Ingrid Schaffner

Tag: Black Mountain College

  • “Reflections on Silver Studios.” The Metal Party: reconstructing a party held at the Bauhaus in Dessau on February 9, 1929 / Josiah McElheny. New York: Public Art Fund, 2002, pp. 26-30.

    Reflections on Silver Studios

    In light of Josiah McElheny’s recent reconstruction, it’s a short hop from the Bauhaus Metallic Party to Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, the pop studio environment in New York where a perpetual party reputedly took place from 1964 to 1968. Both were social spectacles of modernism with reflective backdrops: avant-garde events that merged art, fashion, music, dance, decor, even film.[footnote=1] The results were synthetic performance environments where every participant was also a creative constituent in a flow of actions and conversations (to say nothing of constituent participation in imbibing, ingesting, inhaling, and injecting). Together they advance an art history according to which parties signify as art. But what happens when the same retrospective light moves past the seemingly similar dynamics and meaning of the Bauhaus and the Factory and hits metal?

    The same year that Bauhaus students and faculty clanked and tinkled the Dessau Night away at a theme party devoted to metal, another silver studio environment came into being. Isamu Noguchi recalls the influence of his first meetings with Buckminster Fuller: “I first met Mr. Fuller, as I used to call him…at Romany Marie’s [a Greenwich Village artists’ hang-out and café] in 1929. Some time later I got an old laundry room on top of a building on Madison Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street with window all around. Under Bucky’s sway, I painted the whole place silver—so that one was almost blinded by the lack of shadows. There I made his portrait in chrome-plated bronze—also form without shadow.”[footnote=2]

    Reading this, one can almost see the chrome-plated head of Fuller dissolving into the silver backdrop of Noguchi’s studio. But even in less blinding circumstances, the Fuller head is almost impossible to see. The streamlined form appears to melt, like liquid, into its own reflective surfaces. (One writer recently likened the portrait to a car bumper.[footnote=3]) In so doing, it embodies the visionary architect’s machine-age aesthetic. In 1929 Fuller had just completed his plans for the metal Dymaxion House and was trying to find a means of having it industrially reproduced. Nochugi’s bust also makes manifest Fuller’s theory of the “fundamental invisibility” of “completely reflective surfaces.” As Fuller later explained it: “This fundamental invisibility was that of utterly still waters whose presence can be approached only when objects surrounding them are reflected in them…. Then only the distortion of familiar shapes in the surrounding environment could be seen by the viewer. In the brains of the viewer there would be induced a composite constellation of pattern information permitting the secondarily derived recognition of the invisible sculpture’s presence and dimensional relationships.”[footnote=4]

    Likewise, in a consideration of Fuller’s career, it’s the invisible impact of his teachings, writings, friendships, and other indeterminates that matter. He himself was completely unfazed when a geodesic dome—bolted together from venetian blind slat—collapse in the midst of a demonstration. Fuller simply dubbed it “the supine dome.”[footnote=5] This experiment was conducted in 1948 at the Black Mountain College, located just outside of Asheville, North Caroline. When it opened in 1933, the college had inadvertently assumed a legacy from the Munich Bauhaus, which had closed that same year after refusing to admit Nazi students, by bringing Joseph and Anni Albers from there to run the art department. Judging from all accounts, the events that occurred outside the Albers rigorous classroom curricula—the parties, lectures, meals, music, and other happenings—were as integral to the experience of Black Mountain as they were to the Bauhaus.

    Among the faculty who participated in the summer term of 1948 were, besides Fuller, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. It was also the first of the three nonconsecutive years that Robert Rauschenberg attended Black Mountain as a student. Since he didn’t show up until the fall term, he missed both Fuller and Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg says it was de Kooning’s work that inspired him in 1950 to paint the walls of his New York apartment/studio silver. He and Susan Weil, his wife at the time, were living on Ninety-sixth Street. As Rauschenberg told art historian Barbara Rose in a 1987 interview: “Betty [Parsons, the art dealer] came over to see some paintings. There was a man with her, looking very grim. Clyfford Still. She came into my studio with Clyfford Still. He didn’t even look up. We had problems. We had a Scottie that ate goldfish and stole butter. I had painted the house silver. I had noticed at the time Bill de Kooning would paint silver around the edges, the restrictions of an image on canvas. Noticing how well that worked, I had painted my house silver inside, thinking it might improve my own paintings.”[footnote=6]

