September 10 to October 17, 2015
521 West 21st Street (between 10th and 11 avenues)
New York, 212 414 4144

Sarah Sze makes art from a sci-fi future. Though we recognize objects, they seem to have evolved past our understanding, to be organized by unfamiliar principles, and bound by forces we cannot see. During a conversation with the artist on October 3 at Tanya Bonakdar gallery, curator Russell Ferguson compared her work to “a scientific experiment run off the rails.” Sze is known for employing everyday materials: Q-tips, water bottles, matchbooks, loose change, aspirin, and so on. But this exhibition presents an uncharacteristic embrace of both technology (sound and video), and traditional art materials such as chalk, wood, glassine, and paint. A delicate work on the gallery’s second floor, made of stones, steel, paper and a solitary branch, titled Night Standing (all works 2015), looks like the kind of pet a robot would make for company after all the humans are gone.

Paint is front, center, and all over the sides of this show. Acrylic on various plywood, newspaper, or plastic supports stands, leans, or dribbles on to the floor. Lacy white sheets of it hang from crossbars, mirroring and good-naturedly mocking the “white cube” of gallery walls, and a great swath on the floor at the entrance resembles a rather messy installation in progress, deliberately confusing visitors who often pause, thinking the show not open yet.

This ambiguity is deliberate. Sze believes her work is most interesting when our understanding teeters in a precarious way — and she courts our uncertainty accordingly. That is the moment when the work ceases to be in conversation only with its maker, and starts to interact with the viewer.

The gallery visitor is set several challenges in this show. Not only must he or she tread lightly and carefully around the seemingly fragile works (a limited number of people are allowed into the exhibition at one time), but once in, one must embark on the conceptual unpacking of these deconstructed paintings. In Mirror with Landscape Leaning (Fragment Series) a torn picture of pink clouds in a blue sky floats on a wall while organized lines of white paint trail from plywood balanced on a chair. In Lost Image Standing there is practically no paint at all, yet scraps of archival prints of sunsets clamped to a large rectangle formed of stainless steel rods seem to indicate a refreshing new kind of landscape.

Art about artmaking is a difficult enterprise but Sze succeeds in connecting the artist’s challenges — and those she sets the viewer — with our greater challenges as a species. No answers are given, so understanding is not easy.

Upstairs, Sze’s focus expands from interaction with art to interaction with the Earth and the cosmos. Occasionally we see this literally as the artist’s hand in the making, as in the case of a glazed ceramic sculpture titled Grey Matter, where peeled and twisted shavings of clay have been wrested from a squarish block and litter the floor around it — an intervention that seems almost violent. A hammock called Hammock (inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1955 combine, Bed) conjures the idea of a comfy rest, but a closer look reveals that the hammock’s strings are already occupied by a smattering pattern of acrylic paint. In Measuring Stick, a desk previously used by Sze for video and sound editing is now densely clustered with steel armatures supporting assorted unsettling objects, including broken glass and an egg, and video projectors positioned amongst the clutter stream NASA’s feed from the Voyager 1, our only lonely spacecraft in interstellar space. The desk is both the site and the evidence of the creative process, and the NASA feed, of creation itself. Outside Measuring Stick’s dark room, smooth grey rocks are neatly bifurcated and lined up by size, a secret bird’s nest made out of archival prints, branches, stone, thread, and enamel is hidden in a skylight, and blue chalk dust liberally dusted over the floor functions as a visual signifier of water, doubly so when gallery goers blithely wander into it as they did one recent rainy day, tracking blue footprints all over the gallery, down the stairs, and out into the street.

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March 15 to September 1, 2014
The Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries, Third Floor
11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City

With the exception of a series of monotypes of the numbers 0-9 done during the same time frame as the rest of the work on view here, and superfluous in this context except for the fact that they remind viewers of the stuff in the history books, all of the ink and pencil drawings, watercolor and oil paintings, and aquatints in this exhibition were inspired by a photograph of a famous painter, Lucian Freud, commissioned by an even more famous painter, Francis Bacon. Along with this, it is also important to know that Johns used a custom made rubber stamp that reads “Regrets, Jasper Johns” in many of these works. This stamp was allegedly used by the artist on occasion to decline unwanted invitations rather than replying to them in more time consuming ways, even though it is hard to imagine that he took the time to ink up a rubber stamp and place it firmly against an unwanted invite rather than simply ignore it.

