned the game of topping hands, but my guess
is that the act of painting onstage in October 1959, during the performance of
Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,
constituted a major turn away from the slow process of accumulation that had
presided over his art during the preceding years. And in First Time Painting, also executed onstage in 1961, I find a
confirmation that speed was of the essence in the new mode. Two major features
characterize this approach: The support is now unified, a perfectly smooth
blank canvas (even if, as in the “Summer Rental” series of 1960, a horizontal
black line alludes, trompe l’oeil style, to a seam), and the paint, applied in
broad brush-strokes of often garish colors--a la third-generation AbEx-is no
longer in quotation marks. The two features are not only coeval but intricately
linked. Once the support is nothing more than a neutral surface of projection
and the moving brush nothing more than the prolongation of one’s arm, no
heterogeneous, imported element can have enough weight to materially
destabilize the unity of the picture plane. This is why I find all the objects
grafted on the late Combines, no matter how protruding, strangely inactive, and
perhaps all the more so if they themselves are destined to move like the
electric fans of Pantomime, 1961, or
the clocks of the “Time Paintings” from that year. By returning to its
traditional role of neutral receptacle, by redeeming the homogeneity that had
been so effectively undermined, the ground sutures all gaps and, to my mind at
least, depletes the late Combines of any energy, despite the fact that their
painterly gestures are done with ever more bravado. Once again, there are
exceptions among the post-1959 Combines: I’ve already mentioned Black Market, and I should point to First Landing Jump, also of 1961, in
which the black cloth that occupies the upper portion of the work is sewed to
the dirty tan fabric below. (It is perhaps not by chance that in these two
examples the brushstrokes are far less conspicuous and in subdued colors.) But
in general, the embeddedness of the ground is lost from 1959, a direction that
the exhibition underlines by ending with Gold
Standard, 1964, a freestanding folding screen whose mechanically
articulated surface is as impenetrable a citadel as the Federal Reserve to
which its smooth and shiny gold leaf (and title) seems to allude.
This was a dead end and
Rauschenberg knew it. In fad, two years before, he had already made his next
move in the first of the “Silkscreen Paintings,” a series that was coincident
with the late, AbEx-like Combines and the origins of which can be found in the
series of transfer drawings after Dante, dating from 1959 to 1960. For although
the ground in the silk-screen works of the early ’60s would never relinquish
the coherent identity it had regained after years of sabotage, neither wool it
function conspicuously as a mere receptacle. Rather, the transparency of the
images and their superimposition would make the canvas into something more like
photographic paper—the white of the support seeping into the highlights in the
imagery—or, better, something like the two plates of transparent glass between
which Duchamp sandwiched his rebuses. Back to square one, in a sense. But that
is another story.
A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF
ARTFORUM, YVE-ALAIN BOIS IS PROFESSOR
OF ART HISTORY AT THE
INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY,
NEW
1 Turtles!
1 I wonder if these must be mutually (or even very) exclusive methods of reading a text, film, artwork. Any time a mood (or memory) is created, it seems we have already left behind the mere cause-and-effect of linear narrative. And likewise, even the most linear of narrative can work to establish mood (and memory). So…