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Jarring Juxtaposition. His pants are just about the only thing Robert Rauschenberg has not worked into his paintings, collages, and what he calls "combines." Crumpled newspapers, photographs, street signs, clocks, radios, buckets, neckties, stuffed birds and electric fans have all found their way into his works. Rauschenberg insists that he intends no shock effect, satire or even comment. "I get jarred by the juxtaposition of certain objects. Once you isolate something, you can really see it. I think a picture is more like the real world when it's made out of the real world." To the charge of ugliness, he retorts: "I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable."
The task of art is to match sight with insight, to illuminate, intensify and transmute the raw materials of existence into a higher order of reality and truth, and in that sense most pop art does less with a Campbell's Soup can than Campbell's does. The best pop art, such as Robert Rauschenberg's, is an Art of the Absurd full of the jarring juxtapositions, mechanized tempi, free-floating reveries and strange discontinuities of modern life, as if someone had spliced together unrelated strips of film and run them off on an erratic projector. But too many pop artists seem not to know whether chaos is their subject or their object.
*Previous U.S. winners: James McNeill Whistler (1895) and Mark Tobey (1958).