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About the Author
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts and the director of the Comparative Arts and Culture Graduate Program at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
About Brainstorm
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Laurie Fendrich
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Stan Katz
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
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Recent Posts
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Where's Czechoslovakia? | Comment [27]
The Bad Cover | Comment [61]
Tickle Me Emo | Comment [16]
Painting 2.0 | Comment [9]
Featured Articles By the Author
Robert Rauschenberg
(image from a Salford University site)
I’m going to pause for a moment from my exploration of aesthetic taste to offer a few comments on Robert Rauschenberg, who died yesterday at the age of 82.
Together with the artist Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg led the way from abstract expressionism to the fully cool pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He’s hardly a household name like Andy Warhol, but artists consider him equally important.
Rauschenberg became famous in the early 50s, slamming together (in an orderly fashion) junk that he had found in pawnshops and on the street in his New York neighborhood. He also embellishing everything he made with a confident, deft application of just the right amount of loosely applied paint. In the 60s, he moved on to large silkscreen paintings containing iconic images taken from popular culture — most memorably, media shots of JFK. A prolific artist, he embraced such new technologies as digital printmaking, which he began doing in the 1990s.
Many artists in the 70s learned from Rauschenberg that, if given half a chance, excitement — if not beauty — can be coaxed out of the things we throw away if only we bring them back, in the right way, for reconsideration.
Rauschenberg knew how to handle junk like nobody else, arranging it in stabilizing grids (in his paintings), or treating it with the same respect one would give to sculpture made of bronze (as in his “combines” from the 1950s, which sometimes jutted out from the wall, but more often lay on the floor).
Just as he found his way into art by chance (he visited a museum while a young Navy man in WWII, and that settled it for him), he invited chance to play a huge role in his art. With an eye for the unexpected, he put things together in such a manner that they astonish us (Monogram (1959) — a stuffed goat stuffed, in turn, into a tire, or Bed (1955), a bed quilt splattered with paint, toothpaste, and nail polish and then hung on a wall as if it were a painting). His art invited all manner of interpretation, but its randomness also permitted it to simply hang on a wall, or stand on the floor, absent any requirement that we figure out its meaning.
Rauschenberg’s legacy is much larger than that of his friend and early lover, Jasper Johns, primarily because he opened up new possibilities for collage (an art of chance that he made grander in scale and ambition than it had ever been before). His combines and collages fathered installation art, which was born in the 1970s and continues strong today.
Marcel Duchamp was the granddaddy of artistic chance, of course, with his invention of the readymades — most notably, his Bicycle Wheel (1913), an object consisting of a tantalizing juxtaposition of an upside down bicycle wheel atop a stool. I say “tantalizing” because, as is the case whenever any two things are isolated together for our consideration, our brains deeply desire to discover a connection between them, even if none exists.
But Rauschenberg transformed Duchamp’s readymades from what — in retrospect — seem to be almost effete artistic manifestations into aggressive and populist aesthetic asseverations. He brought Duchamp up to date. Without Rauschenberg, contemporary artists wouldn’t be so infatuated with the energy released whenever objects that don’t go together are compelled to share the same space, or able to so readily delight in making art out of small instances of visual disarray.
Although my art has not been directly influenced by Rauschenberg, like many artists, I recognize his contribution, in an overall sense, to my aesthetic life. Whenever I see a weathered, peeling billboard, for example, I think how beautiful its surface looks. And when I stand waiting for the train at the Canal Street stop near my home, I gaze out over the subway tracks at the white tiled wall that’s about thirty feet away. It’s thoroughly stained with icky green, brown, and black dribbly lines.
Thanks to Rauschenberg, the beauty of that wall never ceases to amaze me.
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