Three Dares by Robert Rauschenberg
Abstract Expressionism, by the early 1950s, had become a dominant voice and influence over the art-world. The movement solidified the shifting epicenter of the art world from Paris, whose grip had been loosened by the travesties of war and the loss of many of its artists seeking refuge in safer countries, to America. In America, Abstract Expressionism “had become the universal aesthetic language” (Foster, Kraus and Bois 368). Despite the command that the movement had over much of contemporary art, there were artists resisting it. One of which was Robert Rauschenberg. Much of the early work Rauschenberg created during the early fifties embodied a “hostile attitude toward Abstract Expressionism and its dominance over advanced art-world thinking” (Foster, Kraus and Bois 368). Pieces such as Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Automobile Tire Print (1953), Factum I (1957) and Factum II (1957) were direct attacks on action painting and the formulaic rut many of those artists had fallen into. Factum I and II most clearly show this by duplicating marks and drips that if found in an Abstract Expressionist painting would be considered gestural, unrepeatable, and “one of a kind.” These marks are duplicated on his twin canvases and manifest, for Rauschenberg, how contrived much of the idealized techniques and mark-making of action painting had become.
Interestingly enough Clement Greenberg, one of the main propagators and, in a way, antagonists of the Abstract Expressionist movement gives a bit of “prophetic” insight into how Rauschenberg ends up dealing with his hostility towards action painting and the post-war American ideals of “painting.” In his essay Toward a Newer Laocoon, Greenberg asserts that “the painter no longer dares to puncture [the transparent picture plane] –or if he does, it is only to dare” (567). The “transparent picture plane” is where three-dimensional space existed on a two-dimensional surface, and by moving away from representational pictorial content many painters were no longer “daring” to inwardly puncture this plane. Instead they were embracing the plane and making art that rested on top of it. Rauschenberg however, with his rebellious attitude toward the ideals and methods of the current aesthetic language was brave enough to rupture the picture plane and puncture it “outwardly.” His defiant bent against Abstract Expressionism resulted in a material dare that completely inverts and distorts the picture plane, resulting in a challenging zone where the second and third-dimensional spaces collide and combine.
Robert Rauschenberg's use of materials in his defiant art progressed over a period of several years. This progression shows how his inversion of the picture plane progressed and, at least chronologically, digressed. In terms of medium, Rauschenberg is hard to pin down, and the main reason for that is because he did not confine himself to one material. He used paint, readymade objects, marks from readymade objects, newspaper clippings, magazine images, bed-sheets, wood, tennis balls, and leather. There was no material that he would not venture to use. The interesting thing to note about Rauschenberg's use of materials, however, is not solely what he used, but the movement of the objects he used further and further outward from the threshold of the picture plane. This notion is fully understood when examining the progression of three pieces completed between 1955-61.
The first piece is titled Rebus (please see below). On this surface Rauschenberg used oil, synthetic polymer paint, pencil, crayon, pastel, paper, and fabric. It's with this plethora of materials we see some of the materials begin to rise up from the surface of the canvas. Pieces of fabric get painted over as a means to adhere them to the canvas, but their inherent materiality gives them a roundness that won't allow them to settle deeply into the perceived picture plane. The canvas is washed all over with a light brown paint that doesn't do a complete job of covering what is beneath. At this point the degree with which Rauschenberg is outwardly puncturing the exterior pictorial space is very small, but it's beginning to happen. Some of the materials, such as the blue moment in the upper left hand corner of the middle segment and the fabric that sits beneath a forcible layer of paint, act as small outward protrusions pushing out from the two-dimensional surface into the third. Rebus shows us the beginnings of Rauschenberg's materials moving outward. The piece that follows will dramatically increase the distance of the protrusion.
