Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Cage, explored ways to limit the artist’s control over the final result, mainlyby trying to make the viewer work harder and become more involved inthe process.A couple of years later, Rauschenberg had progressed to incorporatingcollage elements and found objects into his paintings. Imitating his idolde Kooning, Rauschenberg integrated the added objects by quick, agitatedbrush strokes, drips, and splatters. He was using collage elements to bypasshis own personal taste and to reproduce the nonorder he perceived in lifearound him. He wanted to let materials be (or become) themselves withouthis own personality interfering. His artwork was a form of collaboration withmaterials. He used such items as mirrors, umbrellas, pages from magazines,electric light bulbs, windows, and dirt. Juxtapositions of such unrelatedobjects seemed to reflect the breakdown of linear, cause-and-effect thinkingin modern science and philosophy as well as the all-at-once lifestyle of NewYork City (where he now lived). He began to think of himself as a reporter,bearing witness to the tense, constantly changing life around him.Rauschenberg became close friends with artist Jasper Johns in1954–1955, leading to an intense aesthetic interchange. They were also influencedby the early experimental “popular imagery” paintings of LarryRivers, who in 1953 combined a parodied image of Washington Crossingthe Delaware with the spontaneous, sketchy, gestural painting of abstractexpressionism. By 1955 Rauschenberg had begun incorporating still largerobjects into his paintings, which spilled out into the space around them.Turning Renaissance perspective illusion inside out, he built his pictures outinto the viewer’s space, using objects such as automobile wheels, electriclight fixtures, stuffed animals and birds, pieces of furniture, and pillows.These new works, somewhere between painting and sculpture, were called“combines” or “combine-paintings” (Figure 21). Although often taken asjokes, many of these were actually arch, subtle commentaries on the idealsof the New York School. For example, Factum I and Factum II, two virtuallyidentical collage paintings of 1957, were intended as a satire on abstractexpressionism’s elevation of spontaneity and unique personal expression.While Rauschenberg’s use of everyday and commercial objects inhis combines (as well as in several theatrical “happenings”) helped preparethe way for the pop art of the 1960s, he used them more indiscriminatelythan the pop artists would. He also continued to use paint in the spontaneousstyle of de Kooning, whereas most pop artists tried to imitate the slick,impersonal surfaces of commercial art. Rauschenberg intentionally avoidedexerting total control over his creative work, trying to accept the world andits disorder as it was and collaborate with it, thereby loosening the boundary135