When Rauschenberg swapped the Big Apple for the Sunshine State
Robert Rauschenberg: Spreads 1975-83 Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, W1
Robert Rauschenberg was the first great artist of the televisual age. In his works of the Fifties and Sixties, mass-media images seem to flood directly on to the canvas in a prodigious, channel-hopping flow of paint, collage, silkscreened visuals and 3D objects. These not only launched pop art, a decade before Warhol, but looked forward to the image-making connections of the digital era.
The American artist described these works as having been created by “today”, as if the moment itself had brought them into existence. Yet his conception of “today” seemed to get stuck. The general view is that from 1970, when he moved to Florida from New York, until his death in 2008, his work became an endlessly repetitive refinement of his earlier ideas.
This exhibition, however, sets out to present a new perspective on the later Rauschenberg, focusing on the
Spreads, a little-seen series from the Seventies and Eighties, in which he referred back to the exuberant collage processes of his classic works, while embracing trends of the day.
Clipper (Spread), 1977, sets the tone, accommodating three very different approaches across its nearly five-metre width: cool, flat abstract colour; a central reflective panel that plays with conceptual ideas about including the viewer in the work; and, on the right, a section of collage, instantly recognisable as being by Rauschenberg, combining nearrandom images of food, animals, stock-market listings and old master paintings. Then, as if to dispel any note of pomposity, he plonks a pair of his own shorts in the centre, overlain with white gauze, so they appear at once ghostly and disconcertingly sensual.
Where his Sixties pieces often centre on iconic political images, the focus in these Florida works is intimate and domestic to the point of bathos, with a particular interest in mundane household textiles.
In Rumor, 1980, pieces of cloth are so deftly layered and juxtaposed with silkscreened and washed-out fluid-transfer images that it’s hard to tell what’s real material and what’s fake. Rauschenberg has a fantastic feel for the sensuality of printed surfaces, making these matted agglomerations feel at once dense and weightless.
As if that wasn’t enough, he hangs a steel bucket down the front of the painting, illuminating it from within with a green bulb connected to a socket at the bottom of the painting. The piece becomes a sort of self-powering circuit in a visual quip in which the humour feels satisfyingly integrated with the materials.
The works’ use of two- and threedimensional elements harks back to Rauschenberg’s classic “combines” – combinations of painting and sculpture – of the late Fifties, such as his most notorious work, Monogram, a stuffed goat shoved through a car tyre.
Sometimes, however, the sense of revisiting past glories is too obvious. The two parasols projecting from a wall of collage in Untitled (Spread), 1982, take us straight back to his 1954 combine Charlene – and not to the newer work’s advantage.
While nothing here rivals his great early works, it’s immensely enjoyable just to watch modern art’s chief trickster do his thing, to get absorbed in the visual games of an artist who was incapable of putting images together in an uninteresting way.