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Robert Rauschenberg and the American Postwar Political and Social Scene

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 76; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00233600701249134

1651-2294

Kathryn Boyer,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Presented in 1961 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, March–April; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May–September; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, September–October. 2. Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg, Art in Motion – A Combined Memory, 1961, published in English for the first time in this issue. 3. The illicit act suggested by the title of work is open to interpretation. Branden Joseph provides an analysis of the work in his entry in the Combines catalogue, relating how the work connects to other of the artist's works and providing a reading of the various elements of the piece. He suggests that the incorporation of new objects into Black Market functioned as a »means of smuggling unauthorized objects … into the art museum«. »Rauschenberg's Refusal«, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005, pp. 267–275. 4. Even after his Combine phase, Rauschenberg continued to produce innovative solutions, such as Mud Muse (1968–71), which would forge a way for sculpture away from static shapes to elements of constant varied movement and sound in a manner much more organic and variable than even Jean Tinguely had envisioned. 5. Alan R. Solomon, Robert Rauschenberg, exh. cat., Jewish Museum, New York, 1963, p. 3. 6. Solomon, 1963, pp. 1–2. 7. »The basis of Rauschenberg's position lies extraordinarily close to the aesthetic of Picasso, especially in the sense that both are involved in the tension between the illusionism of paint and the impinging presence of fragments of reality«. Solomon, 1963, p. 2. In 1965, for the show of Rauschenberg's work at the Walker Art Center, Dean Swanson repeatedly stressed the lack of social comment in Rauschenberg's art, for example: »He avoids exploiting topical references for the sake of social comment. Even the powerful image of President Kennedy that appears in several of the silk-screen paintings was chosen because it was comparatively uncontroversial«. »Robert Rauschenberg Paintings 1953–1964«, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 3 May-6 June, 1965. 8. Branden Joseph notes that efforts to assign specific iconographies to Rauschenberg's works have generally been in vain: »nearly three decades of such analyses (which at their most reductive condense a work's evident heterogeneity into a single sentence or illustration of a mythic event) have yielded only partial and unsatisfactory results. Indeed, those relatively few of Rauschenberg's pieces that seem to invite such readings are far outweighed by the majority that do not«. Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003, p. 11. 9. See Rauschenberg's interview with Dorothy Seckler, 21 December 1965, made for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/rausch65.htm. Branden Joseph discusses this work in his book, 2003, pp. 172–177. 10. Quoted in Joan Young and Susan Davidson, »Chronology«, in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson (eds), Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1997, p. 559. Reprinted in Joseph, 2003, p. 177. 11. A Time magazine article from 1964 noted: »Juxtaposed in Tracer [1963] are army helicopters, a Rubens nude, a bald eagle, a street scene, all balanced in colorful harmonies and anchored by skeletal perspective boxes. As pure forms in relation, they make amusing pictorial sense … .«, »Most Happy Fella«, Time, 18 September 1964, p. 94. Thomas Crow, in his essay in the Combines catalogue, discusses the historiography behind formal interpretations superceding iconographic ones: »Rise and Fall: Theme and Idea in the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg«, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 2005, pp. 244–245. 12. Solomon, 1963, p. 3. 13. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Seeds of the Sixties, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, p. 2. 14. Eyerman and Jamison, 1995, pp. 5, 7. 15. The »Why We Fight Series« included a total of seven films: Prelude to War, The Nazis Strike, Divide and Conquer, The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Russia, The Battle of China, and War Comes to America. Prelude to War was first released to the Armed Forces in the fall of 1942, then to personnel in munitions factories in April 1943, and to the public at large in May 1943. It won best documentary film at the Academy Awards in 1943. 16. Quote by Gen. George C. Wallace, 1942, attributed in the film to Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson. 17. Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, May 8, 1942. 18. Declaration of Independence, 1776. 19. Prelude to War, 1942. 