In art, as in most other matters, the '70s have not yet been named. Historians looking back on American art in the '60s see movements and orthodoxies—Pop art, minimal art, conceptual art, Op art, color-field painting, doctrines about flatness and framing edge, proscriptions, mandates. The categories rattle briskly like punch cards in their slots. Art in the '70s is more polymorphous, less ambitious, harder to sort out. The present creed proclaims belief in the Either, the Or and the Holy Both.
During the 1960s, formalism conferred an almost messianic exclusiveness on taste. If one was "for" one kind of art, one was expected to be "against" others. Besides, a new class of collectors, anxious to commit their money only to sure bets—to what would be Historically Inevitable, to the mainstream of culture—wanted authorities. Not today. The American mainstream has fanned out into a delta, in which the traditional idea of an avant-garde has drowned. Thus, in defiance of the dogma that realist painting was killed by abstract art and photography, realism has come back in as many forms as there are painters.
From the cool, detailed gaze of photorealism on its plastic environment to romantic landscapists in Maine to the obsessive stare of the California painter who took seven years to finish a small picture of a few inches of sand, grain by grain, the variety is infinite. Photography has acquired a status unimaginable a decade ago. Meanwhile, abstract painters, released from the severity of their mission, are no longer embarrassed by pattern and decoration. As the desire to paint one's way into history recedes, a new subjectivity has replaced it, a free permit to import life whole into art through video, performance and participation. A broad and knowing eclecticism prevails.
Inside it, a symbolically charged event is the retrospective of some 160 works by Robert Rauschenberg, which opened last month at the National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. (and will travel throughout 1977 to New York's Museum of Modern Art and to museums in San Francisco, Buffalo and Chicago). With his anarchic sweetness and prodigal talent, Rauschenberg, now 51, has for the best part of 25 years been the enfant terrible of American modernism: a permanent scalawag, handing out indulgences to all comers. He is a model of the joy of art.
Rauschenberg is best known for having opened up the tracts of imagery that were occupied in the '60s by Pop art. But as one goes through the show, skillfully boiled down by the Smithsonian's curator of 20th century painting, Walter Hopps, from Rauschenberg's enormous and dispersed output of combines, paintings, silk screens, sculptures and prints, it becomes plain that there has not been much antiformalist American art that Rauschenberg's prancing, careless and fecund talent did not either hint at or directly provoke. It is to him that is owed much of the basic cultural assumption that a work of art can exist for any length of time, in any material (from a stuffed goat to a live human body), anywhere (on a stage, in front of a television camera, underwater, on the surface of the moon or in a sealed envelope), for any purpose (turn-on, contemplation, amusement, invocation, threat), and any destination it chooses, from the museum to