Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real

On certain days, I’d cut school and head over to the Museum of Modern Art to dream awhile. This was in the mid-nineteen-seventies, and my high school—then called the High School for Performing Arts—was on West Forty-sixth Street. I lived in Brooklyn, and the world within the walls of that school, and beyond them, was a wonderland to me. In addition to all that I was learning in my classes, there was Manhattan itself, and, a block or so away, the Gotham Book Mart, Frances Steloff’s fabulous bookstore stuffed with treasures, and, a little farther, the moma. I didn’t know much about modern art, European or American (though I’d seen some African art at the Brooklyn Museum), but I was porous, and entering that storied building one afternoon and encountering a stuffed goat on a multi-panelled wooden platform remains one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life. The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle. Standing before the goat, I felt as if I were having the worst or best possible dream, and, to steady myself, I read the wall label. Titled “Monogram,” the piece had been made in 1955-59 by an artist whose retrospective I’d walked into: Robert Rauschenberg. (I learned later that, in his twenties, he’d changed his name from Milton to Robert, because he liked the approachable sound of “Bob.”) Who was this man? And what did the word “monogram” mean in this context, or in any context? I remember perspiring, not because the museum was too hot but because something was happening to me: an aesthetic experience I did not understand was changing my body temperature, changing my mind.

It was March or April, 1977, and I was sixteen years old. In those days, the museum employed docents who shared their expertise with visitors, and I remember following a docent that seismic afternoon as she talked about another piece that sent my mind reeling. “Bed” (1955) didn’t live in space the way that unmooring goat did; it hung on a wall. But its conventionality ended there. The docent explained that, as a young artist, Rauschenberg was often short of cash, but felt—knew—that art could be made out of anything, even a bedcover. Marcel Duchamp had freed artists from the tyranny of “high” and “low”: art was what an artist chose to make. “Bed” had a wooden frame and supports. At the top was a pillow, and below it a partially turned-down bedspread; both were thick with paint, yellows, whites, reds, and blacks that dripped down the surface of the “canvas” like sleep spit—or just like paint—making something new out of this signifier of domesticity and dreams. The docent said that Rauschenberg called pieces like “Monogram” and “Bed”—art works that had elements of both painting and sculpture—“combines.”

But that goat. It resonated with a strange energy that went beyond wall labels and neat definitions. I didn’t have words for it then. The docent told me that, if I came back the next day, we could talk about Rauschenberg some more. I did go back the next day, and the day after that, because what that marvellous woman was giving me was something I hadn’t known could be given: a way of looking that language only deepened. I wanted to know more about the artist and about the world that had made both him and that goat. Together, they prompted me to see.

Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, was born a century ago this year, and two major New York institutions are exhibiting works from his vast and riveting œuvre. (A third show, on Rauschenberg’s activism and “ecological conscience,” is up at the Grey Art Museum, and Gemini G.E.L. has an exhibition of prints.) But, as thrilled as I am to be in his company again, it says something about the art world and its ethos—an ethos ruled by the laws of fashion, and hovering, just now, between the woke and the pretty—that there is no large-scale retrospective of his work in the city that was his primary home for decades, a place that he, with his collagist’s mind and eye, made us see in all its odd and beautiful juxtapositions. In order to honor Rauschenberg and the city that plays a part in many of his photographs, paintings, silk screens, and combines, which, taken together, say so much about the transformative power of energy, take a walk through Manhattan, and try to view it through his eyes: the refuse beside a discarded chair, the rushing cars and charming legs, a pile of leaves, and a wall of torn and splattered posters. And, as you walk, think about the artist’s journey from his birthplace, Port Arthur, Texas, a refinery town where his father worked for the regional utilities company.