Warhol and Rauschenberg: Two Spaces

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Developments in art history include developments in the understanding of space and innovations in the creation of space. The Byzantine icon is a kind of space in which artists, at the behest of a supremely dominant clergy, deployed gold leaf, line and color treatments and an established iconography in art objects whose ultimate intent was the maintenance of the deeply entrenched power structure of the day. A list of characteristics of the Byzantine icon space would obviously include its intrinsic iconic nature, as well as its two-dimensionality, the subtle glow provided by candle-lit gold and smoky patina, and a kind of sacred mysticism that derived from then-contemporary understandings of the styles, figures and figural arrangements presented. By the time of the Renaissance artists had learned to create a different space characterized by depth of linear and atmospheric perspective and naturalistically rendered human figures, a space in which the use of gold leaf was greatly curtailed in favor of glazes and volumetric lighting and shading. The naturalistic space innovated by Renaissance artists was capable of supporting infinitely greater shades of nuance than that of their Byzantine forebearers, and would come to reveal its versatility in deployments both sacred and profane. When Andy Warhol began using silkscreen at the suggestion of a studio assistant1, he staked claim to a space in art history that was tied closely to his historical

David Dalton,"Andy Warhol," The New York Times Topics, no date given, http://www.nytimes.com/info/andy-warhol/. Warhol and Rauschenberg: Two Spaces Bill Gusky

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context, a space with specific properties that derived partly from the cultural, economic and power structures of his day. When Robert Rauschenberg turned to silkscreen in the early 1960s, in response to Warhols use of this medium2, he innovated a space that responded to the culture, economy and power structures of his day. As similar as the means and in some cases even the motivations of these two artists likely were, the spaces with which they are associated are quite different. An exploration of these spaces and their implications can be made through the comparison of two paintings, both of which are in the collection of Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut: Warhols Triple Silver Disaster of 1963 and Rauschenbergs Retrospective I of 1964.

Andy Warhol Triple Silver Disaster 1963 Silkscreen and enamel on canvas -- 63 x 83 inches

Krauss, Rosalind. Perpetual Inventory, in October Files; 4 - Robert Rauschenberg ed. Branden W. Joseph (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 106 Warhol and Rauschenberg: Two Spaces Bill Gusky

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Warhols Triple Silver Disaster, 1963 The great majority of the surface area of Warhols painting Triple Silver Disaster is a thinned, brushed-on application of metallic enamel, reminiscent of the Byzantine artists use of gold leaf. The color of this enamel changes very slightly depending on how the light hits it, from pale, greasy pewter to light bronze. The top three-fifths or so exhibits a painterly application, with horizontal strokes predominating. The brush strokes tend not to go the entire breadth of the canvas, with stops appearing at various points throughout. The bottom two-fifths or so of the canvas displays a smoother, more even application. Regardless of the amount of brushwork seen in a frontal view of the work, no brushstroke depth is detectable when viewing the canvas edge-on. The left vertical third of the canvas is taken up with four applications of a silkscreen depicting an execution chamber. These thin applications involve black medium with a slightly semi-gloss surface. It appears as if more passes of the squeegee, or a single pass with more medium, was applied in the top image. The three most obvious applications of this silkscreen image are arranged one on top of the other, so that three images are clearly shown. The fourth image is a lighter application of the same screen in the same color, overlaying the center application and offset to the right by approximately one-eighth of an inch. In this silkscreened image an electric chair as used in some American prisons during the early 1960s sits in the middle of an otherwise empty room. Above the electric chair hangs a horizontal fluorescent lamp. To the left of the chair one door is inset into the wall, its details shadowed. A closer door appears to the right of the electric chair. Over this door hangs a sign in dark, plain lettering on white: SILENCE.

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The horizontality of this image is a key aspect that aligns with its low-key, lowcontrast coloring. Clearly Warhol doesnt seek to push or propagandize an opinion about the death penalty through this painting, as would be more apparent in a vertical composition, or in one with greater contrast and clarity. The artist prefers instead to lure us in with a lush surface and with imagery that, due to its murkiness, requires close observation. Warhol based this work upon an image that related directly to an increasingly controversial issue of his day with the same approval that underscores his Campbells Soup Can paintings, as if to say that the controversy itself, rather than any judgment one way or another, is just as culturally pervasive, economically equalizing, and demonstrably delicious as a hot bowl of Campbells tomato soup. Almost in spite of this presentation of controversy, the overall effect of the Triple Silver Disaster is calmly votive. Jennifer Dyers intensive study of Warhols serigraphic work brings cogent observations to light in this regard: Considered primarily in terms of their subject matter, Warhol's images continue and rework a tradition of Christian iconography. In his serigraphs, the stark frontality, simplicity of design and the subject's situation in empty space recalls the popular Christomorphic iconography of the Renaissance. Like the Sudarium, or holy face, images of Christ, Warhol's subjects are static and presented independently of any contextualizing background or spatio-temporal location. This gives Warhol's images the ex nihilo effect of the holy face icon: they appear self-generating, atemporal and otherworldly. And like Renaissance icons, Warhol's images are produced in large numbers and to a pattern.3 Its easy to presume as per Warhols own ubiquitously-quoted statement that he wanted to 'be a machine'4 that silkscreen was his means for essentially excising the human touch from his work. Yet the intensive brush strokes and the irregular silkscreen
3