    As incidental as this story may sound, it is also wildly suggestive. Four years before his first “Combines” upended distinctions between painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg was already thinking outside the frame. Three years before he asked de Kooning to give him a drawing in order to erase it, he was already consigning aspects of abstract expressionism to decor. Rauschenberg’s silver studio was short-lived—perhaps not enduring much past that studio visit, with eventually led to the 1951 gallery show that launched his professional career.

    Rauschenberg’s determination to engage de Kooning seems mirrored, a decade later, by Warhol’s determination to ingratiate himself to Rauschenberg. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is Warhol’s elegiac 1963 silkscreen portrait of Rauschenberg, based on family photographs Warhol solicited from him. At the time, Warhol had not yet moved into the East Forty-seventh Street space that would become known as the Silver Factory, so-called after his assistant Billy Name covered the interior in silver paint and foil. Warhol had enjoyed the effect when he first saw it while attending one of Name’s home hair-cutting parties.[footnote=7] (Indeed Warhol, a wig-wearer, must have also enjoyed the experience of watching people getting their hair done in this silvery domain, as the party inspired him to make a new film Haircut, starring Name.) In January 1964, he asked Name to decorate the new Factory space just like his apartment, in mirrors and foil.

    The light on the Factory’s aluminum surfaces has a tarnished, campy glow, like burned-out movie screens. It is completely unlike the shiny brilliance of metal (and its promise) at the Bauhaus party, which is, furthermore, unlike the revisionist light of McElheny’s postmodern reconstruction. In short, as this brief metallurgy proves: not all silver studios are created equal! And yet, there they are, a surprising ongoing trope of modernism as reflected in metallic surfaces. What these spaces do seem to share in common, however, is a desire to collapse the distinction between different disciplines—to provide a single foil, if you will, for music, dance, painting, sculpture, haircutting, etc. to occur against. Silvering also speaks of the will to break down basic figure/ground relationships, to create new fields, or contexts, in which to perceive works of art—fields, like parties, where people meet, things happen, and maybe someone goes home and paints the walls silver.

    Acknowledgments.

    I would like to thank Geoffrey Batchen, Susan Davidson, Donna Ghelerter, Brandon Joseph, Walter Hopps, David White, and Matt Wrbican for their insights and interest in this essay.

     

  • “Rauschenberg’s Photographies.” Afterimage, 25, no. 5 (March/April 1998), p. 15.

    Rauschenberg’s Photographies

    The first work by Robert Rauschenberg to enter a public collection was a pair of black and white photographs purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department. In light of the noisy Pop assemblages for which Rauschenberg is known, these are straightforward pictures—a buggy and a portrait of his artist friend Cy Twombly: classic American silents with a streak of Surrealism. They also speak of the artist’s early ambition. As a student at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, where  Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind were fellow students, and where Rauschenberg received his first photography instruction from Hazel Larsen Archer, Rauschenberg says he was temporarily tempted to become a photographer. Ultimately he took a less focused course, making art into “the kind of adventure [he] enjoyed, like walking down the street,” often with a camera in hand.

