Robert Rauschenberg’s ruminations on East and West in these Japanese clayworks, Chinese paper works, and the “Kabal American Zephyr Series” turn on a series of elaborate puns that reduce both realms to the terms of fluid mechanics, the flow of liquids and gases. The Orient, in an essentially trite but complexly conveyed notion, is a weightless, watery domain traversed by corrupting currents from the West; America is both the west wind and its cessation, the crash to earth of the previously airborne but always gravity ridden.
Hydrants, fish, scenes reflected in pools or puddles, and one claywork in particular establish the aqueous mood. Dirt Shrine: South, 1982, is a paradigm of the explorer’s intrusive encounter with the edge of the world, a diagram of reaching an impasse on land and having to travel by sea. An embossed tire tread ending in an anchorlike rock and chain extends across the ceramic surface to a prolix confusion heralded by two schools of fish. Visually, these schools and the tire track imitate the wake of a boat, a version of the thrust and drag that have always concerned Rauschenberg (think of the famous picture of him on skates with a parachute on his back).
This trope of the wake unites all the clayworks: references to refuse, even trash art, consumption (plates, for instance), and packaging (including the American flag, folded and bundled) all relate to the conception of the Western garbage scow leaving a trail of litter through the East, like Sherman marching through Georgia. The drift of the East also becomes the unanchoring of the uprooted. In Dirt Shrine: South a sumo wrestler holds a mandrake root in his hand; according to lore, the mandrake root furrows the air with a scream when dragged out of the ground. That unmooring and cacophony spills over into the four versions of Pneumonia Lisa, 1982, a kinesthetic rendition of pulsing noise. The silent stillness of the Mona Lisa becomes a synesthesia of movement and striking sound in the quick intercuts of superimposed images, the flux of pounding (horse hooves, hammer), revving (motorcycle), and pinging (figures from an arcade game). The wake in Dirt Shrine: South becomes “awake” in Pneumonia Lisa; both are disturbances of tranquillity.
In Courbet’s Le Sommeil, which Rauschenberg tampers with in three versions of All Abordello Doze, 1982, nudes sleep. Alternatively titled Pares-se (indolence) and Luxure (lust), and supposedly representing Venus and Psyche, the Courbet painting may have been appropriated as an interface between active and contemplative. West and East meet in a dream (floating worlds, they are flooded with fish) of desire and passion suspended. Still, in the third variation, the sleeping figures are crossed by a tire tread, possibly the track of the Western mobile home represented in the rebus of Drawing Room 1 & 2, 1982. Drawn across the pure nature/creation figured by Botticelli’s newly born Venus is a vernacular American house. That this is actually a drawn room (i.e. a house trailer) carrying its own junk is made clear by the photograph applied across Venus’ knees: a car interior with a wrecked set of mattress springs. That this junkyard on wheels contaminates what it passes through is also made clear in the second of the paired clayworks, where the newborn Venus’ face is replaced by Mona’s with her informed smile, while Mona’s hands cover Venus’ crotch in the gesture of a fallen Eve. This fall is echoed in the image of a tree stump, the evidence of a fallen tree.
The wake is the trace, the imprint which has consistently obsessed Rauschenberg, what’s been called his “presence of absence.” The ghostly afterimages via photosilkscreen are examples, or the veiled embossed characters that dominate the paperworks made in China, in which layers of thin paper intrude between image and viewer. But here the denseness is purely physical; conceptually, the paper pieces compose a kind of geography book of products of China—produce, beautiful children, gymnasts, decorative artifacts—in a congratulatory mode conveyed by pendulums of silk attached to the bottom of each, like blue ribbons at state fairs.
