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| I wrote this piece back around the time of the Tate Modern's Robert Rauschenberg exhibition but never found a home for it. (PDF version available here.) |
Rauschenberg's
animation: three works
A
gelatin silver photographic print, black and white of course, fifteen
inches square, showing series of broad flat steps, possibly in
marble, that rise away from the viewer, filling the image entirely
apart from the tiniest sliver at the top of the frame. Depth is
gently suggested by parallax (we can see the tops of the nearest
steps, but from about a third of the way up the picture we cannot),
and scale by two small black stumpy columns at the top of the image,
verging on abstraction but nevertheless recognisable as a pair of
legs, seen from about the knee down. To the right of this image hangs
another print, of identical dimensions, the framing also almost
identical, though close examination of the steps suggests that the
camera has moved just a tiny bit left and a sightly upwards. The
figure has also moved: the legs are now a few steps closer to us, and
visible all the way to the waist. A bit of shadow extends to the left
of the legs as we look at them. Another image: again an almost
identical framing (the camera tilted back a smidgen to show a bit
more of the space above the steps), but the figure is still
advancing, just a few steps closer to us than before, but whereas
previously it seemed entirely static, now the right leg is just a
little in advance of the left, the leg just a little bent, suggesting
movement in progress, caught in the act by the shutter. Hands can now
be seen, hanging relaxed next to the waist. In the fourth image the
figure is suddenly much closer although, again by comparing the steps
closely, we can discern that the camera has in fact moved back
slightly. Once again the right leg is slightly advanced, but it's
straight again; this is a static pose. We can see all the way up to
the elbow now: it's a man, in dark jeans and a light-coloured
sleeveless shirt, tucked neatly into his trousers. There is one more
image. The framing is a little closer: for the first time the steps
really do fill the frame entirely. The figure has advanced still
further, and for the first time part of its legs are cut off. It's
now framed from about the knee to just below the shoulders. A watch
is on the left wrist, face on the underside of the arm. The shirt has
two breast pockets, both full; the left-hand pocket looks like it
probably contains a cigarette packet. In the previous images, focus
was evenly balanced between steps and figure, both clear; here the
depth of field is ever so slighly shallower, the figure now
definitely in the foreground, standing sharply out against steps that
have become ever so slightly fuzzy.
These
images are remarkably relaxed and casual: despite what I've noted of
their precision, there is nothing fussy about their composition. They
are also, with the simplest of means, remarkably evocative of
movement. They're not large photographs, but still, one cannot take
in all five of them with a single glance, so that moving one's head
from left to right, or right to left, the figure advances or
retreats, like the simplest flickbook. Others have already connected
these photographs to the pioneering photographic analysis of movement
conducted by the likes of Muybridge and Marey.
But note how carefully everything about the images contributes to the
effect of movement: the framing, the composition, the disposition of
the figure, the depth of field. They're vivid, dramatic, playful. The
series is entitled Cy +
Roman Steps (I-V).
The photographs were taken in 1952 in Rome (on the steps of the
Basilica di Santa Maria in Ara coeli), the figure in them is Cy
Twombly, and the photographer is Robert Rauschenberg.
Rauschenberg's
range of media is famously vast, often in series with specific
designations: White Paintings, Black Paintings, Combines... Seeing
these photographs in the context of the retrospective running at the
Tate Modern from December 2016 to April 2017 (after which it will
travel to New York and then San Francisco), I was struck by a small
but fascinating undercurrent running through a number of works from
diverse periods, all dealing with the phenomena I have highlighted in
the photos of Twombly: the ability of static images to evoke
movement. We know that Rauschenberg had an abiding interest in
movement, as attested by his involvement in dance and other
performative arts. He did make at least a few films, such as 1966's
Canoe,
and there are works that literally move, such as 1967's Revolver
II,
with its five rotating Plexiglass discs. John Cage's claim that
Rauschenberg "regrets we do not see the paint while it's
dripping" is well known.