    As benefits its subject—a painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, dancer, performance artist, theater set designer, fresco painter, Mud Muse-maker, world traveler, new technologies buff and first postmodernist—Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective is a gargantuan show. In New York, it filled both the Guggenheim Museum’s uptown and Soho locations, then spilled over into Ace Gallery, a veritable bunker of commercial gallery space on the fringe of Soho, where The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, a large-scale, Pop-operatic installation that has been unfurling since 1981, was on view. Organized for the museum by Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson of The Menil Collection with an important contribution on Rauschenberg’s performance by the Museum’s own Nancy Spector, the curatorial conceit is distinctly Hopps’s. In the catalog (also mammoth), Hopps compares Rauschenberg, to the artist Charles Willson Peale, who, in a well-known self portrait of 1822, proudly pulls back a curtain to reveal his seemingly endless collection of art and artifacts—the first museum in America. (For which, Peale subsidized the excavation of an entire mastodon skeleton.) The same analogy might be extended to Hopps, who staged the first Rauschenberg survey as a Bicentennial event in 1976 for the Smithsonian, and who once again pulls back the curtain, this time on a presentation composed by a lifetime’s intimacy, enthusiasm and full participation in the artist’s love of the encyclopedic. The exhibition is nearly a catalog raisonné in the round. For the viewer, it’s a lot—really too much—to absorb, and no doubt would be better served by fewer works. But for the Rauschenberg devotee (myself included), this was an opportunity to see the work on its own super-abundant terms and to explore in detail the roles and guises of one of its most consistent means: photography.

    Rauschenberg was introduced to the photogram technique in 1950 by Susan Weil (their collaborative photograms were included in the 1951 MoMA exhibition). In one of these almost life-sized studies, a woman washed in light clutches a cane as if to keep from blowing away in the wind that is billowing her skirts. It’s a ghostly image, fixing in blueprint the shadows that Rauschenberg originally envisioned flitting across his pure white paintings of 1951. (At the Guggenheim the White Paintings were rendered purely conceptual [really defunct] by barriers on the floor that keep viewers and their unruly shadows impossibly at bay.) Altogether these first works—the prints, photograms, white canvases—are emblematic of Rauschenberg’s indexical approach to representation: non-narrative, radically ephemeral and, in that the pictures practically make themselves, almost un-authored. The presence of Marcel Duchamp—who also liked to play with shadows, to casually mark junctures of time and space and who preferred to leave things open in his art—looms large over these first gestures by Rauschenberg.

    What makes Rauschenberg’s work so compelling (and perhaps prolific) is that the opposite impulses—to make pictures, to narrate, to construct allegory, to invent—are equally profound. The critical precedent here—explicitly conjured by early collages and box-like constructions (such as the Scatole Personali of 1952) and later called forth through concert themes—is Joseph Cornell. Both artists create worlds out of ephemera, trash and photography, collected, collated, collages into art. And like Cornell, who compulsively stocked photographs of favorite images, Rauschenberg’s art can also be read in terms of an archive. Over time, images routinely re-appear (the Rokeby Venus, John F. Kennedy, a pail), at first as if through convenience (pictures near at hand), then more rigorously recycled, as if refining the elements in a grand narrative. This has its pragmatic aspect: in 1980 Rauschenberg was sued for copyright infringement. He has since drawn more heavily on his photographs, making the structure of his archive—its limits, its themes—increasingly apparent.

    The two not-necessarily-contradictory side of Rauschenberg’s art (Duchamp and Cornell) are famously married early on in the survey, by the mid-1950s, with the “flatbed picture plane.” This is the term art historian Leo Steinberg coined to mark the inception of postmodernism within Rauschenberg’s Combines. “Neither painting nor sculpture but a combination of the two,” the Combines realize the artist’s expressed desire “to bridge the gap between art and life” by importing wholesale to his art the sights, sounds and stuff of the world. There are pictures of things reproduced in snapshots, book and newspaper pages, and the things themselves: chickens, shoes, mirrors, dirt, paint. This in not art as mirror, but art as an index, a plane upon which things land, adhere and resonate. The triumphal arch of all flatbed pictures Monogram (1955-59), stand about one third of the way up the Guggenheim spiral. For photography, look under the taxidermied Angora goat with a tire around its belly and paint daubed on its face to the canvas laying on the floor encrusted with pigment, old boards, signs and other elements of collage. There is a photograph and, nearby it, a footprint inked on paper. As mundane as these might appear amidst the spectacularly shocking surroundings, it is these two indexical items that segue into the next major phase of Rauschenberg’s art: the silkscreen paintings and transfer drawings.