One has to wonder how the recalcitrant octogenarian, who has rejected critical analysis of his art throughout his career (The Critic Sees, 1964, and many statements made by the artist through the years attest to this), would feel about the curator’s pre-packaged analysis of his works.

The other thing that stands out about this exhibition is that a portion of it consists of copper plates and the earlier states of the final aquatints on display. This tells us that the curators believe that the art going public, the hundreds of thousands of people who will traffic this exhibition before it closes, will want to know all about Johns’ working practice and to see unfinished works of art, as if they provide some insight into the final product, which is a dubious claim. Beyond the wonder and joy we experience while beholden to the targets and flag in the museum’s permanent collection and on display consistently for decades, which is something that is true for an extremely small group of works of art, all of us should want to know how Johns gets there, how he climbs that mountain, regardless of how good the outcome is. Which is another way of saying that all that Johns touches is gold, not only with regards to the market value of his work, but also with regards to the quality of it. The fatal flaw of this exhibition is the notion that Johns can do no wrong, based solely on decades old work that has been neatly and tightly fitted into the mainstream art historical narrative.

Visually speaking, the works on view here that are the loosest and most interesting to look at are the ink on plastic paintings, because the medium used, the pooling of the ink, the controlled drips, the subtle and deftly created gradations separating one section of the fragmented compositions from another, hold our interest thanks to their variety, fragility and luminosity. Art historically speaking, along with Rauschenberg, Johns is known as Abstract Expressionism’s assassin, the cool-headed conceptualist who changed the way artists approach subject matter and their emotional involvement in the art making process. But looking at what still matters to Johns at this point in his life, what stands out are the affinities he has with classic Modernism rather than the differences. If anything holds these recent works, executed in 2012-13, together, it is the artist’s love of subtlety, nuanced handling of materials, creating textures and dense layering and piecing together of disparate gestures and concepts of pictorial space, all of which were part of the Modernist approach to painting. The four specific ink on plastic paintings I am referring to, each measuring 27-1/2 inches by 36 inches, celebrate the fact that the interplay of control and accident could only be the result of many years of doing. Like other works in the show, the figure/ground relationship clearly defined in the photograph that allegedly inspired a host of other works, all but disappears and is replaced by a complicated framework where everything becomes disparate parts, one no more subject matter than the other, and all held together by a unifying technique. In other words, it is the doing that takes precedent rather than the showing. Also, Johns makes abstract imagery in these ink drawings that becomes something new and never seen before, a photograph of a figure in an interior becomes a dense landscape where allegiance to verisimilitude is replaced by the will of the artist, in that intuitive patterning and balancing of compositional elements such as line and tone trump the original inspiration.

The largest work in this exhibition, an oil painting, measuring 67 inches by 96 inches, is particularly static, with a crisply divided foreground and background, one dark, one lighter, with no interplay between the two except a simplistic shifting of what comes before what. It is big, it’s an oil painting, and it’s painted by Jasper johns, but lets be honest—it’s mediocre.

Johns uses doubling, mirroring or reversing, as the wall text notes, and elevates negative empty spaces to a central visual theme by recontextualizing the missing or torn away portion of the original photograph that inspired him, making it the central shape or form in many of these images. The missing piece of the photograph is copied or doubled: the floor in the photograph and the missing portion of photograph become a weird foreground plane. Unfortunately these reversals, doublings, etc., do not necessarily lead to successful compositions. It is handy material for curators and critics to bandy about, but what do they mean if they don’t lead to successful works of art?

A skull, meanwhile, appears in several of the oil paintings and aquatints, resting atop this doubled form, which becomes a tombstone shape. Of course this convenient memento mori fits in nicely with an exhibit of any artist’s late period work. Johns must be thinking of you know what, right?

