Essay: 'Collection'

Collection: Robert Raushenberg and his first Combine

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to describe and underline the interest that Collection, one of the first Raushenberg’s Combines, has provoked in me, and how consequently it has been relevant within my work, in its aesthetic appearance but also within its thoughtful composition and meaning. This piece will contains information and an illustration of the artist’s work in question, as well as a brief description of the artist’s style, analysing the formal aspect of his work, and incorporating the philosophy concealed behind it, which is related within my work. It also will enclose Leo Steinberg’s evaluation and critique of the artist’s work, compared with my own analysis. Moreover, this piece will lay out how, according to Rosalind Krauss, the theory of Raushenberg’s work is a recall to the work of Marcel Duchamp. It will also describe the importance concealed behind the use and transformation of the objects within his paintings, highlighting the significance of the relationship between the artist and the external environment.

Collection 1954

Robert Raushenberg’s Combines represent the invention of a form of art which fuses, in an amazing and unique structured messiness, both painting and sculpture, making non-traditional materials and objects, protagonists of a theatrical aesthetic appearance. “Characterized by intimacy, vitality, and authenticity, the Combines are a direct result of their relationship to the life of the artist” , relationship which is visible, especially in his early Combine paintings, through the incorporation of specific elements that were part of the artist’s own life story. In fact, Raushenberg wrote, and affirmed varies time in different interviews:

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)”

This is an admirable and influential statement in which the artist clearly emphasizes the importance of integrating within his works both materials and experiences, a combination of factors which highlights his attitude and “feeling that art should open itself as completely as possible to the surrounding environment. Collection is one of the first of Raushenberg’s works fully to celebrate the variety of feelings he connected with the city” , capturing all the metropolis’ various experiences. According to Paul Schimmel, it is also the first major Combines together with Charlene (1954), sharing a similar aim within their large and complex compositions. However, while Charlene is closer to the format of previous works by Raushenberg, Collection is more an anticipation of his future work, Rebus (1955) . Theatrical in all its forms, Collection fully expresses “confusion and messiness” , also reflecting the artist’s “feelings of excitement in New York” , beautifully described from the chaotic fusion of different objects and materials contained within the painting itself, such as oil paint, fabric, paper, newspaper, wood, metal, printed reproduction, mirror, and metaphorically comparable to the roughness of the metropolis in which the artist lived. A three panels work, from the damage look, which is dominated by the Red colour, in this case representing the aggressiveness of the Newyorkese environment, that consequently was classified as one of the Red Paintings which he created between 1953 and 1954.

“I picked what was for me the most difficult colour at the time to work with- the one I consider the most aggressive” .

Collection, titled by the artist only in 1976, is part of his first Combines, more painterly than sculptural, enriched by the beauty of its material/collage, but also by the intensity and the brightness of the red, yellow and blue stripes. This piece became a very strong influence within my work, mainly for its structured messiness, for its thoughtful chaotic order, in which the experimentation of the third world painting/sculpture, and the exploration of the fusion of the vast range of materials and colours, are the key concepts for the realisation of a true, real piece of art.

“I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world” .

Collection, has been also very influential within my work, regarding the importance concealed behind it, about the relationship between the artist and the external environment, a surrounding which is continuously stimulating and enriching feelings and emotions, that consequently are capable to create another reality in which they are expressed under different forms. As a whole, Collection is an extremely fine piece of art which is able to transmit, through is sophisticated disorder, the variety of feelings hidden inside its creation.

Raushenberg, Stainberg and I

Raushenberg’s crucial role in exploding earlier limits of art, has been subject of discussion in Art History. American art historian Leo Steinbeirg, born in 1920s, studied and critiqued the work of Robert Raushenberg, during the 1950s and 1960s, in the exciting art world of New York. He evaluates the artist’s work, emphasizing how the New York art scene, during the 50s, had a great shift with Raushenberg’s paintings: “What he invented above all was, I think, a pictorial surface that let the world in again.” Steinberg obviously refers to the amazing experimentation that the artist included within his paintings, a vast variety of objects, also with a personal meaning, that created a unique and unmistakable style, where the surfaces of the works hold a fusion of materials and experiences. The art historian also refers to Raushenbrg’s paintings as the work that “is for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city.” A psycho-analytical critique that highlights what is the essential, within the artist’s theory of the work, namely the personal feelings with which Raushenberg dealt during his period in New York. Of course, this chaotic state of being is transmittable and excepted with enthusiasm to anyone that had his ‘consciousness immersed in the brain of the city’, imagining the work itself as personal, as different thoughts finally becoming visible. This is what makes me totally agree with Steinberg’s critique, and also truly appreciate and esteem Raushenberg’s work, in a sense that whenever an artist is able to make you feel his/her work as yours, the work itself is already a success. “The all-purpose picture plane underlying this post-modernist painting has made the course of art once again nonlinear and unpredictable” , and these nonlinearity and unpredictability is just the result of a fantastic freedom of expression, that can be only pursued by an artist whose major ambition is to break boundaries. Raushenberg shifted art to another level, making people think and attracting them to what normally they see every day, but under different forms; through his work he is able to suggest to the viewer feelings and thoughts, which remind a chaotic emotional state, present in the real life. Therefore, the importance of acting between art and life, as Raushenberg said, is essential to create that unique and valuable relationship between the artist, the image and the viewer, also emphasised by adding real materials to the work itself.