20. »I do take a stance in questions like race issues and atrocities of all sorts. . . If you feel strongly [about political issues], it's going to show there. I mean, that's the only way it can come into my work. And I believe it's there … I think cultivated protest is just as dreamlike as idealism«. Seckler interview with Rauschenberg, 1965 (see note 9 above). 21. In the Truman Doctrine, at the beginning of the Cold War, Harry Truman stated, »I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure«, 28 April 1947. During the Berlin Blockade, in 1948, General Lucius D. Clay, US military governor in Berlin, stated on 24 June, »If we mean that we are to hold Europe against communism, we must not budge. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay here until forced out«. 22. In the United States in the 1950s, 80% of 15- to 19-year-olds were in enrolled in school, versus less than 30% of Europeans; between 1940 and 1950, the increase in college enrollment in the United States grew by nearly 80%. National Center for Education Statistics: Thomas D. Snyder (ed.), »120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait«, 1993, pp. 6, 65. Available at: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=93442 (accessed 15 November 2006). 23. Not the least of which was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 24. Alan Solomon, »Four Germinal Painters, Four Younger Artists«, in XXXII International Biennial Exhibition of Art, Venice 1964, United States of America, exhibition brochure/catalogue, 1964. 25. In 1964, the United States Information Agency (USIA) had charge of the American entry at the Venice Biennale. The USIA, under the auspices of Edward R. Murrow and Lois Bingham, selected Alan Solomon as the commissioner for the American section, allowing him free rein in selecting the artists and works that would be included. The USIA's participation was limited to funding, facilitating the transportation of works, and other administrative duties, such as helping with printed material. See my »Political Promotion and Institutional Patronage: How New York Displaced Paris as the Center of Contemporary Art, ca. 1955–1968«, UMI, Ann Arbor, MI, 1995, pp. 184–203. 26. USIA Memorandum, 6 April 1964. USIA Inter-office Miscellaneous Memos file – 73, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC. For a discussion of the relevance of Cold War politics and the promotion and exhibition of American art in general and Rauschenberg's art in particular, see Boyer, 1995. Not only did the US government want to juxtapose American art and issues of freedom and democracy, it wanted to combat the (Soviet-encouraged) view of the United States as a cultural wasteland, competent merely in the areas of technology. 27. I discuss Solomon's statement regarding New York replacing Paris as the center of art, reaction to the statement, as well as the importance of American cultural success within a Cold War context (Boyer, 1995, p. 191). 28. Boyer, 1995, p.190. See, for example, D. C., »Pop'art & dollars, ou la semaine de Venise«, No. 18, Vol. II, July–August 1964, La Côte des peintres, pp. 24–27. 29. The 1947 exhibition »Advancing American Art« serves as one excellent example. Some US congressmen, who were upset by the representation of the United States by art they found incomprehensible and ugly, forced the cancellation of the international schedule of the show as well and the wholesale unloading of the artworks, which had been government property. See Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–48, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, 1984. 30. Robert Sivard, Memorandum to Mr Harris, »The Venice Biennale Art Exhibit«, 14 August 1964, Record Unit 321, Box no. 9, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C. 31. »[Rauschenberg] … is the artist of American democracy, yearningly faithful to its clamor, its contradictions, its hope and its enormous demotic freedom, all of which find shape in his work. Other American artists have had this ambition – one thinks of Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters at the turn of the century – but none fulfilled it so well«, Robert Hughes, »The Great Permitter«, Time, 3 November 1997, p. 57. 32. Calvin Tomkins, »Master of Invention«, New Yorker, 13 October 1997, pp. 92–96. 33. It should be also noted that Rauschenberg's biography and later professional career reveal a distinct liberal bias that argues that he was aware of liberal causes early on. Rauschenberg's 1965 interview with Dorothy Seckler reveals this. And note that Rauschenberg gave the work Election as a gift to the Kennedys. He supported the space program and championed environmental causes. Evidence of his later professional allegiance to liberal causes is found in the current Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition of Rauschenberg's art, Robert Rauschenberg, Artist-Citizen. The promotional information from the SI website states that the exhibition includes prints from 1970 to 1996 »that reverberate with Rauschenberg's commitment to making the world a better place«.