Dyer, Jennifer. 2004. The Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhols Serial Imagery. Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 25, No. 49: 36.
4

See for example David Dalton,"Andy Warhol," The New York Times online, no date given, http://www.nytimes.com/info/andy-warhol/. Warhol and Rauschenberg: Two Spaces Bill Gusky

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applications of Triple Silver Disaster suggest a perhaps subconscious impulse of the artist to explore the more expressive, painterly spaces described by the Ab-Ex painters. That he doesnt fully yield to this impulse presents a capacity for conceptual nuance unavailable to the Abstract Expressionists. As Dyer notes, [Its] almost as if Warhol set out to undermine [serigraphys] precision, subvert the power of [precise] mechanical reproduction, and sought out accidents in the process of replication. For instance, Warhol's medium is often stroked across the image unevenly or the squeegee is not cleaned between applications, resulting in varying densities and streaks in the colour. The sharpness of Warhol's colourmedium varies, due either to the uneven exertion of pressure on the squeegee or its incorrect angle. Furthermore, there is often insufficient medium to complete a stroke, which means the image must be completed by hand. With Warhol, the silkscreened print becomes as arbitrary, random and unpredictable as paint was for the abstract expressionists before him.5 The combined effect of the application characteristics Dyer describes is that the silkscreened images of Triple Silver Disaster carry the aesthetic of low-resolution blackand-white television, a pervasive aspect of early 1960s culture. In restricting his repeated images to one edge of the canvas Warhol creates an asymmetric composition, a picture, so to speak, that is quite in keeping with figureground relationships established many years previous. Its clear that the silver ground was applied prior to the black silkscreened images, and that their working together is not the same as that of for example the white background of Warhols symmetrical Campbells Soup Can paintings, which can be seen as deriving from the Byzantine icon, with plain commercial white substituting for gold leaf. Dyer notes: Iconologically, however, Warhol's subjects are insistently mundane. He replaces the divine with objects such as soup cans, movie stars and toys. This is because his images are self-referentially engaged in questioning iconography itself. Taken

Dyer, Metaphysics, 37. Bill Gusky

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at face value, their iconic semblance allows them to be seen as devotional in terms of their iconic semblance.6 Much speculation has been made concerning Warhols philosophy as seen in his art. Paul Mattick, in his 1998 essay The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol, challenged a number of prevailing yet divergent opinions and came to a conclusion that runs decidedly middle-of-the-road: Far from seeking to justify the specialness of art, mounting a critique of its degradation under modern conditions or of the emptiness of consumer culture, Warhol embraced the commercial aspect of high art and celebrated the sign system of popular culture. ... Warhol did not need to take on the Benjaminian or Adornian "task" of demystifying art; rather, the development of bourgeois society in accomplishing this made a space into which he could move to make a place for himself in the art business. The fit between his sensibility and that space is at least an important reason why his work has the power it does, a power as great, at times, as that of the movies or newspaper photos themselves. The key to its power lies on the surface, not in philosophic depths - on surfaces like Marilyn's face, a newspaper headline, or a cereal box, with depths enough of their own for millions to swim in.7 In this conclusion Mattick addresses a space that is cultural, social and economic. Such spaces relate directly to those innovated and deployed by artists throughout history. The Byzantine artist for example deployed a sacred esthetic space that derived from his social, economic and political space. In this sense Mattick can be seen here as implying that, rather than innovate any space, Warhol discovered a cultural, social and economic space that already existed in the culture at large and then transliterated it into esthetic pictorial spaces already extant. It would then follow that Warhol staked claim to this transliterated space with a variety of images from soup can paintings to Brillo boxes to
6

Dyer, Metaphysics, 36. Mattick, Paul. 1998. The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4: 985-987.
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cow wallpaper and celebrity portraits. In its conventional Modernist asymmetrical pictorial structure Triple Silver Disaster exists as a highly apt iteration of this discovered and transliterated, rather than innovated, space. It's tempting to consider that, because Warhol was certainly completely aware of this aspect of his work that he was as much a tenant of the esthetic space he deployed as he was of his Park Avenue apartment he deemed it necessary to develop a vivid public persona that would confer the one small element of originality missing from his work. To carry these considerations further, we might return again to our Byzantine comparison. In Warhols paintings the artist becomes the god of the work because his work requires a deity to confer sanctity upon its otherwise mundane space. And what a terrible sanctity that space presents, for Triple Silver Disaster reveals Warhol as the god of death and eternal punishment. The electric chair is the throne from which the artist only appears to be absent, when in fact he suffuses the scene through having created the work. From this throne the artist enforces his own SILENCE regarding anything that might reveal an authentic autobiographical fact or opinion, a silence which served him well during his previous highly successful service to a wide variety of taskmasters in the commercial art world.

