Imagine:
Untitled (1954): oils, paper, textile, newspaper, cotton, print, wood, colored glass, electric light.
Odalisk (1958) : oils, ink, carbon, crayons, paper, pencils, textile, photos, newspapers, metal, glass, grass, steel, a pillow, wooden pole, electric light, stuffed rooster.
Monogram (1959): oils, paper, textile, magazines, metal, wood, one heel shoe, a tennis ball, on canvas and stuffed Angora goat with a car tire on wooden platform.
The people (and there were crowds of them) who have visited – and can still visit the George Pompidou Centre in Paris, during the October, 2006 -January 2007 period- were able to do more than imagine. More precisely, they have had the opportunity to witness an exceptional international art event: the COMBINES exhibition of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg[1]
For all the 60’s American vanguard savvy people out there, this name may have an almost religious resonance, as the Paris schooled native Texan was an important figure among the small group of people who have written the ABC of the 6o, 70 s worldwide experimental artistic movements. Do Nam June Paik, the Flux movement, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Robert Wilson ring a bell?
Postmodern times came with a radical change in people’s reception perspectives. With this in mind and ss there are few things that can appall, dismay, surprise the nowadays audiences any more, Rauschenberg’s “combinations” created in the 60s might seem dated, old, dusty and overrated. This might be so, nonetheless, we must not forget the fact that it is this American artist who did it first, and who, through his innovative attitude and ideas, has succeeded in answering back to the abstract expressionist art, the crowned queen of that period. Anyway, the exhibition presented at Pompidou (gathering works dating from 1954 to 1961) is quite special, as it expresses a crucial moment of his art, a turning point in his artistic vision and the outcomes of his experimenting with various elements as ready made objects, (shirts, ropes, shoes, buttons, magazines, photos, reproductions of POP culture), abstract painting and more personal things (hair, nails, teeth, journal pages), in other words: the discovery of a new artistic language.
There is no reason why we can not consider the world as huge painting…his words, written on the walls of the exhibition, seem to give not only a more direct insight on how his mind functioned, but also make you think that, probably, this is what his art is all about. What the postmodern art is all about: art and worlds, fiction and realities, life and artistic representations, that collide and mingle till they lose their identities. Life becomes art and art becomes life. It’s a cliché, but one who has made history.
So has Rauschenberg, who is a pioneer of the postmodern era of installation art.
So has the last creation exhibited at Pompidou, Monogram, most famous because of the radicalism of his decision to use a stuffed animal within the structure and of the relation created between the title and the creation itself. Monogram: car tire and goat, interlaced as two letters on a handkerchief (in this case, a painted canvas, covered in urban debris, laid down on the floor).
Both performative and poetical, Rauschenberg work refuses, as any great art, any kind of definitions or categorizations; yet, it clearly expresses his wish to always astonish, to always question everything, his intention to change the state of mind of the audiences, to offer a new a new perspective on the world, on how to represent the world, to feel, to look outwards and inwards.
[1] Born in
Leave Your Comments