the peanut gallery
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Posts tagged "arts and crafts":
9 December 2009. 21:45
In allowing himself to work with practically any material and very little intent, Rauschenberg could achieve arrangements of objects that created meaning in each other instead of relying on the artist. His teacher Josef Albers had emphasized the dramatic ability for the feeling of a color to change in its interaction with other adjacent colors, and Rauschenberg found that similar effects came about by the juxtaposition of materials in his own painting. Where the abstract expressionists used spontaneity as a tool to delve into their subconscious in a search for hidden truths, Rauschenberg used it as an assurance that his own personality or creative pretense would not slip in. His ultimate goal: achieve total “self-annihilation” in the finished product—a complete reversal of the abstract expressionists struggle to reveal the true self.
Reservoir is unique among the combines in that it introduces the notion of time explicitly, an element that was always implicitly important to Rauschenberg’s art. Indeed, he justified his hectic working style by this fact, saying “I want my paintings to be reflections of life, and life can’t be stopped.” Temporality is precisely what undermines the validity of induction, says Hume, and likewise, time itself is exactly what eliminates the possibility of gaining the inductive knowledge that Rauschenberg tempts us with in Reservoir. These competing facts of existence—that time is continuous, and that time will obliterate fixed meanings—are directly at odds with the heroic pursuit of the abstract expressionist, who strives for a timeless inner purity that has been somehow obscured by present experience.
2 December 2009. 21:45
“The world described in these landscapes is untouched by change. There is no sense either of the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere or of the passing of time or season. Nature is arrested at the point of blossoming, at its most perfect. It is always summer; it never rains. A world without space and air, it is claustrophobic. There are no wide vistas. Klimt’s view of nature seems calculated to sooth the nerves of an agoraphobic. Every square inch of the surface is crammed with incident.”
This assessment could not be further from the truth with Large Poplar II. Storm clouds are gathering, an obvious sign of change, atmospheric effect, and time passing. It literally does rain; perhaps this is his only landscape where rain occurs. Besides the poplar, there is essentially nothing but open space and air—an agoraphobe’s nightmare. Nature is not arrested at its perfect point of bloom, but rather at its perfect point of chaos and uncertainty. The shadowy foreground figure is just icing on the cake.