Overall, this exhibition seems like an exercise in shoring up an artist’s reputation, a way for the museum to convince us that they are right to memorialize Johns’ earlier works in a very codified timeline. Johns use of photographic imagery is also nothing special in that he doesn’t take advantage of photographic effects or things unique to the medium to enhance the drawing, printing, or painting process. Yes, the particular photograph he uses easily provides fodder for writers, including the authors of wall text and reviews, because its provenance is steeped in art history, but otherwise it is thin visual gruel, not interesting in and of itself and hardly worth multiple visitations as a source of inspiration. Johns successfully undermines any narrative or emotional aspects of the photograph, but the inert and monotonous compositions we are left with are nothing much to look at, regardless of the bigger than life icon, forever memorialized in the art history books, they were made by.

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Most of the exposures assembled in Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949-1962 were shot during the period in which Rauschenberg produced his “Combines”—his greatest artistic achievement, according to prevailing opinion. It is not difficult to discern echoes of those game-changing painting-sculpture hybrids in, for example, the book’s three dozen or so photos taken in North Africa and Europe in 1952 and ’53. In the open-air markets of Tangiers and Morocco and the streets of Venice and Rome, textures, patterns and images play off each other in a kind of inadvertent, walk-through assemblage. In works like Madrid Park (IV), 1953, Rauschenberg’s camera organizes the information in loosely geometric subdivisions that reiterate the picture plane.

The artist would later move to color photography, but even in black and white Rauschenberg, then in his mid-twenties, was already feeding the voracious visual appetite that resulted in such feats of pictorial reprocessing as the paint-spattered quilt that became Bed (1954) and the stuffed-goat-and-spare-tire-bedecked Monogram (1955-59). Photography was a natural medium for the idea, which composer John Cage promulgated, that art might be a re-presentation of the overlooked and undervalued (sound; visuality) in everyday life.

, 1953. Contact print 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 inches. Photo © Estate of Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA”]Other of these photos are rewarding for their documentary value, such as Untitled [Merce + David Tudor], 1953, in which choreographer Cunningham is seen putting himself through his paces, accompanied on piano by the Rainforest composer. Cy + Relics, Rome, 1952 shows painter Twombly contemplating an enormous antique hand—funny, considering the place of this artist’s “hand” in his graffiti-inflected canvases. In Jasper—N.Y.C. (I), 1954, a trenchcoat-wearing, twenty-four-year-old Jasper Johns, alert yet casual, lounges like a killer against an advertising kiosk.

There are still moments of clarity amid the clamor, reminders of the shift in paradigm, in Rauschenberg’s work of the early 1950’s, from the void to the net—from atmospheres to accretions. Untitled [Bathroom Window, Broadway studio], ca. 1961, depicting a pale, hazy expanse of dimpled, chicken-wired glass flecked with paint, looks back to the well-known “White Paintings” and Erased De Kooning Drawing of nearly a decade earlier.

Unmistakably, however, throughout the work of this period Rauschenberg valued process as much as product—his works’ becoming as much as their realization. This comes through in the near-autonomy of his works’ parts in relation to the whole. In the book’s last image, Untitled [elements for Oracle, Broadway studio], ca. 1962, remnants of duct work, auto parts, conduit and other mostly metallic street finds are arranged on the studio’s wood floor. At the ready, in the midst of the clutter, sit a sack of bolts and a power drill.

Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949-1962. Edited by David White, Susan Davidson. Text by Nicholas Cullinan. (D.A.P./Schirmer/Mosel, 2011. 232 pgs / 136 duotone / 31 color. ISBN: 9781935202523. $75)

The post All the World’s a Combine: Robert Rauschenberg’s Photographs appeared first on artcritical.

Hiroko Ikegami
The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 978-0-262-01425-0
277 pp.