In the “Kabal” series the pressure that makes the imprint, the pressure of gravity, is overly great. On the road in America, many things give evidence of a great fall. Objects are crushed, flattened. Site of the Mute Spokes, 1982, is a bed frame (the touring one-night stand?) collapsed and hung on a wall (surely a play on Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane”); indexed on its headboard are a beer can and a flashlight, both utterly compressed. When one also notices a target, one acknowledges a reference to Jasper Johns-ian flatness. This esthetic thinness may be equated with endgame, since in House of the Eyetest of the Earth Spider, 1981, a crushed gasoline container conflates getting flat with getting a flat. Out of gas or without a spare, this mobile home on one wheel goes nowhere (a more pointed pun on exhaustion is the oversized battered and rusted pipe positioned like an exhaust muffler in Petrified Relic from the Gyro Clinic, 1981); looking into it, all you see is your reflection in a mirror on the back wall. That reflection, looming large, is the tautology of solipsism, and as tautology again flat. Even seasons are telescoped: the door is half screen, half storm. The Eye Test becomes the “I” test becomes the hi-test (gasoline) of the Earth Spider, the creature who spins everything out of its own abdomen.
Because there is no fructifying other in this world, every stranger lurks as a mere projection of the paranoia of the isolationist. Gazing into the mirrors, all one perceives are multiplications of the cloistral self. Hence a piece like The Interloper Tries to Hide His Disguises, 1982, is a comic collage of cloning. Replication rules, and allusions to the pods of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers genre are made in watermelons opening in star scallops and patterns of amoeboid proliferation. Paranoia can be harmless, learned, or homicidal, as in 28 Famous Murderers with Poems, 1981, where the ubiquitous wheel turns medieval torture tool.
All these wheeled vehicles are unicycles, therefore poised for a fall. So too the earth itself, that great Solar Elephant, 1982. While clinging to clichéd ideas about travel in the form of untouched paint-by-number scenes of faraway places, it hesitates a moment (like the photoinsert of the dump truck hoisted in midair) before plunging down through space, as represented by galactic and planetary iconography. Pulled down perhaps by the force of an outworn and one-dimensional world view (the paint-by-number panels), we are urged to hold on (upside-down photos of subway strap-hangers) even as we tumble head over heels (two reproductions of the Sistine Chapel’s Creation finger touching a foot).
In all this, if there’s been a zephyr it’s been a downdraft; really the air has been still. In Pegasus’ First Visit to America in the Shade of the Flatiron Building, 1982, however, we get a breath that turns out to be that of inspiration. Although crushing flatness as the result of a fall is featured in quibbles about pulp—oranges juxtaposed with orange juice, crumpled cardboard—and allusions to height—mountaineers, skyscrapers, aerial views, Bellerophon’s unseating from Pegasus—the crushed items appear at the very top of the combine. The fall occurred at the beginning, says Rauschenberg, and what we’re left is a fear of falling, or a fear of flying. This accounts for the repeated rabbits, as in scared, and the crossed-out smile. If we let go we’ll be buoyed up by the real electric fan at the bottom of the piece, which, along with the images of hot-air balloons there, strains to lift this whole unwieldy construct off the ground. But that our agoraphobia is not just another general paranoia (as is the double entendre of the Pegasus symbol flanking the American flag in a scandalous collusion of oil and government), but a specific one of reading or making connections is evident. Note the two image clusters at diagonal extremes to each other, one of a woman with electrodes taped to her head, the other the empty socket of a snake skull and a light bulb—mental burnout succeeds the psychic and combustive exhaustion parodied elsewhere.
Afraid of getting burnt (a grilling lobster) or getting stung (a beekeeper), the viewer can take heart from a central photograph near the efficient motor of the fan. In it, a monkey plays with a Rubik’s cube. As an allegory of the encounter between reader and Rauschenberg text this is simultaneously funny and insulting, encouragement that the puzzle is easy and warning against roteness in pursuit. Let’s not overlook Pegasus’ causal connection with the fountain of the Muses; the point is to fly, to make the associative leap. Is this Rauschenberg’s problem with Johnsian flatness—that it’s too literal? Is he offering his own bulky Rube Goldbergs as not only better art but as the hemistich that will heal the caesura in the poem of America? Why not—with Rauschenberg all things are possible.
—Jeanne Silverthorne
