Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (review)

Leonardo Reviews 237 ure out why people like myself had to persuade themselves that, in the times of the Net, such exclusions should not be allowed. The contents of the subsite do not contain anything of a particularly female nature, or would one think that something about Ada Lovelace is, because of her name, perhaps? In the end, I believe I understood the naming of the topic as a clever move to get everybody more interested in the information contained here. Colors of a conspicuously feminine nature abound in the site, but why are they not carried through from the topic buttons to the pages behind the buttons ? Such a color-design decision would help orientation and navigation. This observation leads me to a more general remark on formal aspects of the site: its form is simple and, in a way, clear, but it almost totally lacks a discipline of design. The many lessons of presenting text against a background, important as they are for a site that is almost 100 percent text, seem virtually unknown to the authors. The designers play with the design of the buttons that lead to topics or subtopics . These buttons are large, colored squares with words explaining their meanings in varying script-like fonts. The size of the buttons has no justification , neither has their typography. In fact, they make navigation complicated at times, as their size may force one to scroll down in order to see a full listing of the choices available. Of course, there is a bare word-list of those choices at the bottom of such pages, but one first has to get there by passing the picture -buttons. The script font used in the button texts does not get taken up on the pages belonging to the buttons. It is annoying to me to read about the career of one artist under the heading of “Multimedia,” when under such a heading one might expect an explanation of the subject. If one then read about the same artist under the heading of “Graphic Design,” one could think this was intentional. Yes, okay, I am probably just missing the intention. Is it true, however , that a useful site does not strive for aesthetic pleasure? Likely, the male in me is not capable of grasping the particular aesthetics of this site. Altogether, the site is full of references and contains a fair number of useful texts, but is poorly designed and virtually devoid of aesthetics—or of a definite aesthetics. EXHIBIT ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: A RETROSPECTIVE Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, November 1998–7 March 1999. Reviewed by Roger F. Malina, Laboratoire d’Astronomie Spatiale (LAS)/CNRS, Traverse du Syphon, 12eme Arr., BP 8, 13376 Marseilles Cedex 12, France. E-mail: . If, as Gaston Bachelard asserted, the true destiny of a great artist is a lifetime of hard work, then surely this retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s work is a prime illustration. Almost 50 years of hard work are represented in this large show, which fills two-thirds of the spacious galleries of the new Guggenheim in Bilbao, on the northern coast of Spain. The artist has digested much of the art-making of the last half century with supreme craftsmanship, experimented with technological and social issues and succeeds in presenting a single artist’s vision of what it was all about. For readers of Leonardo, Robert Rauschenberg’s name may be unavoidably linked to the influential work of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology ), which he co-founded in the 1960s with Billy Kluver (among others). The retrospective includes a number of works from the E.A.T. period, including a number of pieces in the “Oracle” and “Soundings” series. The pieces are shown as free-standing sculptures or installations , regrettably divorced from the context of the “Nine Evenings” and other works of the E.A.T. collaborators. The pieces here include motorized and electrical mechanisms and soundgenerating devices. Soundings, a large mural of mirrored plexiglass, displays its contents in response to sound-actuated interior lights. Other works, which make use of plexiglass disks, can be manipulated by spectators. Divorced from their context, these artworks seem rather tame—in the Tinguely...