But I am less concerned here with Rauschenberg's involvement in
"actual" movement than with the fact that what it might
not, I hope, be too fanciful to describe as an
investigation into some of the fundaments of cinema seems to have
been an abiding, if minor, interest. But whereas in cinema we can
keep our heads still while the images succeed each other, and hence
appear to move, Rauschenberg makes us move our heads, forcing us
to generate movement from static images.
Take
the paired Combines Factum
I
and Factum II,
from 1957. On two rectangular canvasses, in portrait format (roughly
61.5 inches by 35.5 inches), Rauschenberg has used oil, ink, pencil,
crayon, paper, fabric, newspaper clippings, printed photographs and
calendar pages to create two nearly identical images. Both have the
same calendar pages to the bottom left, the same grey smudges of
paint below the calendars, the same red daubs above them, streaks of
red dripping over February and October 1958 (dates now relegated to
the past that were in the future when the images were made). The same
trees over to the right of the smudge, the same big red T beneath the
trees. To an extent the pictures explore the inevitable differences
between them: no two smudges of paint can be exactly identical. But
they also exhibit Rauschenberg's remarkable technique, if technique
can be measured by the ability to execute ones intentions repeatedly,
with accuracy. Branden W. Joseph has talked about these works in
terms of philosophical notions of similarity and difference, and
showed how much play there is with identity and difference within the
works as well as between them.
Ordinarily, in fact, it is impossible look directly from one to the
other: Factum I
usually hangs in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, while
Factum II
belongs to MOMA in New York. At the Tate retrospective, however, they
hang right next to each other, thereby creating a faint echo,
perhaps, of an anonymous early seventeenth-century painting that
hangs in Tate Britain: The
Cholmondely Ladies.
It seems likely to have been the biographical coincidences between
two lives (the painting shows two women with young babies that an
inscription informs us were born the same day, got married the same
day, and gave birth the same day) which prompted their being painted
in such a way that one has to search for differences between them.
The filmmaker and theorist Jean-Louis Comolli wrote of The
Cholmondeley Ladies
that we see in the painting 'a repetition that is not a repetition...
a contradictory repetition... it makes us believe that it repeats
itself just because it does not repeat itself'.
Standing in front of Factum
I and
Factum II,
as
one flicks ones eyes back and forth between the two paintings, it can
be astonishing how little
changes, how little the repeated forms seem to jump, change position
or transform. And yet these two paintings do not repeat themselves.
The big T is not in exactly the same position, being notably lower
and to the right in Factum
I
compared with its location in Factum
II.
The white block above it, painted over the bottom of the image of the
trees, is also different in the two images, dripping from both its
left and right sides in Factum
II
while in Factum
I
it drips only to the right. The more one looks at The
Cholmondely Sisters the
more different the two women become; that is not the case with
Rauschenberg's paintings. Glancing from one to the other, one cannot
help but see the T jumping between positions, cueing us to see the
whole dyptich as a kind of minimal flickbook. (A very early work,
1948's This is
the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time,
could literally be used as a flickbook. Its cover can be seen in the
exhibition, but sadly it is too delicate to display properly, though
a small reproduction can be seen in the catalogue.)
Collage,
obviously one of Rauschenberg's most persistent interests throughtout
his career, is the art of juxtaposition. Yet we are most accustomed
to think about juxtaposition in terms of what we can take in in a
single glance. What do we make of a goat with a tyre round its
middle? The effect of the juxtaposition is to hover between two
things and one thing: is Monogram
(1955-9), still Rauschenberg's most famous and most notorious work, a
goat together
with
a tyre, or is it a tyre-goat (or perhaps a goat-tyre)? With Factum
I
and II,
however, it is impossible really to take the two images in at once,
even if one stands right back from them. Difference is not enfolded
within a single image of a double. We do not see
similarity
in these two paintings; rather, difference is seen as
change,
as movement. As Jonathan T.D. Neil has written, it is "impossible
to read these two canvasses as just one Factum
after another."
