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MAX KOZLOFF
monstrating that chance lacks individuality, and that the freely-wrought
is not necessarily spontaneous. It is the quintessential criticism of
Abstract-Expressionism. On the other hand, as his friend John Cage
once related when Rauschenberg's paintings were being transported,
any damage "wouldn't concern him at all-it would be part of the
painting's natural life." (As contrasted with Johns, for whom damage
"would reopen the esthetic problem.") Another consideration is
Rauschenberg's multiple montage-like inclusion of objects which do
not commit him to a specific view of the American urban environment,
yet physically allow him to document it with a breathtaking range and
justness. Just the same, his themes are often merely disquisitions on
vicarious communication, expressed quite characteristically in his rub–
bings and transferred silk-screens of photographs, where one is always
at some and possibly several points of remove from the actual events
or objects. And even when one has the latter in hand, their very
tangibility is questioned by their inclusion in a predominantly pictorial
field. It was from Rauschenberg's example that Jim Dine (as Oyvind
Fahlstrom said) could imagine the juxtaposition of an electric light
and painted, caricatured light beams-which forces one to ask (but pre–
vents one from answering) the question: "Which is more 'real,' the
immaterial light from the lamp, or the thingness of the paint?"
This questioning of the existential status of things is at the root
of the marvelously fruitful esthetics of assemblage. Taken out of the
context of painting itself, the valence of assemblage diminishes. But
enough remains to inform the sibling work of people as diverse as
H.C. Westerman, Robert Morris, Bruce Conner, and Edward Keinholz,
to name only a few. Their great failing is to allow acceptance of the
created presence to become an absolute in itself. For the more shock
value becomes the artistic aim, the less the work stands independently
as form, and the less applicable it is to experience. In the best pieces
of the artists mentioned, the rampant literary associations-and they
might jump from nineteenth-century Americana to Skid Row derelic–
tion-work hand in hand with the basically indefinable and mysterious
effect of assemblage as a mode of existence. Once again one is put
into great doubt as to the identity of the object. Unabashedly con–
crete, the created image still yields its qualities reluctantly
to
the
mind. This is especially obvious when the assemblage takes on some
of the particularities of sculpture. In fact, the nature of sculptw-e is
interrogated by assemblage. For all that they are shaped uniquely by
the individual hand, three-dimensional sculptures are coming
to
ap–
pear like artifacts, just as artifacts, eventually pushed back into the