R.I.P. Mr. Rauschenberg
Posted by: admin in Robert Rauschenberg, Artist quote, Making art for the sake of it, Death of art, Aging artists
He was a giant when I was in school in the 1980s and 1990s. His aesthetic in many ways ruled those decades, and I long marveled as a young art student at his way of making tense magic out of ordinary and ugly objects.
I had no idea I was so close to him this past spring when I visited Captiva Island in Florida (where he is said to have lived his last years). A friend recently pointed that fact out to me, and said he’d long been friends with the artist and had visited his estate down there. I wish I’d known Mr. Rauschenberg was a friend of a friend–I would have asked for an introduction. I would have loved to ask the artist what he thought of the state of the art world today.
R.I.P, Mr. Rauschenberg.
“You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.”
“It is impossible to have progress without conscience.”
–Milton Ernst (Robert) Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008)
And, for good measure, here’s a (bad) poem I once wrote about an important event in the career of Robert Rauschenberg (I hope you will forgive me):
The 1964 Venice Biennale
In 1964,
less than two years before my birth,
Kenneth Noland’s paintings occupied half the American pavilion
at the Venice Biennale,
and Robert Rauschenberg won
the Gran Premio—
the youngest artist to do so to date.
As a result Europeans raged about America,
about its Pop sensibilities
and its imperialistic designs—
though they didn’t riot like they would in 1968,
when I was two.In 1964,
less than two years before my birth,
my parents met on a blind-date trip down to Tiajuana,
in Baja California,
and my mother’s mother,
my grandmother Billie,
celebrated the twentieth anniversary
of her divorce from Kenneth Noland,
whom she had met in Asheville, North Carolina,
during the Second World War
when she was just eighteen-years old
and had run away from her mother.
In 1964,
less than two years before my birth,
the esteemed Cardinal Urbani proclaimed a Biennale ban,
and the president absented himself.
Critics fumed too,
at Castelli’s campaign for the American.
“An offense to dignity,” said one;
“A general defeat of culture,” another.
But the artists could care less,
Chamberlain hopscotching across piazzas like a bear,
Oldenburg and his melting typewriter,
Cunningham and a safety pin to hold up his pants.In 2007,
Forty-three years later,
long after half of these men’s deaths,
and after I had reached the age that Noland was at that time,
I would read about the Venice Biennial
and its embarrassment of riches,
about Rauschenberg’s combines
which had everything but Merce Cunningham’s pants.
And I would pause and consider
how things never really change—
unless you are a cobbler or a typewriter repairman—
and that is both a good and bad thing.
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