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AVANT-GARDE
I am for an art that a kid licks, after peeling away the
wrapper. I am for an art that is smoked, like a cigarette,
smells like a pair of shoes. I am for an art that flaps like a
flag, or helps blow noses. . . . I am for art that unfolds like
a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweety's arm, or kiss,
like a pet dog. . . .
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In one sense, this whole phase of sensory exploration is an outgrowth
of Abstract-Expressionism, especially its cult of immediacy and im–
provisation, but in happenings pushed out into the realm of the
social, the animal and the ephemeral. It is like the Wagnerian dream
of synthesis of the arts upon which has been superimposed junk culture.
There have been Futurist and Dada antecedents for this too, but none
with such a curious dualism of optimism and anarchy, a dualism which
seems to embrace real life most literally, but so restlessly as only to
backfire into inadvertent ridicule of the motifs, and the productions
m which they figure.
After gaining notice in the two "New Forms-New Media" shows
at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960, assemblage achieved interna–
tional renown in the exhibition of that name at the Museum of
Modem Art in 1962.
As
Pollock is to Abstract-Expressionism, the
progenitor of the whole mode of assemblage, whether in its static or
mobile forms, is Robert Rauschenberg. In fact, the suggestion of mo–
tion, of mind as well as of things, is actuated by his "combine paint–
ings," in which the spectator's participation in the activity of the pic–
ture is solicited not by emotive brush strokes, but rather more bluntly
by a chair or a ladder. Fans that "blow" gusts of paint and radios that
blare from behind the canvas are examples of extra-pictorial activation
that surprise as much by their literalness as they baffle by their final
recession before the claims of paint. As for paint itself, it is difficult
not to be aware that it has been demoted from the quite exalted status
it once had in, say, de Kooning, Rauschenberg's mentor. The highly
sensuous impact of Rauschenberg contrasts with the meanness of his
materials so that one becomes conscious of a kind of bright nihilism in
this painter, a continual reconstitution and loss of energy in a matrix
whose most salient note is an elegance of concept which holds all its
disparate materials in balance. Any emotional coloration, any evalua–
tion of subject, is withheld- which is precisely Rauschenberg's special
accent.
Several elements in this remarkable artist are worth attention. One
is his totally open-ended view of chance. In "Factum," 1957, for in–
stance, he duplicates his own paint bespattered composition, thus de-
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