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March 22, 2007
Rauschenberg's cardboards and appropriation
Artists have appropriated images from each other for hundreds of years. Titian's Venus of Urbino led to Ingres' Odalisque with Slave led to Manet's Olympia, and so on. The next step in appropriation came with Duchamp, who appropriated not just composition and subject, but other artworks, such as the Mona Lisa, and everyday objects like wine racks. The pop artists continued in Duchamp's moustache by appropriating design from commercial culture.
In between Duchamp and pop, Robert Rauschenberg established appropriation as the major theme of his work. He laid out his theme most clearly in 1953's Erased de Kooning Drawing and continued appropriating everything in sight for his combines: Family photos, animals from second-hand shops, stuff from garbage bins, and, literally, whatever.
But with the cardboards, on view now at the Menil, Rauschenberg did something different and new: He didn't mine composition as artists had for centuries. He didn't just repossess objects from the everyday as Duchamp had, or re-purpose common cultural iconography as Warhol did. With the cardboards he mined the conceptual underpinnings of artists such as Donald Judd, Yves Klein, and Eva Hesse, appropriating their ideas for his own ends. He didn't take their art to riff on, he took the intellectual supports behind their work and played with it.
With Klein -- see Tuesday's post -- Rauschenberg didn't borrow composition, objects or anything else. He took the ideas that formed the basis of Klein's practice -- performance and a particular color -- and re-made those ideas in cardboard. Klein's models lay flat on canvas: Rauschenberg found cardboard that instructed the handler to "LAY FLAT -- DO NOT STAND ON END." And when Klein's models were, well, standing, he didn't want them to stand on end. Instead he famously had them walk around his studio while he worked -- not so much because he was using models in the traditional pose-so-I-can-draw-you way, but to set the 'proper' art-making mood.
In the 1950s Jasper Johns achieved his conceptual breakthrough by making the ultimate American nationalistic icons -- the flag and our country's footprint -- into painterly objects. Rauschenberg took the map to which Johns and done something and did something else to it: Made it the subject of a cardboard titled National Spinning Co. Furthermore, Rauschenberg kept doing things to it, turning the map this way and that. (And do the large and small boxes stuck to Rauschenberg's piece represent large Alaska and small Hawaii?)
To the best of my knowledge the role of Rauschenberg's cardboards (and the related pieces) in the history of 'appropriation art' is little examined. Hopefully the Menil show starts that conversation.
Related: The show at the Menil.
Posted March 22, 2007 11:47 AM
