Art: Robert Rauschenberg: Art and Life

Rauschenberg's collage period captured in Art and Life

By Erika Yowell

Friday's opening of Robert Rauschenberg: Art and Life at Godt-Cleary Projects downtown drew a respectable crowd despite the inclement weather. Comprising a large number of screen prints, intaglio prints and lithographs from the 1990s, the show also includes a few prints and sculptures dating as far back as 1974. None of the artist's original paintings are on display, but the affordable prints on display provide a serviceable overview of the latter portion of his career.

Rauschenberg is a canonical figure in 20th-century art history, and he is generally credited, along with Jasper Johns, with initiating the reaction to the sheer nonobjectivity of Abstract Expressionism. To effect a reaction against something, however, one has to refer to it on some level, and Rauschenberg's works at Godt-Cleary do just that. Work such as "L.A. Uncovered #7," a 12-color screen print from 1998, references Mark Rothko's horizontally bisected, color-saturated canvases. While Rothko's canvases were devoid of any narrative reference, however, Rauschenberg's boxy quadrants include plenty of subject matter taken from photographs, presumably snapped in the title city. This particular work features an endearing of artistic self-affirmation in the form of a photo fragment reading, cryptically, "Yes! Robert."

Many of Rauschenberg's paintings function as AbEx tableaux cobbled together with various narrative elements. Great swooshes of painterly color intermingle with ready-made images taken from photographs or illustrations to create dynamic collages. Go to any doctor's office in the 1980s, and you saw how the pastiche formula Rauschenberg originated had been digested and reconstituted by any number of frame-shop poster artists and hung as more or less inoffensive waiting room wallpaper.

It goes without saying that Rauschenberg's oeuvre is far more important than the generations of knockoffs it spawned, just the way Picasso's paintings are invaluable while the myriad "Cubists" he inspired represent just one big heap of crapola. Which is not to say people don't pay out the nose for imitators; they absolutely do. Those fine art galleries in malls are chockfull of the demon offspring of Rauschenberg, Picasso and countless other notable figures.

In addition to characteristic print work, Art and Life includes two sculptures from Rauschenberg's Publicon series. "Station I," from an edition of 30, is especially provocative, consisting of a vibrantly colored, trapezoidal portable altarpiece structure housing a fetish-friendly, gilded paddle studded with a blue light bulb. The space this piece occupies between art and life--the space within which Rauschenberg purports to work--is a singular place to be sure.