The Arcadian as Utopian

By ROBERT HUGHES

Rauschenberg's rhapsodic energies fill four Manhattan shows

At 57, Robert Rauschenberg is back; but then, the rumors that he had gone away were greatly exaggerated. It is almost 30 years since his "combine" paintings--rebus-like assemblies of every imaginable waste object, from beach tar to stuffed chickens, from electric fans to auto tires, slathered in abstract expressionist paint drips--burst upon the American art world. Nearly two decades, a lifetime for some artists, have elapsed since his first prize at the Venice Biennale (back when the Biennale mattered) heralded the "imperial" entry of American art into Europe. The unwanted reward of a career like Rauschenberg's is premature old-masterhood, followed by a cooling in the audience. This happened in the late '70s, when a lull was felt in his work.

But for an artist of Rauschenberg's large and rhapsodic energies, no pause lasts very long. There are now, by the latest count, four Rauschenberg shows running in Manhattan. Sculpture, combines and a 100-ft.-long photomontage based on a recent trip to China are being shown in three spaces run by Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend downtown in SoHo; uptown, at the Museum of Modern Art, a set of collages from the China journey is on display. They are all pendants to a larger project, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), whereby he intends to travel and exhibit a changing nucleus of works in some 20 countries, while working on new projects with local artists and craftsmen. The initial incarnation of the ROCI show is planned as a 150-piece retrospective that will include some of the 491 collages he made at the world's oldest paper mill, still operating in Anhui province.

It is clear from the New York shows that out of this pharaonic enterprise, Rauschenberg has been producing some of the best work of his career. Some of it involves materials quite new in his oeuvre, most notably clay. The star piece in the show at Castelli is Dirt Shrine: South, 1982, a pseudo combine in which all the disparate elements (tire track, painted chain, stone, bamboo ladder) were made from fired ceramic in Japan. The characteristic montage of Rauschenbergian imagery--a sumo wrestler holding a tiny alligator, schools of fish, a dump truck, and other elliptical images of ancient and modern Japan, mostly derived from photographs--is fired into the glaze. The result, a hybrid of traditional and new technologies, looks both archaic and slick.

He has also produced, in the spirit of old-master quotation that ran through his silk-screened work in the early 1960s, a suite of variations on well-known paintings: Botticelli's Venus, that hardy standby of the Pop sensibility the Mona Lisa, and Gustave Courbet's rosy, meaty image of two lesbians--one of them Whistler's mistress--sprawled in amorous sleep. At times, as in All Abordello Doze 3, 1982, the degree of interference by overprinting, cutting and juxtaposition almost buries the motif in a landslide of variations, and yet Rauschenberg's close, laconic grasp of form saves the effect from chaos. The montage of alien images, clamoring for attention, cancels the peculiar voyeuristic steaminess of Courbet's original.

The insouciant constructions at Sonnabend are mainly plywood structures of boxy shape, printed with a gauzy farrago of images that have been veiled in overpainting or muslin and endowed with a delectable shimmer of wellbeing. These works demonstrate that Rauschenberg is at heart an arcadian, obsessed with emblems of uncorrupted nature and their parallels in culture.

When some darker or more aggressive image is thrust into this sunny matrix, it gains the force of contrast. Occasionally, Rauschenberg has to invoke the violence he fears. In the Sonnabend show, it is done with a piece entitled The Lurid Attack of the Monsters from the Postal News Aug. 1875, 1982. It consists of a long narrow box, printed and overlaid with the usual strings of gauzy metaphors. Along its top are four rusty arches that turn out to be old crosscut-saw blades, bowed upward, thrusting their iron teeth at you; they look as though they might whang loose at any moment and do real damage to incautious onlookers. The whole affair is mounted, like some weird military machine, on a little pair of wheels; these are the point of balance, and only an ounce or two of pressure is needed to make the thing tilt; it is as carefully balanced as a model glider. Absurdity, threat, delicacy and extreme tension are packed into the image in a way that is Rauschenberg's and Rauschenberg's alone.

It goes without saying that Rauschenberg's work is full of messages to the art world; it always has been. Its present phase does not come across as a challenge to "established taste," for the simple reason that in current art no such thing exists. In any case, Rauschenberg's subtle, outward-facing temperament rejected the expressionist posture a long time ago. Nowhere in these shows does one get a whiff of the exacerbated self. Instead, his work presents, over and over again, the poetic rigor that comes from collaboration. Rauschenberg has always liked to work with other people, shifting the artist's monologue into a conversation. The works he did with the Chinese papermakers and the Japanese ceramicists display a further development of this: a labile, cunning relationship with older crafts, a kind of flexibility that enables him to alternate between mastery and studenthood.

Rauschenberg's acts of appropriation have an innocent cast, being gestures of homage. Look, the work declares in a most unchildlike way, in the world we have this, and this, and this; now let art try putting this next to that, and see what changes. This bricolage is a game with a serious subject: freedom. What it changes, if anything, will not be the world itself, and anyone who supposes that Rauschenberg's ROCI project will cause nations to shelve their mutual distrust will be left, to put it mildly, waiting. But art is a form of fiction--projected, in Rauschenberg's case, upon history--and utopian fancy is one of its modes. In the ROCI project one may eventually see the flowering of Rauschenberg's mature identity: the arcadian as utopian, spinning a poetry of affirmation out of an opaque and hideously conflicted time.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.