This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by carol starr [EMAIL PROTECTED] FLUXLIST FYI carol starr [EMAIL PROTECTED] /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Celebrate Summer with a NYTimes.com Photo Screensaver NYTimes.com's latest screensaver captures the unforgettable moments from Coney Island amusement park. Enjoy these images every day on your computer, absolutely free. http://www.nytimes.com/partners/screensaver/index.html?eta2 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Rauschenberg, the Irrepressible Ragman of Art August 27, 2000 By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN CAPTIVA, Fla. -- WHEN Robert Rauschenberg was a boy, his mother used to make him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Collage shirts. She even made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother, Luther, was being buried in, because she didn't want the material to go to waste. For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. A decade or so later he made history with assemblages of junk; sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and red paintings like "Yoicks" sewn from fabric strips. Now, on an August evening, Mr. Rauschenberg is home making oyster stew to the dull murmur of a television set with the volume turned low. He has a television on all the time. There's a television in the studio. Sometimes he glances at the television as he cooks. He cooks the way he makes art: ingredients change, spur of the moment. He's an improviser, like his mother, resuscitating scraps. When he settled on this slender island off Florida's Gulf coast 30 years ago, he lived in a modest beach house and worked out of a studio so small he couldn't get back far enough to see the big paintings he was working on. So he built a wall away from the house to lean the paintings against. He would scramble up to his kitchen and look out the window, the only way to have a good view. "I thought it was magical," he says. "There were only 500 people on the island. At the time everybody in New York was making the big migration to the Hamptons. Not me." Mr. Rauschenberg is now Captiva's biggest residential landowner. He acquired the land by at first buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors, whom he let live rent free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, not counting the sheds and service buildings. He has almost all that remains of tropical jungle on the island. He has another studio, a 17,000-square-foot two-story behemoth overlooking a swimming pool. His assistants call it the Taj Mahal, a joke he doesn't find particularly funny. Sometimes sea otters wander into the pool from the gulf. Mr. Rauschenberg was first intimidated by the studio, pristine like a vast operating theater, and hesitated before settling in. He took a while to adjust to a new house, too, dawdling for months before leaving his old place. The living room of the new house is the size of the entire old house and empty except for pictures on the walls, a couch at one end and, at the other, a Ping-Pong table next to a galley kitchen, where he is cooking at the moment. At 74, he is an American institution, the paradoxical fact of an anti-orthodox career. Nine people now work for him -- several of them have been with him for 20 years -- and they include a computer specialist, welders and fabricators. ("I hate the word fabricator," he says, joking as usual. "It means liar, doesn't it?") The materials he and his assistants now use reflect the price of the art, his early work having been notoriously ephemeral, to the distress of collectors who paid fortunes for it. By contrast, the recent work is extravagantly durable. There is also a gardener who doubles as a frame maker, and a secretary who helps with the plumbing. All are part of a small industry and also "a small family," in the words of Mr. Rauschenberg's friend and assistant Darryl Pottorf, an artist who designed the new studio and new house. Mr. Pottorf, whose brother, Kevin, works here as well, has been around for 20 years. "I'm a lousy boss," Mr. Rauschenberg says, looking at Mr. Pottorf. "You're not a boss," Mr. Pottorf says. "That's what I mean." Mr. Rauschenberg smiles, perhaps not for the first time at this exchange. His latest show, "Synapsis Shuffle," at the Whitney, like a lot of his work in recent years, hasn't been too warmly received. But, materials aside, he continues to make art the way he always has, as if it were the equivalent of breathing, and he sustains an optimistic equanimity toward the results. Jasper Johns once said that no American artist has invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Creatively, he is still the most irrepressible artist. For "Synapsis Shuffle" he asked a group that included Mike Ovitz, Martha Stewart, Merce Cunningham and Mathilda Krim to make their own configurations from among 52 new large photo-transfer panels by him, everyone picking lots to establish the order of selection. Chance and collaboration, the two biggest themes in Mr. Rauschenberg's career, were linked with an element of irony, the irony possibly having got somewhat lost, well, in the shuffle. "I wanted experts," he says, making quotation marks in the air. "I wanted people who were supposed to be experts to make art." Alternatively, he thought of having the first dozen taxi drivers who stopped at the Whitney pick the panels. "The museum asked me about the lights, the floor, but a work like this has got to exist on its own, with its own muscles and mistakes," he says. An anti-orthodox career created, paradoxically, an American icon with great wealth, universal recognition, a staff of nine and a