Robert Rauschenberg characteristically included common everyday materials and objects without any discrimination as to what could be considered worthy. The exterior world is full of objects ready to be transformed into art, ready to fill an empty canvas, if they are perceived without any preconceptions.
High Art and Popular Culture
Utilization of references to popular culture in Rauschenberg's Odalisk stands in contrast to Greenberg’s notion of subjective art as personified by Pollock. Art critic Clement Greenberg distinguishes the category of high art associated with his favourite Abstract Expressionism and low-class imagery of popular culture. Odalisk's photographs and illustrations would fall into the latter category as examples of kitsch. They are mechanically reproducible images and signify the contemporary consumer culture.
Clement Greenberg's Concept of Kitsch
In Greenberg’s view, the artefacts of popular culture are diluted forms of genuine art that are incapable of providing as valuable an aesthetic experience as the subjective expression of artist’s authenticity. He says that ‘Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.’.
But the role of art evolves with changing society and its culture and these were certainly different from the culture and society that had nourished the ideas of 'pure' autonomous art, ideas that culminated in Abstract Expressionism. Post War western cultures grew economically stronger and artists recognized that yet again they had to identify adequate mode of representation corresponding to that particular situation.
Post War Consumerism and Its Impact on Art
In the post-war period, commodification, mass production and mass consumption expanded so much that the society came to be characterized by its consumerism.
Looking back in history, Greenberg ascribed the origins of kitsch to the demands of urban population in the aftermath of the 19th-century industrial revolution : ‘To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ...kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.’
According to Greenberg, kitsch continued to flourish during the Post War economic boom, especially in mass-media.
Postmodern Artists React to Mass Culture
But one man's trash became another man's treasure and contemporary culture became the main subject of postmodern art. Postmodern artists regarded the dominant abstract art as stagnant and merely decorative, removed from life and inaccessible. They reacted by directly employing the products of mass culture in their works.
The trend spread internationally as artists started using mass media imagery to create collages made of magazine pictures and advertisements for common products of everyday consumption. Unlike Abstarct Expressionists, postmodern artists were concerned with modern life and they incorporated its elements into their creations to reflect the new reality.
Return of the Everyday Object
John Cage, musician involved with the New York-based neo-avant-garde, spoke of conversion from ‘wanting what we don’t have, art as pained struggle’ to ‘enjoyment of our possessions’. Rather than straining to decipher a work of art as an articulation of the higher truth expressed by an individual personality, one should focus on appreciating the beauty that already exists by means of reviving one’s perception.
The spectator is no longer restricted by the need to decode the artist’s version of higher truth, and the artist is free to incorporate anything he deems aesthetically valuable without it having to relate to his inner state. There is no fixed meaning communicating the artist’s self-expression.
Robert Rauschenberg's Work in Context
The usage of ordinary things in an unfamiliar way, the preference for the objective and factual rather than elusive subjective feelings, the evolutionary quality rather than fixed resolution of an artwork, the active role of audience and indefinite interpretations seem to be the characteristics seen as significant in Rauschenberg’s work and as distinct from Abstract Expressionism.
- Sources:
- Varieties of Modernism, edited by Paul Wood, Yale University Press 2004
- Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Blackwell Publishing 2003
Zuzana Minarikova - I live in London and work in publishing in Bloomsbury which is an exciting part of London, full of museums, galleries, bookshops and ...
