Robert Rauschenberg: Early Networks
July 6 - September 17, 2017
Project Room: Ross Tibbles
July 6 - September 17, 2017
Closing
reception: September 17, 6-8 pm
Importantly, this exhibition tells a different kind of story, organized to highlight the specific gallery and museum exhibition networks where Rauschenberg’s work first took hold. Less known than the New York networks are the particulars of Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome—where Rauschenberg and Twombly travelled together in 1952 and where Rauschenberg, Twombly and Johns all exhibited together early. Here, they shared the stage with a surprising number of artists who overlapped with Leo Castelli’s early stable, but also with European artists who did not: Burri, Castellani, Manzoni, and Kounellis, to name a few.
While unknown to American audiences, Galleria La Tartaruga regularly issued elegantly screen-printed, mostly typographic exhibition posters on colored papers in small, squarish formats. About ten are on view in this exhibition. The rare exhibition poster for Rauschenberg’s May 1959 show at Galleria La Tartaruga and screen-printed in brick red ink—the designer is unknown—reflects not only the artist’s interest in typographic mark-making and the “flat bed picture plane,” but also, underscores Rauschenberg’s graphic connection to the legacy of Dada. By the time this was printed, Leo Castelli’s gallery had yet to inaugurate, with full force, what would become a leading poster-publishing program, particularly during the 1960s.
Johns and
Rauschenberg created exceptional, slyly coded artists’ posters for Castelli in
1961: the former with his artist’s poster in January, incorporated stenciled
typography along with an image of his infamous beer cans—this rare poster is present
at Alden Projects™—an explicit nod to de Kooning’s comment about his friend,
Leo Castelli, “That son-of-a bitch, you
could give him two beer cans and he could sell them.” Following Johns, Rauschenberg’s November
1961 poster for his one-person exhibition also contained messages in code. The
poster comprises photographic images of found urban detritus together with fragments
of printed phrases on torn papers, including “Rauschenberg,” “Castelli,” as
well as “2nd week of November” stenciled onto a “found” photograph
within the photograph, all scattered throughout the rubble and nearly indecipherable.
This complex, nearly hermetic composition communicates the graphic power of Rauschenberg’s
materials, collage methods, and its semantic uncertainty. It is one of the
earliest artist’s posters of the era, only very narrowly rising to announce the
bare minimum communicative / instrumental functions of an exhibition
invitation, which otherwise reliably provide clear, specific details about the
event’s time and location. This poster provides clarity, instead, into
Rauschenberg’s particular way of seeing, transforming his audience into
collaborating urban detectives. It would not be any surprise if most people encountering
this poster in its earliest reception missed both the event and the location of
its encrypted messaging system.
Rauschenberg’s 1963 poster for his one-person exhibition at The Jewish Museum was handled with the same process and care given to the artist’s prints: lithographed onto thick paper from a large stone plate, the poster was struck by Universal Limited Art Editions, New York (ULAE), who would collaborate with Rauschenberg and Johns on their most consequential print projects throughout the 1960s. Prior to hitting upon the silkscreen technique in 1962, Rauschenberg first turned to lithography: “My lithography is the realization and execution of the fact that anything that creates the image on stone is potential material.” Rauschenberg’s poster for The Jewish Museum is an early example of the time, energy, and importance the artist gave to artist’s ephemera, in contrast with the earlier generation of artists (e.g. de Kooning) who were more interested in painting and the vertical axis of nature than they were in the horizontal, graphic axis of signs and their reproducibility (beer cans, scavenged photos, posters, etc.).
Following the critical success of the Rauschenberg and Johns shows at The Jewish Museum (1963 and 1964 respectively), its Director and curator, Alan Solomon was selected to organize the American contribution to the Venice Biennial in 1964. “Four Seminal Painters” at the American Pavilion included Rauschenberg and Johns along with Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. With the support of the Italian-speaking duo, Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, Solomon was able to persuade the contested jury, to the chagrin of many, to grant Rauschenberg the Biennial’s top prize. French critic, Pierre Restany wrote: “The Rome-New York axis between the two poles of neo-geometrism and modern folklore constituted the true scope of the Biennale.” Rauschenberg, Castelli and Sonnabend’s affinities with the Rome network (including Galleria La Tartaruga) paid off handsomely.
Rauschenberg, Johns, and other Leo Castelli-associated artists to follow (including Warhol and Lichtenstein) achieved worldwide notoriety through the support of visionary publishing and publicity programs. Innovated by a specific network of players who shared collaborative and expansive undertakings, they championed the ephemeral printed format of the artists’ poster that, in many ways, was particularly well suited to the reproductive visions of these artists. Rauschenberg was drawn to the democratic promises of the poster, nearly all of which were freely distributed. But he was also drawn to the poster in the early 1960s as a freshly discovered context for printing ephemeral messages, fleeting and unfixed. While contemporary museum culture often looks upon the artist’s poster as the unwanted stepchild of art, it remains irrefutable that Rauschenberg’s graphic interest in the reproductive space of the exhibition announcement—including shifting markers of the here-and-now—manifests with particular, and local purpose the artist’s attempts to expand not only the materials, techniques and frontiers of art, but also to transform audiences into active collaborators who are invited to discover art in unexpected places—including, perhaps, the date-stamped poster arriving in yesterday’s mail.
© Todd Alden 2017