Art: The Arcadian as Utopian

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Rauschenberg's rhapsodic energies fill four Manhattan shows

At 57, Robert Rauschenberg is back; but then, the rumors that he had gone away were greatly exaggerated. It is almost 30 years since his "combine" paintings—rebus-like assemblies of every imaginable waste object, from beach tar to stuffed chickens, from electric fans to auto tires, slathered in abstract expressionist paint drips—burst upon the American art world. Nearly two decades, a lifetime for some artists, have elapsed since his first prize at the Venice Biennale (back when the Biennale mattered) heralded the "imperial" entry of American art into Europe. The unwanted reward of a career like Rauschenberg's is premature old-masterhood, followed by a cooling in the audience. This happened in the late '70s, when a lull was felt in his work.

But for an artist of Rauschenberg's large and rhapsodic energies, no pause lasts very long. There are now, by the latest count, four Rauschenberg shows running in Manhattan. Sculpture, combines and a 100-ft.-long photomontage based on a recent trip to China are being shown in three spaces run by Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend downtown in SoHo; uptown, at the Museum of Modern Art, a set of collages from the China journey is on display. They are all pendants to a larger project, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), whereby he intends to travel and exhibit a changing nucleus of works in some 20 countries, while working on new projects with local artists and craftsmen. The initial incarnation of the ROCI show is planned as a 150-piece retrospective that will include some of the 491 collages he made at the world's oldest paper mill, still operating in Anhui province.

It is clear from the New York shows that out of this pharaonic enterprise, Rauschenberg has been producing some of the best work of his career. Some of it involves materials quite new in his oeuvre, most notably clay. The star piece in the show at Castelli is Dirt Shrine: South, 1982, a pseudo combine in which all the disparate elements (tire track, painted chain, stone, bamboo ladder) were made from fired ceramic in Japan. The characteristic montage of Rauschenbergian imagery—a sumo wrestler holding a tiny alligator, schools of fish, a dump truck, and other elliptical images of ancient and modern Japan, mostly derived from photographs—is fired into the glaze. The result, a hybrid of traditional and new technologies, looks both archaic and slick.

He has also produced, in the spirit of old-master quotation that ran through his silk-screened work in the early 1960s, a suite of variations on well-known paintings: Botticelli's Venus, that hardy standby of the Pop sensibility the Mona Lisa, and Gustave Courbet's rosy, meaty image of two lesbians—one of them Whistler's mistress—sprawled in amorous sleep. At times, as in All Abordello Doze 3, 1982, the degree of interference by overprinting, cutting and juxtaposition almost buries the motif in a landslide of variations, and yet Rauschenberg's close, laconic grasp of form saves the effect from chaos. The montage of alien images, clamoring for attention, cancels the peculiar voyeuristic steaminess of Courbet's original.