Jasper Johns: Drawing Over at Castelli Gallery
November 6 – December 18, 2010
18 East 77th St.
New York City 212 240 4470

Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are utilitarian artifacts–a bottle rack, a snow shovel, a urinal. Whatever his intentions, these objects now look like sleek early modernist sculptures. Joseph Cornell extended Duchamp’s way of thinking, collaging images, photographs and all sorts of antique memorabilia. Deborah Solomon’s Utopia Parkway: The Life And Work Of Joseph Cornell reveals maybe too much about his unhappily repressed erotic life, which found perfect expression in his little worlds of exquisite objects set behind protective glass. Marvelous as they are, these works of art are precious. No truly great artist can hold the world at a distance, as Cornell did in his life and his art. Imagine Cornell collecting his collage elements not in Manhattan’s thrift stores, but abandoned on the street. Suppose, furthermore, that he took an aggressively populist interest in politics and public life. And imagine then that he discarded his confining boxes and, boldly set his collages on the floor or wall, working on the scale of classic Abstract Expressionism. Imagining Cornell so dramatically transformed is, I grant, a utopian exercise, for it would have required a personality transplant. But fortunately there is no need to do that, for we are lucky enough to have had Robert Rauschenberg. “I’m for ‘yes,’” Rauschenberg once said. “‘No’ excludes. I’m for inclusion.” (p.34)

An artist, we expect, is someone who creates something essentially new. This exhibition teaches us that we need to reject that well-established way of thinking. Rauschenberg creates by combining already existing things. Combining cardboard, wood branch, and lace curtain in Untitled (Venetian) (1973) – no problem. Juxtaposing cardboard, sand, Day-Glo paint, spoked wheels, pillow, and hose in Untitled (Early Egyptian) (1974) –why not?  He can make art out of almost nothing, as in Vow (Jammer) (1976) composed of sewn fabric and rattan pol. Nothing could be simpler than The White Paintings (1951), canvases painted with white latex house paint. But he can also do elaborate creations, like Palladian Xmas (Spread) (1980), which is made of solvent transfer, acrylic, and collage on wood panel. Following Surrealist tradition, Cornell sought to display elective affinities. Like lovers, previously unknown to one another, who discover on a crowded city street that they are predestined passionate partners, his juxtapositions of objects are poetic. Rauschenberg thinks about art making in different, more plausible way. He demonstrates that the world is far more aesthetically fascinating (but less visually mysterious) than we have imagined.

We think of an aesthete as focused on the here and now. But Rauschenberg, so John Richardson suggests in his catalogue essay, was too absorbed by the future to bother about the past. Maybe Untitled (Late Kabal American Zephyr) (1985), composed of rubber cycle wheels on metal structure with hand crank, is a joke about Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. But mostly Rauschenberg so radically transforms this tradition as to make any search for precedents irrelevant.  Academics have already devoted great deal of attention to his iconography. In fact, however, that is a problematic procedure, since for him, it seems, almost any things can be combined. “I avoid images that are fixed,” he said. “You get that and it is just illustration.” (p.31)

I have no idea what Rainbow Harp (Roci Tibet) (1984), fabric, metal rings, and wire on aluminum stand with animal skull and turquoise, means, but that doesn’t keep me from enjoying it.  I do ‘get’ Petrified Relic from the Gyro Clinic (Kabal American Zephyr) (1981), an assisted ready made consisting of metal table with metal wheel, rule, and duct. And Untitled (Kabal American Zephyr) (1983), composed of a metal chair with metal object and advertising thermometer also is easy to understand. So too is Watchdog (2007), rusted metal buckets on mirrored aluminum composite base, which is simple, and no doubt silly. But it works. Rauschenberg loves to include works from other artists within his art, as in Short Circuit (1955), in which the copy of a Jasper Johns’ Flag by Elaine Sturtevant and a painting by his wife Susan Weil compose a collage whose support is a rustic hinged wooden cabinet.  Art Box (Combine Painting) (1963), oil on wood crate and paper with enameled telephone sign, Plexiglas, and wing nuts, looks like an anticipation of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964). But how different it is!

