A Reason To Get Your Hands Dirty

The shirtsleeves, newspapers and other bits of daily life glued to Rauschenberg’s canvases brings the artist's process to the forefront and forces us to look at the clutter of our lives - in our apartments, offices and trash cans. One can visualize the artist surrounded by paint, hammer and nails, picking through odds and ends collected from second hand shops and trash heaps, constructing these deliberate and compelling Combines.


Collages are a sum of their parts but in Rauschenberg’s case those parts carry messages of their own, gleaned from our personal and collective associations with ordinary objects that most viewers rarely bothered to notice until Rauschenberg placed them, cleverly and in a deceptively easy way into his work. Rauschenberg’s original audience recognized them as bits of their everyday lives, glued and nailed to canvas and wood. Yet it is hard to forget that over forty years have passed since these pieces were first exhibited, as their messages continue to evolve. Walking through the exhibition I was struck by the nostalgia emanating from the bits of signs, old comic strips and, yes, even the stuffed animals. I was conscious of Rauschenberg’s defining Pop Art sensibility but also of the America of the fifties and early sixties, a world that once embraced new technologies, looked forward to placing a man on the moon and feared what he might bring back with him.



Rauschenberg's work reflects the cultural change and challenge to the status quo that was rife during the late 50’s and early 60s. His juxtaposition of objects, the stuffed pheasant standing atop a canvas covered with bits of paisley and striped fabric, stained doilies and an old sock in Satellite (1955) or the umbrella topping the fragile construction of The Tower (1957) screams that the times were clearly a-changin’ as loudly as any folksong yet to be written. I found myself constantly enchanted by artifacts of an America of which I am too young to remember. I kept returning to the ironic and timeless beauty in this work, essentially constructed of discarded scraps of our parents’ and grandparent’s lives that still transcend history and analysis.


Great art inspires me to get to my studio ASAP. I don’t care to analyze the work or think about the artist’s place in history, I just take it in on an intuitive level and see its effects once I have a paintbrush in hand. The Met’s exhibition of Rauschenberg’s Combines kept me from running back to my studio for the afternoon. In addition to the amorphous inspiration to create, this exhibition makes me do exactly what I suspect the artist intended, to think about the nature of beauty, its presence in our mundane surroundings and the artists’ job of illuminating beauty for the rest of the world to see. This is no easy task considering today’s audience expects art to appear in a slick package with clean edges or, more often, in a digitized format that hits us hard and fast and is gone with the click of a mouse. And now back to my studio, to get my hands dirty, making stuff with paint, canvas, some wood or whatever else is lying around.