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The best of the color silk-screen paintings, like Retroactive I, 1964, are such soaring bel canto that one is apt to skip over the odd resonance of their images. Consider the red patch in the lower right corner: a silk-screen enlargement of a stroboscopic photo by Gjon Mili of a walking nude, done in imitation of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was itself based on an earlier sequential photo by Marey. The image stutters backward through technological time. But then it also looks like the grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden, and that turns the enormous grainy effigy of John Kennedy (then dead), with its repeated pointing hand, into a type of vengeful deity. Rauschenberg has had great moments of social irony. "The day will come," Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal in 1861, "when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, but established, fixed once and for all by photography. On that day civilization will have reached its peak, and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice."
In 1964 Rauschenberg was riding in one of these gondolas, through the mighty hoo-ha raised by his winning the first prize at the Venice Biennale. Few now doubted that art's center had migrated to New York, and this ignited an orgy of chauvinism on both sides of the Atlantic. Some forms of success, Degas once said, are indistinguishable from panic. This was one. Rauschenberg was now a celebrity, almost the Most Famous Artist in the World. His critics were quick to blame him for every crassness that attended the promotion of Pop art.
As somnambulists mysteriously avoid bumping into the coffee table, Rauschenberg dealt with fame. His instinctive response to being promoted as a culture hero was to stop making one-man art. He went back into the group, and through the rest of the '60s he worked on all manner of collaborative projects: multimedia events, dance, liaisons between art and science. Of course, the group had expanded greatly by now. It contained artists who wanted to work collectively, but there were also dozens of people who simply wanted a piece of Rauschenberg, from saber-toothed politicians' wives and Park Avenue art groupies to eager, ineffectual students. It was not as freaky or snobbish a mix as the circus that Andy Warhol accumulated, but it had its distractions. "Dozens of people ripped Bob off for money and time," a friend from the '60s recalls, "and he knew it, but he never said a word against them."
His most absorbed collaboration was with Billy Klüver, a Swedish laser-research scientist from Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1966 they started a nonprofit foundation named E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology. Its announced purpose was "to catalyze the inevitable active involvement of industry, technology and the arts." E.A.T. grew out of "Nine Evenings," a series of multimedia happenings held in New York in 1966. Its biggest project was the