It would be unfair to compare Castelli’s small uptown show Jasper Johns Drawing Over, a display of thirty drawings executed from the early 1960s to the present, against this massive exhibition.  Still, comparing them reveals much about these artists, whose personal relationship was important for both of them. Made in a variety of media – acrylic, watercolor, ink, gouache, pastel, etc. – Johns’s drawings are executed over prints. In this body of work, an image previously created by the artist has been reworked and transformed into something else. Thus Land’s End, Johns’ monochromatic intaglio from 1979, became a vibrant pastel at the artist’s hand, and a new work: Land’s End, 1979/1989.  In this show, as in his recent paintings, Johns obsessively reworks a small group of subjects, going over and over his themes, like Bach in his Goldberg Variations or Mendelssohn in Songs without Words. Johns thus turns inward, whilst Rauschenberg would embrace everything and everyone.

If Johns is our Mallarmé, Rauschenberg is our Walt Whitman. One of his few unfulfilled dreams, Richardson says, was to photograph the world in its entirety, big as life.  You would have to be seriously emotionally stingy not to respond to this irresistible show of our most open and winning artist. At a press conference in Japan during the 1980s, a member of the audience asked Rauschenberg to name his greatest fear. “That I might run out of world,” he replied. (p.11) That never happened. Some critics complain that Rauschenberg was not sufficiently self-critical. (He made more than six thousand works of art.) Gagosian’s exhibition shows that they are totally wrong. Like Andy Warhol, the most different artist imaginable, he was often great. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” Rauschenberg said when he was seventy-four. “Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” He never stopped screwing things up. I am in awe of his amazing generosity.

Our globalized art world, in which Gagosian has branches in Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, and Rome, and many artists travel between America, Asia and Europe, was created during Rauschenberg’s lifetime. There has been a great deal of discussion about the politics involved in the export of Abstract Expressionism.  Now Hiroko Ikegami extends that analysis. Her marvelous The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art reveals how supportive curators and dealers in Paris, Venice, Stockholm and Tokyo made it possible for Rauschenberg to become a superstar. Although she has very interesting, albeit brief remarks on how to read his allegories, she focuses on analyzing the system of collectors and curators who made possible his career. Early on Rauschenberg had important exhibitions in four cities, Paris, Venice, Stockholm, Tokyo—all part of the “Free World.” Ikegami discusses the role of Ileana Sonnabend in Paris; Alan Solomon in Venice; Pontus Hultén in Stockholm; and a number of artists and critics in Tokyo. Rauschenberg, Ikegami argues, was generally seen as a very American artist, which sometimes involved downplaying the politically critical and homoerotic dimensions of his art.  Her very tactful narrative, which is an amazing synthesis of materials in many languages, has the feeling of total reliability.

In Paris Rauschenberg suffered from rivalry with French artists, and in Venice his success was much resented both by some Italians and by jealous American rivals. Monogram, purchased for $15,000, now is a symbol for the Moderna Museet, but in Stockholm not everyone was pleased when Hultén paid serious attention to contemporary American art. And in Japan, Rauschenberg had French rivals.  His personal generosity, openness and tact played an important role in his success; he was generally gifted at avoiding unproductive conflicts. Some of the Abstract Expressionists traveled to Europe, and Sam Francis lived in Europe and Japan. But before Rauschenberg, no major painter exhibited and worked in so many countries. So far as I can see, however, these extensive travels didn’t decisively his art. He didn’t speak French, Italian, Swedish or Japanese, and never stayed anywhere very long.

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The estate of Robert Rauschenberg, represented for the past 15 years by the Pace Gallery (formerly PaceWildenstein), will now be represented by Gagosian Gallery.  Gagosian offers an artist or an artist’s estate international representation with three galleries in New York, one in Beverly Hills and spaces in London, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong and, soon, Paris.

Rauschenberg, who died of heart failure in May 2008, was a prolific and influential American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s, and remained an influential figure until his death.  He is well known for his “Combines” from the 50s, which combined painting and sculpture with non-traditional art materials like a stuffed goat or trash that he found in the streets of New York City.  He also worked in photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.

Rauschenberg’s works continue to bring good prices, at a Christie’s auction in March, a Rauschenberg Combine painting sold above estimate for more than $10 million.

Gagosian exhibits the work of Jasper Johns, an artist Rauschenberg is often associated with.  A Rauschenberg exhibition is planned in New York in the fall of 2010

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