spacious studio on a Florida isle. Muscles. As with found objects and materials, Mr. Rauschenberg uses words sneakily. At one point he mentions that when he used to play Scrabble with his mother (she died last year at the age of 97) the two of them accepted made-up words if they agreed that the words ought to be in the dictionary. "Screwing things up is a virtue," he explains, partly about Scrabble but also about "Synapsis Shuffle," for which he set rules, then allowed them to be broken, conceding that players could trade panels or turn them to the wall, as Dr. Krim did. "Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea." So with Mr. Rauschenberg you go with the flow. His flow. Serendipity and also control: the essence of his art. He is garrulous, back-slapping, mildly naughty, more resilient physically than he ought to be, adept at publicly disguising whatever might be his temper or disappointment. These days he has a half-dozen projects percolating. He's designing announcements for a new Merce Cunningham performance. He just signed off on prints for Al Gore's campaign, to raise money for the Democratic Party, and for Hillary Clinton: elephants seen from the rear, a broom, a donkey. "No point being subtle," he says. He photographed the elephants in a Zurich animal park, the donkey in Venezuela, years ago, when he was working on the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, ROCI (a word-play on the name of his old pet turtle, Rocky). The project was the culmination of lifelong collaborative ambitions, ROCI being a mammoth art chain-letter that toured the world. Hundreds of his photographs from it and elsewhere are stockpiled in the studio by country and date. He can recall photographs 30 or more years old. As he needs them, pictures are got from the files, scanned into a computer by an assistant, Lauren Getford, printed to spec and stacked on long tables, where they wait, like his brushes and containers of paint, to be used, or not, since he constantly changes his mind. "I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop," he says. "At the time that I am bored or understand -- I use those words interchangeably -- another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore." Mr. Rauschenberg has just finished a series for a show this fall at PaceWildenstein in New York. He says it is about struggling against what he knows how to do, about doing what's unnatural. The works in the living room and around the studio belong to that series. Meanwhile, two years' labor on a mural for a Renzo Piano cathedral in Italy, commissioned by the Vatican, has gone for naught, he says disgustedly. The Vatican, among other things, didn't like that he represented God as a gold satellite dish. "You know -- a halo, and also something that hears everything, knows everything." Mr. Rauschenberg is perfectly sincere. "The subject of the mural was the Apocalypse, and I think I handled the destruction of the world as gently as possible." Having once thought of becoming a priest, he may have had more invested in this project than in others. He backed out rather than even discuss making changes. "Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics," he adds. Flashing on the television at that moment is Lauren Hutton. Mr. Rauschenberg touches the screen. Ms. Hutton is the host of an annual benefit he organizes for an abused women's shelter in Fort Myers, Fla. Sharon Stone was the host last year. A framed photograph of her is in the kitchen. Mr. Rauschenberg raises or donates hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for charities for women, children, medical research, politicians, artists. When added to the business of what has become a major operation, a chunk of time -- too much, you can sense he thinks -- now goes into being Robert Rauschenberg, which is not the same thing as making Robert Rauschenbergs. Certainly this is not what he had imagined 50 years ago, when it seemed as if nobody wanted anything from him. Or almost nobody. The often reproduced photographs of him and Susan Weil making silhouette negatives on blueprint paper, Mr. Rauschenberg's breakthrough pictures, were for Life magazine in 1951. The way a serendipitist works: 'A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore.' There was other media attention too. But the New York art world after the war was in some ways even more circumscribed and harder to succeed in than it had been during the war. Peggy Guggenheim's gallery was closed. So was Stuart Levy's. Many of the European artists who had waited out Hitler in New York, enlarging the local culture, had returned to Europe. Duchamp was around but lying low. "Jasper and I broke into his privacy," Mr. Rauschenberg says. "Duchamp knew who we were because his wife knew everything and everyone. She was his reporter." HERE were just a few dealers representing new work: Betty Parsons, Samuel Kootz, Sidney Janis, Charles Egan. "Egan used to open his gallery in the morning and head for the bar," Mr. Rauschenberg fondly recalls. "You could go there at 9 at night and it was still open and there was the art on the walls and nobody was around. "Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics then. That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It's the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn't have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change." Mr. Rauschenberg and Cage became friends not when they were at Black Mountain College, as people think, but after Cage happened into Mr. Rauschenberg's first show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951, and asked for one of the paintings. He was the only person who did. Cage