Art

Molting Goats and Bed Quilts

by Evelyn Atkinson

Tuesday March 7, 2006

When Robert Rauschenberg’s works first premiered at New York City’s Betty Parson Gallery in 1951, those in attendance were so shocked that uproar ensued, demonstrators blocked the entrance to the exhibit, and police were called to keep order.

Or so remembers my grandmother, an art student at the time, though none of these statements can be corroborated by any information I can find. However, after experiencing the Rauschenberg exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, such an incensed reaction is not unimaginable.

In fact, given the troubled visage of many patrons as they exited the exhibit, and considering that we live in an age of Modern Art where we’ve seen it all and nothing can shock, Rauschenberg’s seemingly still-intact ability to discomfit is quite remarkable.

Rauschenberg enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948, and proceeded to study art by doing "exactly the reverse" of what his method-heavy teacher taught him.

Breaking down the traditional barriers between painting and sculpture and exulting in the use of found objects, Rauschenberg created what he called "Combines"–three-dimensional, combination painting/sculpture/found-object pieces. He said he wished to "act in that gap" between art and life, and as such incorporated real-life elements into his constructions, such as a quilt stolen from a laundromat. In the shocking, revolutionary quality of his work, Rauschenberg provided an alternative to Abstract Expressionism, prompting one artist of the former school to say, "If this is Modern Art, then I quit!"

Part of the reason why Rauschenberg is so startling can be found in his use of color. At times, such as in "Collection" (1954) or "Untitled (with stained glass window)" (1954), his tissue-paper pinks, deep crimsons, and thick blues and yellows, coupled with the rough texture of the wood, make the combines warm and strangely comforting. At other times, the messy swaths of black or grey paint, dribbled over with red, are frightening and disconcerting.

Of course, the material he uses also plays an emphatic role–such as in the piece "Canyon" (1959), where a stuffed bald eagle bursts out of the canvas straight at the viewer. In fact, during the period of combines exhibited (1954-1964), Rauschenberg seems to have entertained an uncanny taste for incorporating taxidermied animals into his work. Birds and pieces of birds–wings slathered with paint and strapped oddways to wood or canvas–compose most of his menagerie, but by far the most startling creature of the collection is a stuffed angora goat ("Monogram" [1959]). Wearing a tire wedged round his middle, the goat’s face is glopped with paint, as if the animal had gotten loose at night and gobbled up some paintings. (Perhaps he feasted on one of the birds.)

At any rate, these molting carcasses of dead animals, slathered with often brutal colors and ensconced in the confused, manipulated space of the Combines, are eerily disconcerting. Not to mention strangely malodorous (they are, after all, nearly fifty years old). A distinct and unpleasantly pungent scent pervades the exhibit, which perhaps exacerbates the discomfiture of the patrons already brought about by the works themselves.

Rauschenberg’s collection of found objects stretch beyond this zoological garden to include alarm clocks, ladders, broken chairs, newspaper clippings, mirrors and a zipper. The seemingly slapdash and erratic combination of objects (though some critics have intimated a methodical, hidden meaning to his work) evokes the disorder of a post-apocalyptic world, or at least the seedier areas of New York City. At the time a starving artist himself living illegally in a warehouse, Rauschenberg collected many of his found objects from the dust bins and trash heaps of downtrodden New York sidewalks.

As structures, the Combines have the feel of battered, slipshod chunks of ramshackle houses. This is a world that clearly exists – all the items used are, after all, recognizable daily household items (except maybe the bald eagle) – and yet, it is not an elegant, comfortable, or delicate world by any means. Its familiarity is perhaps what makes these works so jarring; his early audience in the fifties may have wondered how the harshness of objects one encounters daily could be art.

Rauschenberg was one of the first modern artists to find inspiration in his own back yard–or, more aptly, his trash heap–and it may be this strangely aesthetic utilization of a straggling, unaesthetic home life that even today continues to make his work so uncannily unnerving.

"Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" runs until April 2, 2006, in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.