Rauschenberg’s Repartee
Facetious Facets of the Retrospective in Houston.
(Page 5 of 5)
Acrostic many mediums
A group of elementary school children stand with a museum guide in front of an almost life size representation of Napoleon, perched atop a rearing stallion. “How does this picture make you feel?” she asks them. I haven’t made it that way yet so I don’t have an answer; I’ve been mesmerized by the process of these large-scale lithographs that make up the most recent works in the Rauschenberg retrospective. Leaning in closer, I’m trying to get a side view so I can pinpoint the exact place where the ink touches the medium. Vegetable dye transfer on paper? Frescoes? Negative and positive images in tarnish on brass, bronze and copper? How the heck does he do it? Later I learn Rauschenberg makes digital color prints of his photographs that can be transferred to paper or plaster and still retain their high-resolution contrast.
Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba II (Japanese Recreational Clayworks), 1985
© Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Back at the work titled Able was I ere I Saw Elba II (Japanese Recreational Clayworks) one kid finally speaks up. “Scared,” he says. “Me too,” says another. “It’s a war going on,” says a third. A girl in the back finally makes her voice heard above the din. “I think his face is funny.” I decide to check it out for myself.
An artistic paradigm, I’m not sure if this image has been stolen from a famous painting or if maybe I’m just supposed to think it is, but what at first appears to be some pop art throwback to neoclassicism, on closer look becomes a parody, a really clever lampoon on imperialism - in history and in art. (Is it merely coincidence that the transfer was done on high-fired Japanese art ceramic?) In the spirit of the title given to some of the works in this series—Anagram—there are words at the bottom right of the rectangle. One, though half of it is running off the side, can’t be anything other than part of “Bonaparte,” and the other quite clearly says “cannibal.” And there’s a duplicate, ghostly image of Napoleon’s regal head beneath the tri-corn turned sideways, placed squarely on the horse’s ass. This must be the punch line.
It’s fascinating to me that so much of Rauschenberg’s humor is expressed through wordplay, especially in light of his much-publicized dyslexia. Maybe words were quaint to him, curves of gobbledygook that could mean everything or nothing, encouraging him to communicate visually instead. The images are complementary, yet seem secondary in some of these works to a calculated verbal idea. The most obvious witticisms, the Anagram series, are collages of many juxtaposed images brought to the same level in a theme most easily expressed by a word. In Chairman for example, a Mexican man sits on a stoop in one corner, an empty chair graces the middle of the paper. He’s holding court on the stoop, the king of all that is ordinary. And they don’t stop there: images of Mexico City grace Chain Reaction, a larger-than-life skeleton takes center stage in Mirthday Man (apparently happy he doesn’t have to go through another birthday), and Metropolitan Escape features an image of the Jones Diner on Lafayette in NYC—some escape.
Mirthday Man, 1985
© Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Yet the subjects of these later works appeal to me just as much as their meaning. They’re images I’ve seen in real life, thought about, dissected on my own, and here they are gathered in an inside joke that I’m privy to (you can view them all over the exhibit because Rauschenberg is a master recycler, using them to a different end over and over again). And it suddenly begins to make sense why Rauschenberg chose to use mirrored aluminum for some of these pieces, it seems natural for this man-wrought metal to hold visions of architecture and history, but it is an odd backdrop for nature, cacti and bamboo are torn from their roots and forced to exist in paint, in shine. I can see my face among the stalks. And I’m still laughing about that.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
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Related article: Return of the Native Catching up with Robert Rauschenberg.
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