In the arts, as elsewhere, there are some enfants terribles whose public image gets trapped in infancy. Whether or not such an artist really is Peter Pan, he is apt to be treated as though he were; a precocious reputation stiffens round him like a coffin, immuring him in the period of his youth. He is not expected to mature, but simply to become an older virtuoso, so that all his later work risks being dismissed as an appendage to the earlier. If he accepts this role, it grips him, and he turns into a vulgar monster—something like Salvador Dali. If he fights it and reflects the blame for it on the audience (where it belongs), he may, with luck, come to resemble Robert Rauschenberg, whose latest prints—after a run at the Castelli Gallery in New York City—are on view at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles.
Iniquitous Goat. Rauschenberg turns 50 this year. It is almost a quarter-century since he popped into American art with an eccentric, prankish and—in retrospect —prophetic show of pictures, some painted all white, others all black, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in Manhattan. This ironic burst of premature minimalism was only the first in a series of gestures that, throughout the '50s, persistently harassed and delighted art's public in New York. They were all conducted under Rauschenberg's slogan, derived from futurism and Dada, about "working in the gap between art and life." Out of street rubbish, dead birds and old newspapers and gaudy lathers of pigment, he put together the "combine paintings" that, so much later, remain his best-known works. How outrageous, how iniquitous that tire-girdled Angora goat looked in 1959! What perversity seemed to lurk behind Rauschenberg's gesture of erasing a drawing by Willem de Kooning and exhibiting the sheet! How dandyist an affront to spontaneous sincerity, the idea of painting two abstract expressionist canvases, Factum I and Factum II, almost identical down to the last drip!
Rauschenberg's role as provocateur could only work within a relatively innocent art world, which New York had in the '50s—innocent not only about modern art, but to some degree about its history. It took more than a decade before the relationship of his big combines to Kurt Schwitters' tiny Merz pictures and to the formality of cubist collage could be talked about without heat and seen, not as proof of derivativeness, but as simply part of his work's ecology. Besides, the '50s were the last time a public could be provoked by art. (Since then, an overload of images has rendered art's audience blase.) This seems to have confronted Rauschenberg with a crisis after his silk-screen paintings won the Venice Biennale in 1964—a dead zucchino now, but the Big Apple then.
For a time, he cut down on his production of gallery art and began to turn himself into a rootin'-tootin' mixture of Zen monk and Texas daddy, full of Jack Daniel's and koans, moving from one collective project to the next and plunging into a sequence of causes. These have run from EAT (Experiments in Art and