    Initiated by Dante’s Inferno (1958-60), an ambitious illustrative picture cycle tucked away in a side gallery, these images are certainly less cumbersome and crude than the Combines. Driven almost exclusively by photographic reproductions transferred onto paper and canvas as rubbings and montage, the work of the 1960s might be seen as the platonic union of the index and the construct. However, in her catalog essay (the only one primarily on photography), Rosalind Krauss detects a step away from the non-literal flatbed approach and recourse to old-fashioned allegory with its attendant associations and narratives. The smoking gun is Rauschenberg’s straight photography, which Kraus describes in damning WPA terms (“the frontality, the relentless focus”) thus underscoring what she finds to be the conventionality of his work in general. (“We would sooner expect him to share a sensibility with Robert Frank,” she writes.) Krauss’s essay is compelling reading (moving effortlessly and pointedly from Breton to Richter) and yet, in the end, seems overdetermined, pinning its subject into a tight analytical corner that the work—by way of its generous movement and strong visual intelligence—patently resists.

    Returning to Rauschenberg’s photography one finds more than just refried Walker Evans. Starting in the late ‘40s, and continuing to the present is a body of work that on one hand informs and on the other stands independent of the artist’s assemblage. At The Guggenheim, the photographs were grouped in side galleries along with other works on paper and primarily served the role of fueling the Combines and silkscreens installed out on the ramp with fresh batches of images. But in a concurrent New York exhibition at Pace/Wildenstein/MacGill Gallery, Rauschenberg’s straight photography was allowed to stand on its own. RR Fulton Street Studio, NYC, a studio interior of 1951, is practically a Combine before the fact: fetish-like found objects on a shelf, postcard reproductions and a scrappy fabric curtain come to rest on the plane of the studio wall. Moving out of the studio, recurrent motifs are staircases, hand-painted signs, empty streets and headless bodies. These together, with the kind of strange juxtapositions and framing devices that give rise to a sense of the uncanny in everyday life, evoke Surrealism in general and Henri Cartier-Bresson in particular. Both artists were inveterate travelers, who quested further and further afield to fuel their pictorial appetites. Rauschenberg has spent great portions of the past two decades on extended exotic sojourns—for example, the Rauschenberg Oversees Culture Interchange (or ROCI), the artist’s personally incorporated adventure to encourage international exchange, took him to Tibet, Chile, Russia, among other places—collaborating with local craftsmen, taking pictures and making great souvenirs.

    It’s difficult not to be dismissive of much of the late work—large-scaled and expensive-looking—on view at the Soho Guggenheim. It doesn’t appear to demand the kind of looking (or, for that matter, thinking) required by the earlier work in the retrospective. These are big easy gestures, drawing on familiar photographs, at their best sweepingly cinematic (the tarnished Night Shades, 1991), at the worst simply inflated (the brassy Boreali, 1989). The photographically-minded spectator will want to tap any reserve energy for viewing the artist’s films and performance documents. Early choreography, such as Pelican (1965), shows the artist at his most intense and potent, an innocent and true believer in the power of art to draw participants (viewers, other artists, dogs, chickens…) into life. Something of the reverse is also true, when one starts to measure Rauschenberg’s influence on other artists: Gerhard Richter says he felt permission to paint after seeing Rauschenberg’s contribution to the 1959 Documenta; and, as far as younger generations, there is precedent in Rauschenberg’s work for artists as diverse as Matthew Barney, Jason Rhoades, Jessica Stockholder and Wolfgang Tillmans, to name but a few.

    Given the nearly constant presence of photography and photographic reproduction throughout the 40 years of work on view, one might argue that Rauschenberg never abandoned his initial ambition to be a photographer. (For that matter, the inquisitive and accumulative Rauschenberg seemingly never rejected anything that came his way.) He simply refused photography’s departmentalization, and with it, at times, art’s own marginalized status in society at large. (In 1987 he designed a wine label for Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant Spago, testified against Judge Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, and initiated a new body of work when he discovered a new technique for bleaching photographs.) In the work of Rauschenberg, a consummate sampler, photography gives way to photographies: what better means of fulfilling the desire to make art that is simultaneously abstract and allegorical, autobiographical and global, archival and indexical, in the museum and of the media, enduring and ephemeral, actual and fictitious. What better way to do all this and walk down the street at the same time?