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Modernism/modernity 12.2 (2005) 360-362



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Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde. Branden W. Joseph. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 418. $34.95 (cloth).

Brandon W. Joseph has embarked upon the ambitious project of reconstructing the essential part of Robert Rauschenberg's oeuvre. He carries this out by making a point or, rather, by making two related and intertwined points, whose unfolding presents different levels of complexity and difficulty. The project's backbone is formed by a meticulous reconstruction of Rauschenberg's work and ideas through a period of roughly two decades. Joseph points out that the reasons why Rauschenberg's project ended in the sixties are essentially related to historical circumstances. [End Page 360]

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the icons of American art. Born in Texas in 1925, he studied in Kansas City, Paris and at Black Mountain College. On his White Paintings, the first of which date from 1951, the only image is that cast by the spectator's shadow. It was this series which made Herbert Read remark that Rauschenberg is the "most sensual of painters."1 From almost the beginning of his career an influential figure in Rauschenberg's life was John Cage, and the reverse was also true: "Cage has always been clear that his infamous 4'33" of silence was composed after seeing Rauschenberg's White Paintings" (42). Rauschenberg soon went on to create black paintings. Whereas the white paintings functioned as neutral projection screens and as windows on the world, the black paintings stressed their material existence and presence. Together with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg represents the best of American neo-dada.

Some of Rauschenberg's projects or works are seen as appertaining to conceptual art: in the earliest of such cases Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing which he then erased. In this work, entitled Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Rauschenberg left only the title and the frame, while adding his own signature. Rauschenberg had also undergone the abstract expressionist experience—not to mention that he was for some time confused with Pop Art. Peter Wollen remarked that, "Rauschenberg and Johns were initially Warhol's role models in the art world"—an observation supported by Rauschenberg's statement: "Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio" (131).2 In his works Rauschenberg used a plethora of techniques and materials, extending his artistic practices to performances, dance, earthworks, light, and sound. In 1964 he won the first prize at the Venice Biennial.

Joseph's first claim in Random Order is: "[I]t is my position that a satisfactory comprehension of Rauschenberg's work requires nothing less than an understanding of the particularly 'neo' aspects of his avant-garde project and the ways in which they differ from the dominant practices and understandings of both his predecessors in the 1910s and 1920s and his minimalist contemporaries in the 1960s and beyond" (16). He then concentrates upon the relation between Rauschenberg and Cage, with the aim of proving that they brought a new paradigm into existence.

Nonetheless, Joseph claims—and this, then, is his second point—that Rauschenberg initiated a specific and distinct strand of neo-avant-garde art. The work of Rauschenberg and Cage, he claims, "forged an avant-garde project that did not depend on recovering the already-liquidated spaces of subjective autonomy or stable, critical distance but nevertheless opposed the instrumental signification and stultifying pseudo-differentiation of commodity production" (23).

From the White Paintings on, Rauschenberg attempted to avoid representational meaning, but just as John Cage discovered, and has proven, that silence was not in a binary opposition to music, so Rauschenberg discovered that the most persuasive way to avoid meaning was to follow the random order of contingency pioneered by Marcel Duchamp. As Cage put it, Rauschenberg's objects, too, were to be understood "as fact, not symbol" (162). Or in Rauschenberg's own words: "What interests me is a contact; it is not to express a message" (267...

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