Not too long ago, gallerygoing was a genteel affair. To and fro across carpeted floors swept the art lovers, sipping sherry. Safely up on the wall were the paintings, framed and titled, with prices on request. But no longer do the panes of varnish give onto idyllic visions of pinky Titian nudes, fluffy Millet sheep, plush Poussin valleys. Nowadays, avant-garde gallerygoing is more like the full 100 yards, with the visitors swivel-hipping through art works that threaten to tackle the visitor's body as well as his sensibilities (see color pages).
In the galleries sit hamburgers the size of Volkswagens. Here is a comfy zebra-striped chair draped with a leopard coat marked by the gallery PLEASE DON'T SIT. And right there behind the gallerygoer is a plaster facsimile of a real person looking like a petrified floorwalker. Coke bottles protrude from the canvas; TV sets roar from the painted surface; neon lights glow like theater marquees. A plethora of real objects has been swept into art, and art has walked right out of the frame into the living room.
Irreconcilable Appearances. "Painting relates to both art and life," says Artist Robert Rauschenberg enthusiastically. "Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two." His most spectacular feat of gapsmanship was his trend-setting Angora goat with rubber tire. It seems that Rauschenberg was struck by the incongruity of a stuffed goat in an office-furniture store window. He tried to paint the image. No good. But two years later, he laid a canvas on the floor, bought the goat, and set it on top of the canvas with a rubber tire around its middle. "I just wanted them to cope with the fact that it was there," Rauschenberg explains.
Cope the critics did, and Rauschenberg, in 1964, won the Venice Biennale Grand Prize.
Actually, Rauschenberg makes no claim to being the first to play the game. The cubists, he points out, long ago began incorporating materials from the real world (labels, newspaper clippings, playing cards) into their stuck-together collages. The surrealists later cottoned to the idea, as Max Ernst put it, of "coupling two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them." Dadaist Marcel Duchamp hung up mass-produced snow shovels and labeled them ready-made art.
Greasy Verisimilitude. But not even in their wildest dreams did the oldtimers go in for a production like Edward Kienholz's The Beanery (opposite), currently assembled at Manhattan's Dwan Gallery. A veritable apotheosis of the ordinary, it is West Coast Artist Kienholz's reconstruction of a favorite Los Angeles artists' greasy spoon, a kind of frozen happening quickened by sounds (random conversations, taped on the spot, and jukebox background music) and circulating odors (stale bacon grease) pushed around by a fan.
Kienholz, 38, has meticulously created the eatery on Santa Monica Boulevard. In his quest for verisimilitude, he even bought a new phone booth to replace the Beanery's so that he could have the real thing for his stage-set. The jukebox, too, is real, though the choice of records turns out to be art world in-puns: Up a Larry Rivers; It's Delightful, It's Delovely, It's de Kooning.