Rauschenberg’s Repartee
Facetious Facets of the Retrospective in Houston.
(Page 2 of 5)
Gallery of the subconscious
I suggest you start here, upstairs at the MFAH, at The 1/4 mile or 2 Furlong Piece, because it serves as an incredible timeline of Rauschenberg’s work, and you can preview an overview of his progression as an artist before you take a deeper look at the separate stages of his career. The 1/4 mile or 2 Furlong Piece is as yet unfinished (when done it just may extend beyond the 1,320 feet that its title implies), but it occupies an impressive space already, weaving mazelike down one wall and up another, leaving street signs, traffic lights and stacks and stacks of library books in its colorful wake.
The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece
© Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Rauschenberg began the piece in 1981, and continues to work on it between other projects. Furlong has a calculated autobiographical nature: Rauschenberg has been making art since the late 40s, and has recounted his own history here by going back in style and subject farther than the year of the work’s inception. How is it funny? It’s as silly as a red trough filled with what looks like milk, a jug floating atop the white liquid; the physical humor of a fat ass plopped down and spread across a bench, and as awkward as the rudimentary human forms we trace of ourselves in kindergarten class. A friend described the work as a gallery of the subconscious, a playing out of the noise in your head you never listen to. It forces us to examine the things we cast aside. Rauschenberg offers a soundtrack to this chaos, suggesting we should be open minded to the combination of many elements in his art, voices and songs coming from everywhere and yet apparently without source. There are no titles or explanations provided, allowing Furlong to speak to each of us individually.
Andy Warhol was inspired by Rauschenberg, and in Rauschenberg’s use of cardboard boxes, coke bottles, newspaper clippings, patterned fabric, and lithograph collages of celebrities and politicians of the times, it is easy to see how. But Rauchenberg merely lets these things interact with each other without elevating them to star status. Library books do just what they’re supposed to, lay around in stacks until someone picks them up for a read. But maybe they’re laying around because they’ve been intentionally unreturned to the library whose name is stamped on the edge of every single one. There’s a sense of the mischievous implied here, a vision of books that with Rauschenberg’s help, have escaped their dusty shelves in a stuffy little library to participate in a grand visual showcase of culture. And they’re chuckling at how their ordinary bindings and dated titles are forming towers that people are craning to view, their pages full of words suddenly less important than the smooth lines and regal height created by their assemblage. The only thing that may be onto them is the silkscreened image of a rooster juxtaposed throughout the piece. I doubt either will ever go back to their ordinary selves.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet Street, Houston. 713-639-7300
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Tuesday, Wednesday: 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Thursday: 10:00 a.m.-9:00 p.m.
Friday, Saturday: 10:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
Sunday: 12:15 p.m.-7:00 p.m.
Closed Monday, except Monday holidays
Closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day
On to The Menil Collection
My Library