If one want to compare,
one has to flick ones eyes back and forth, and then movement, however
minimal, leaps into being. Rauschenberg observed in 1963: "Listening
happens in time. Looking also had to happen in time."
A number of works make prominent the time it takes to explore them,
and the movements of the viewer that this might require. But here
movement is a matter of the instant: as we look from one Combine to
the other, movement happens, but we cannot experience the time in
which the movement happens. The dates on the calendar pages included
in Factum I
and Factum II
had, at the time of painting, not happened yet. We know this when we
look at the painting, but this does not alter the fact that they
will, now and forever more, always have
happened.
But the movement that turning our gaze from one of these painting to
the other generates is neither about to happen, nor experienced
during the looking, nor safely in the past. It has always just
happened.
One
of the wittiest explorations of these ideas is to be found in Glacial
Decoy.
If Factum I
and II
are a minimal flickbook, this really is a minimal piece of cinema.
Produced in 1979 as a backdrop for a Trisha Brown dance piece – for
which Rauschenberg also designed the costumes – this silent
eighteen-minute series of 620 slides also works remarkably well
viewed on its own. The images are photographs taken around Fort
Myers, Florida (whose Arcade Theater, apparently, "Thomas Edison
sat in to view his first films, with his friends Henry Ford and
Harvey Firestone").
The slides are projected as huge, portrait-format images, each twelve
feet by nine feet, four at a time. Every four seconds the images slip
one place to their right: the rightmost image disappears, images 1, 2
and 3 become images 2, 3 and 4 respectively, and a new image appears
in the leftmost position. Of course, there is no actual movement:
each image merely dissolves into the next. Trisha Brown called the
result a "luminous continuum".
It is impossible not to see a continual rightwards march of
photographs, however clearly the mechanism of this illusion is on
display. We are told that it is the speed of the projection which
gives cinematic images the illusion of movement and yet here, while
in a sense there is
no illusion, there is nevertheless, very definitely, movement.
Photos
of what appear to be the back of a metal set of steps visually pun on
the appearance of a celluloid film strip. The title also puns: on the
piece's combination of display and artifice ("decoy") as
well as on the slowness of the images' progress (a picture of a
tortoise is a further joke about this). The images refer at times to
Rauschenberg's previous work: images of goats and of tyres, taken
together, obviously reference Monogram,
while the tyres also evoke 1953's Automobile
Tire Print,
another work concerned with movement and the need of the viewer
themselves to move, for which John Cage drove his car over a long
strip of twenty sheets of paper glued together, after first passing
through a puddle of paint. The movement of trains (which, like that
of celluloid film, occurs only with the bounds of parallel tracks) is
a frequent theme in Glacial
Decoy,
which contains many images of freight cars. The final image also has
a railway theme: a closeup of a road sign indicating an upcoming
railway crossing, comprising a black St Andrews cross in the middle
of the letters "R R". This is, of course, a kind of
signature: "R R" for "Robert Rauschenberg". (A
later work, 1987's Polar
Glut,
is a sculptural collage consisting, in part, of two such signs.) But
by placing this image last, Glacial
Decoy
comes to an end with an image indicating the necessity to stop (for
the motorist), but only in order to give way for a different movement
(that of the train). The final image recapitulates something of the
piece's phenomenology: each time the slides have clicked into a new
position (or, likewise, each time we stop moving our heads in front
of the other pieces I have mentioned), one form of movement ceases
only to give way to another. The movement that has "just
happened" shifts from the visual to the mental: we stop seeing
movement and start thinking
it. In all these pieces Rauschenberg, with simultaneous seriousness
and playfulness – never approaching either portentousness or
frivolity – explores the mechanisms of movement and of our
perception of it, the movement of our world around us and our
movement within the world. The results are curiously exhilarating,
both affirming the physicality and temporality of our experience and
slipping, continously but pleasurably, from our grasp. I would hazard
a guess that Rauschenberg would have agreed with the great French
filmmaker Robert Bresson, who writes in his Notes
on the Cinematograph
that "the sight of movement gives happiness".
Dominic Lash, April 2017
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