Rebus, 1955
When Jackson Pollack painted his very famous drip paintings, he would lay the canvas on the floor to paint, but then hang it on the wall to look at it and then put it back on the ground to paint. This cycle would repeat over and over again, until the painting was finished. Pollock would present his paintings hung on a wall; the perpendicular opposite to how they were created. Rauschenberg's piece Monogram (please see below) takes note of this method of painting on the floor and leaves the canvas on the floor. This act alone of presenting a canvas laying on the floor, without even mentioning the taxidermy goat, flies directly in contradiction to the quote Greenberg said in his aforementioned essay. The picture plane in painting, whether it was punctured or not, had historically and consistently resided on a vertical axis. Even the deeply abstract canvases by Pollock or Rothko had some semblance to a head and foot of the canvas. Rauschenberg's piece throws the canvas on its back, and places the “window” of the pictorial plane on the floor; giving the viewer nothing to look at but the perceived ground. Any notion of the canvas having a top or a bottom is destroyed with this piece, because the act of laying it down dismembers the canvas and turns sideways the conventional directionality. And if the canvas isn't complicated enough, there is also a large goat wrapped in a tire that needs to be dealt with.
Monogram, 1955-59
The goat is emblematic of Rauschenberg inverting the direction of how the transparent picture plane is punctured. Instead of puncturing inward to create an illusionistic visual space, Rauschenberg punctures outward spatially, by adhering a literal sculptural object to the top of his canvas. The tear which he makes is a dramatic one, and creates an actual visual space existing in three-dimensions on top of a two-dimensional surface. The goat and tire cannot be imagined apart from the canvas on which they rest. Similar to the bed-sheets or clocks in his previous work, this goat acts as an element of the “painting” despite being inherently “sculptural.” This collision in both medium and space, results in the canvas almost becoming a glorified pedestal.
It would be incorrect, however, to completely dismiss the canvas as being merely a “pedestal” because it has been given a high degree of attention, and it is only with the goat coming up and out from the canvas that it is elevated from an object of natural science to an object of art. By attaching it to a painting, Rauschenberg takes something that was never intended to be a “sculptural art object” and fashions it into one. The goat and tire, by sitting on top of a painted canvas, are elevated to the uppermost levels of “high-art” like the toilet in Duchamp's Fountain once it was signed “R. Mutt.” The goat and tire are obtruding readymades breaking out from the surface of the picture plane and causing a collision between two different spatial dimensions.
The last piece to examine is a step back in the outward puncturing of the transparent picture plane. With First Landing Jump (please see below) Rauschenberg returns his surface to the gallery wall, but still allows for the dramatic outward puncture of the transparent picture plane. The sense of outwardness continues in this piece, but moves out and then downward, whereas the canvas seems as though it is resting and being supported by the tire, which is also a visual support beam as well. This piece also engages with the wall, by needing to be plugged in. The cord however comes from behind the perceived frontal picture plane, and really pushes this piece from the realm of painting into sculpture. Rauschenberg always intended for this tension as noted by the fact that he called these pieces “combines.” They acted as combinations of painting and sculpture.
First Landing Jump, 1961
Rauschenberg's materials are constantly existing in the “round” and are hard to flatten, so they do well to invert the notion put forth by Greenberg in his essay that the inclusion of objects are not a puncturing of the transparent picture plane. Simply put, Rauschenberg destroys the picture plane, and this is done from a deeply reactionary and rebellious place, rising out of a dissatisfaction with the conventional ways of artist's thinking. Much of his dismay stemmed from something that was supposed to be inherently spontaneous (action painting in particular) turning into a method.
Rauschenberg dared to puncture, and he did so in such a way that it is hard to ignore his flipping of the pre-established pictorial assumptions (that vertical up is the top, vertical down is bottom, etc). His innovation to puncture outward paved the way for artists to not break from the mold of being solely a “painter” or a “sculptor” or a “musician” and opened up the door for the artist to not only work across mediums (which had been done for centuries) but to work simultaneously across mediums within the same piece of work, and in some cases within the same canvas. Rauschenberg's puncturing gave access to installation and multimedia artists, and his effect can be seen in the works of Claes Oldenburg and Jessica Stockholder, to name a few. Robert Rauschenberg can be understood as a man of retaliation, early on his career as an artist. These prolific retaliations against Abstract Expression and authors such as Clement Greenberg proved to rise above petty disputing into the high echelon of effectively critical art that responds and creates something new and challenging.
Works Cited
Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, and Yve-Alain Bois. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Volume 2 1945 to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. New York: Blackwell, 2002. 562-568.
(03.2010)