Historical and Theoretical contexts

Robert Raushenberg (1925-2008) is one of the most important and prolific visual artists of the post-war period, and reached his success in the 1950s, between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. He was most well known for his Combines, his work, however, also ranged across various disciplines, such as photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance, work which made him one of the most influential figures in avant-garde art since the 1950s. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Academie Julian in Paris, whilst in 1948 he attended the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Josef Albers, formerly at the Bauhaus school, became his painting tutor. Consequently, from 1949 to 1952, Raushenberg studied at the Art Students’ League in New York. Starting with minimalist monochromatic painting, in the mid 1950s he began to include non-traditional materials and three-dimensional objects into what he called ‘Combine painting’, creating a unique style. Together with his friend, painter Jasper Jhons, “Raushenberg is regarded as one of the most important figure in the move away from the Abstract Expressionism” , followers of the Duchamp’s readymade. The presence of the commodity, and the questioning suggested by his work, regarding the distinction between art objects and every day objects are a continuous response to the work of Marcel Duchamp: “In relation to the question of the aesthetic primacy of conception over commodity, Raushenberg’s and Johns’s affinities with the work of Duchamp are entirely consistent. This is so even though the specific aspects of Duchamp’s art toward which the two men established a relationship, differed as their own work developed in tangential direction.” Raushenberg’s use of ordinary trash objects in his Combines is a clear statement of a personal identification with the image itself, a way of telling a personal story expressed sensibly by the relationship between the materials/objects and the paintings. According to Rosalind Krauss as for Duchamp the images were floating in his glass paintings, for Raushenberg a vast range of fabric and materials were suspended within the pictorial representation. But the originality of the artist’s Combines shifted him to another level in art history, “because the image was always a case of mapping: of translating a three-dimensional thing onto a two-dimensional field”. This unique relationship between materials and images has the power to transform the painting dimension, where from object the work become image as a whole. Therefore, the image was not just a conversion of the object, but it was a complete rearrangement of it. In this way the painting is capable of removing the object from its common place within this world, giving it a new position in a totally different context. In Raushenberg’s work the main subject is the image as a whole, and not the different objects that have been relocated. This is why, his paintings, acquire such an important role in expressing the artist personal story, and his own feelings in relationship to the ambient in which he lived. Raushenberg’s capacity of expressing in total freedom his emotional state, relocating and transforming the meaning of every day objects, in his enviable and unique ‘Random Order’ Combines, made him one of the most influential figures within the avant-garde movement, who set the course for the generation of artists that followed. His work made him one of the most inventive artists of his period, who also created a significant transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.

Conclusion

To summarise Robert Raushenberg’s Combine has been and still is a very big influence within my work, not just for its aesthetic appearance, but also for the interesting theory concealed behind it. The relationship that he established working with materials, has been a new door opened in art history. A new way of using the object, not just as a form of rebellion in order to provoke the public, but in order to initiate a relationship with an object that, while dealing with it, makes you think of how it can continue to live in a different environment, acquiring a different meaning. His use of non-traditional materials and objects showed an attempt to engage with the world in all its complexity and contradiction. For Raushenberg the importance of acting between the gap of art and life was a vital element within his work, considering that for him everything started out on the street, the environment from which he was surrounded was his muse. “Through his art we can experience the liberation of the real in its fragmented reduction to image…His work carried things from reality into unrealistic situations”. Collection, and all his other Combines, is a great example in how life can be opened to art, and it suggests an important instigation direct to the public in initiating a connection between the two worlds: Art and Life.

“I don’t want my personality to come out through the piece…I want my paintings to be reflections of life…your self-visualization is a reflection of your surroundings”.

Word Count: 1996

Bibliography

Chilvers, Ian. Oxford Reference, The concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. Oxford University Press,1990.

Krauss, Rosalind, Raushenberg and the Materialized Image, October Files Robert Raushenberg, Branden W. Joseph, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002.

Mattison, Robert S. Robert Raushenberg Braking Boundaries. Yale University press, New Haven and London, 2003.

Schimmel, Paul. Robert Raushenberg Combines. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Steidl Verlag, 2005.

Steinberg, Leo, Reflections on the State of Criticism, October Files Robert Raushenberg, Branden W. Joseph, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002.