On certain days, I would skip school and go to the Museum of Modern Art to daydream a little. It was the mid-seventies, and my high school, then called the High School of the Performing Arts, was on West Forty-sixth Street. I lived in Brooklyn, and the world inside and outside of this school was a wonderland to me. On top of everything I learned in class, there was Manhattan itself, and a block away was Gotham's Bookstore, Frances Steloff's fabulous bookstore, full of treasures, and a little further Mother. I didn't know much about modern art, European or American (though I had seen some African art at the Brooklyn Museum), but I was porous, and walking into that legendary building one afternoon and encountering a stuffed goat on a multi-paneled wooden platform remains one of the most destabilizing experiences of my life. The goat had a beard, horns and a long-haired silver body. His head and neck were smeared with several colors of paint, as if he had applied it while drunk. Not only that, but it had a black and white rubber tire in the middle. Standing in front of the goat, I felt like I was having my worst or best dream, and to calm myself down, I read the writing on the wall. The work entitled “Monogram” was created in 1955–1959 by the artist whose retrospective I went to: Robert Rauschenberg. (I later learned that in his twenties, he changed his name from Milton to Robert because he liked the approachable sound of “Bob.”) Who was this man? And what did the word “monogram” mean in this context or any context? I remember sweating, not because the museum was too hot, but because something was happening to me: an aesthetic experience that I did not understand was changing my body temperature, changing my consciousness.
“Bed” (1955).Artwork by Robert Rauschenberg / Courtesy © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / WAGA / ARS
It was March or April 1977 and I was sixteen years old. In those days, the museum had docents who shared their expertise with visitors, and I remember following the docent on that anxious day as she talked about yet another work that left me reeling. The Bed (1955) did not live in space like an unmoored goat; it was hanging on the wall. But that was where his convention ended. The associate professor explained that as a young artist, Rauschenberg often lacked money, but he felt—knew—that art could be created from anything, even a bedspread. Marcel Duchamp freed artists from the tyranny of “high” and “low”: art was what the artist chose to create. The “bed” had a wooden frame and supports. There was a pillow on top and a partially folded coverlet underneath; both were thickly filled with paint: yellow, white, red and black, which flowed down the surface of the “canvas”, like the saliva of a dream – or just like paint – creating something new from this symbol of home comfort and dreams. The associate professor said Rauschenberg called works like “Monogram” and “Bed” — works of art that contain elements of both painting and sculpture — “unifying.”
But this goat. It resonated with a strange energy that went beyond graffiti and clear definitions. I didn't have words for it then. The assistant professor told me that if I came back the next day we could talk a little more about Rauschenberg. I came back the next day and the next day because what this wonderful woman was giving me was something I didn't even know existed: the view of this language only deepened. I wanted to know more about the artist and the world that created both him and this goat. Together they motivated me see.
Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, was born a century ago this year, and two major New York institutions are exhibiting works from his vast and fascinating oeuvre. (A third exhibition, dedicated to Rauschenberg's activism and “environmental consciousness,” is at the Gray Art Museum, and Gemini GEL has an exhibition of prints.) But as thrilled as I am to be in his company again, it says something about the art world and its spirit—a spirit governed by the laws of fashion and now oscillating between the woke and the beautiful—that the city that was his hometown won't have a major retrospective of his work. home for decades, a place that he, with the mind and eye of his collagist, made us see in all its strange and beautiful juxtapositions. To honor Rauschenberg and the city that plays a role in so many of his photographs, paintings, silkscreens and combines that, taken together, speak so much of the transformative power energywalk around Manhattan and try to see it through his eyes: trash near a discarded chair, speeding cars and adorable legs, a pile of leaves and a wall of torn and splattered posters. And while you go, consider the artist's journey from his birthplace, Port Arthur, Texas, an oil-refining town where his father worked for a regional utility company.
