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It’s hard to think of much art being made today that hasn’t been touched in some way by Robert Rauschenberg’s protean work of the 1950s and ’60s: the heady decades when he restlessly experimented with just about every artistic genre and medium—and invented several new ones in the process. His copious output proved hugely influential, not only for the development of Pop Art but also performance, Conceptual Art and interactivity. His achievements, however, did not occur in a vacuum but were fomented with friends and colleagues, as this engrossing but imbalanced retrospective takes great pains to point out. The show sprinkles works by Rauschenberg’s spouse (Susan Weil), lovers (Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns) and fellow travelers (John Cage, Andy Warhol) among his own; it also includes a number of videos documenting his performances and collaborations with dancers and choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. (A large projection of Brown’s 1983 Set and Reset, with Rauschenberg’s theatrical design and Laurie Anderson’s music, is particularly captivating.)
Rauschenberg (1925–2008) famously wanted to bridge the gap between art and life. Early in his career, this meant deflating the Mandarin aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism by adding bits of the real world to painting, which is to say, by entirely conventional collage. But by the time he made his most iconic “Combines”—shambolic hybrid painting-sculptures assembled from whatever was at hand—art and life seemed to dance a two-step in his work. In the iconic Monogram (1955–59), the world in the form of a stuffed long-haired goat with a tire around its middle literally stands atop art, on a platform covered in various found items and broadly brushed swaths of paint. (The enormous Plexiglas box added by the museum to protect Monogram even makes the piece seem like a forerunner of Damien Hirst.)
In 1962, Warhol taught Rauschenberg his new method of silk-screening on canvas, and Rauschenberg embarked on a suite of paintings with jumbled pictures and brushstrokes that feel far more diaristic or oneiric than Warhol’s more mediacentric repeating images. Parsing specific meanings from these signature works, which brought Rauschenberg international fame and fill an entire large room here, seems next to impossible. But photographs of John R. Kennedy, Robert E. Lee, astronauts, military helicopters, the Statue of Liberty and a bald eagle, coupled with art-historical and more personal imagery, evinces the artist’s keen focus on the social and political events beginning to roil the U.S.
After the wonderful one-off Mud Muse (1968–71), a vat of bubbling gray ooze, there is a penultimate gallery of the artist’s “Jammers” from the mid-1970s—amiable but vapid works sewn from colorful unstretched silk—that evokes recreational boating off Captiva Island, Florida, where the artist moved to from New York in 1971. But it also feels like the wind going out of his sails. The exhibition compresses the last four decades of Rauschenberg’s production into two rooms. Considering the overblown and mostly unmemorable work on view, it’s an understandable move on MoMA’s part, but it is also disappointing denouement for one of the artistic giants of our time.