and Mr. Rauschenberg rendezvoused a year later at Mr. Rauschenberg's loft, where, as Mr. Rauschenberg tells the story, the only place to sit was on his mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward and said that he was going away for a while so Mr. Rauschenberg should stay over at his place because Mr. Rauschenberg's mattress must have bedbugs. At Cage's apartment, Mr. Rauschenberg decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, spur of the moment, as a kind of thank you, painting it black, being in the midst of his all-black paintings at the time. Then Cage returned. He was not amused. "We both thought, 'Here was somebody crazier than I am,' " Mr. Rauschenberg recalls. "That's why we got along so well. John said I was natural Zen while he had to choose between studying Zen or going to a psychiatrist, and Zen seemed like the better alternative." Cage also recognized what you might call the sympathetic music in Mr. Rauschenberg's art -- the silence of the all-white paintings, for example. Even the famous "Automobile Tire Print," for which Cage drove his Model-A Ford over a long strip of paper that Mr. Rauschenberg unrolled outside his studio on Fulton Street in 1953, besides taking a funny swipe at Barnett Newman's "zip" paintings, was a "concrete" score. At least, like a score, it was a printed version of their performance. "I was mostly rejected by the visual art world," Mr. Rauschenberg says about the early 50's. "But this turned out to be very lucky for me because my interest in life led me to be involved with musicians and dancers and they became my friends. Not just John and Merce but also Morty Feldman, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown. The problems they were having, I thought, had a lot more to do with painting than the problems of the people at the Cedar Bar, who were just whining about how the latest collector in town had bought a de Kooning instead of one of their paintings. The fastest way to become unpopular at the Cedar Bar was to sell something." The high-beam smile appears. "The thing about the people I was close to in my career is that they wouldn't have been survivors if they didn't have a sense of humor. I remember one time John and Merce were walking ahead of Morty and me, and I was asking Morty how he was doing. 'Haven't you heard?' Morty said. 'I'm the toast of two continents. Australia and Africa.' Those guys didn't get any more encouragement than I did, but they just continued with a vibrancy for life. "I've always been kind of envious of them because they had professions that depended on the moment. That's why I like dancers and musicians -- because I feel that art can be like furniture, static, clumsy. The whole point of collaboration is to counteract that. For me, art shouldn't be a fixed idea that I have before I start making it. I want it to include all the fragility and doubt that I go through the day with. Sometimes I'll take a walk just to forget whatever good idea I had that day because I like to go into the studio not having any ideas. I want the insecurity of not knowing, like performers feel before a performance. Everything I can remember, and everything I know, I have probably already done, or somebody else has." The oyster stew turns out to be delicious, by the way. Mr. Rauschenberg, still going, talking apropos of doing what other people have already done, recalls an idea he once had for an exhibition of paintings imitating different Abstract Expressionists. "Imagine, the luxury, the excessive energy and the iridescent glory of doing a Rothko," he says. "Of course, it would have been blaspheming, but can you think what it would be like to throw yourself into that incredible mood? Then out of respect I decided I wouldn't paint like Rothko or Franz Kline because I'd be in their way and they in mine. That was also John's attitude. Cage always said, There's enough room in the world so that nobody has to be that close to another person." Everything has its place, all things have their value, nothing is extra. I Ching. Mr. Rauschenberg, having shared this philosophy with Cage, nonetheless has trouble when he drifts briefly onto the subject of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the composers. Each of them asked to visit Cage, and afterward each one denounced Cage's music. Mr. Rauschenberg starts to weep suddenly. "John was not the kind of person who would admit hurt because he had enough spiritual belief to think that everything is as it should be -- there is no tragedy. The thing with John is that he didn't separate his work from his life because there was no separation in his mind. He had no ambition because ambition implies growth and he was full already. But I bet he was hurt because it is hurtful to lose a friend." Pause. "When it has happened to me I have a few days of feeling, 'How could I be so gullible?' Then I realize gullibility is a desirable state because it means I'm open. I'm Libra, and Libras are gullible. We lean over backwards while we're walking upright." He's smiling again. "I think you're born an artist or not," he adds. "I couldn't have learned it, and I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations. I wouldn't want to be any less vulnerable than I am."    The New York Times on the Web http://www.nytimes.com /-----------------------------------------------------------------\ Visit NYTimes.com for complete access to the most authoritative news coverage on the Web, updated throughout the day. Become a member today! It's free! http://www.nytimes.com?eta \-----------------------------------------------------------------/ HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