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Robert Rauschenberg Retroactive I 1964 Silkscreen and oil on canvas -- 84 x 60 inches

Rauschenbergs painting Retroactive I epitomizes the unique space he developed. In understanding this space a fairly thorough description of the work is in order. Retroactive I could roughly be divided into vertical thirds. Nearly all the markings depicted derive from silkscreen applications, with notable exceptions. The most prominent image lies in the center. A tall bust-length image of John F. Kennedy, frozen while speaking and gesturing with his slightly blurred right hand, provides a central focus. Kennedys tie is painted a pea green, the color of money and Irish pride, two key iconographic elements of Camelot.

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The bottom of the left column and the top of the right column contain images of construction zones. The bottom left one displays protective netting contained within what appears to be a concrete colonnade of deep shadow. Glimpses of a crumbly construction landscape can be glimpsed out between the columns. At the top right a hard-hatted workman seems to gesture to others outside our view. In the open space before the balcony, scaffolding or a rebar structure for pouring concrete can be seen. Just over Kennedys head a large empty area appears, bounded by thinned black smears that drip in long tendrils, and a beige tone that might have been derived from the deep red and chartreuse colors described earlier. The center of this explosion-like smear has been cleaned off by the artist. Moving up along the left-side column from the bottom, an echo of Kennedys gesturing right hand appears just above the black construction scene. Above this hand a photograph of apples in a bin appears upside-down, using a combination of several silkscreened colors: chartreuse, a deep red and the same cyan seen in the Kennedy image. At the joint of the hand echo and the apples image a corner of a rectangular box intrudes, showing the lowercase letters N and A as though they are part of a product logo. The remainder of the left column is taken up by a NASA photograph of an astronaut undergoing some sort of test. The astronaut wears a classic early 1960s-style suit with a harness and a small-balloon-like object which extends above him. This silkscreened image appears to have been made using two or even three applications of medium: black and deep cyan. Below the workman seen in the top right corner, the remainder of the right column is taken up by a small yellow-green silkscreen image of a glass of water or milk

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sitting on a rough wood table, and then a tall deep red silkscreen of nude women taken from an Expulsion from Paradise painting that may be Pre-Renaissance, Renaissance or even Mannerist in origin. Overlaying the red image a broken line stretches in a low diagonal. Beneath this broken line a strange chartreuse dial appears, large and toothed as though for a gear. Numbers along its perimeter seem to indicate angles. Rauschenberg is credited with playing a key role in the development of the space he deploys in Retroactive I. Leo Steinberg implicates the artist by name in his landmark 1972 essay Reflections on the State of Criticism: A picture that harks back to the natural world evokes sense data which are experienced in the normal erect posture. ... But something happened in painting around 1950 most conspicuously ... in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet. We can still hang their pictures just as we tack up maps and architectural plans, or nail a horseshoe to the wall for good luck. Yet these pictures no longer simulate vertical fields but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does. The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational process.8 The flatbed picture plane is clearly evident in Retroactive I, in which a selection of image-objects lays in an arrangement upon the canvas just as similar newspaper clippings might be arranged upon a table or tacked to a bulletin board. When presented with an arrangement of images as dissimilar as those found in Retroactive I, the issue of narrative inevitably arises. Rauschenberg himself verbally
8

Steinberg, Leo, Reflections on the State of Criticism, in October Files; 4 - Robert Rauschenberg ed. Branden W. Joseph (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 27. Warhol and Rauschenberg: Two Spaces Bill Gusky

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eschewed obvious narrative in both composition and in color choices, while in practice it seems that he fell under the spell of narratives that are sometimes quite obvious. Rauschenbergs intention to leave the work open was described by Rosalind Krauss in her 1997 essay Perpetual Inventory: Leaving things open has been Rauschenbergs most frequently used expression in describing his artistic stance; whatever happens, he must always conspire to leave the situation open, so that he will be surprised. This, he has stressed, is different from chance, since chance is programmed ahead of time, which is exactly what Rauschenberg has insisted upon avoiding. Instead, if he has continually referred to his process as a collaboration with objects and materials, it is because he never wants it said that he in any way has had free reign over his heroes.9 Krauss goes further to recount a Rauschenberg conversation in which he felt obliged to dodge obvious color choices due to their effect on visual narrative, perhaps in reference to Retroactive I: In most cases, my manipulation of the psychological is to try to avoid the [meanings] that I know about. I had trouble in one painting ... I was silkscreening a glass of water and I put it over green and that whole painting had to change to destroy the look of poison, which is just simply an association that one has with a glass of green, I think.10 In spite of the artists apparent contentions to the contrary, a narrative begins to unfold from Retroactive I almost from the moment you first set eyes on it. The iconic portrait of recently-assassinated president Kennedy is central and would likely begin any narrative. The gesture of his right hand, seen echoed at the left, is a then-contemporary correspondent to the ad locutio that typified Roman statues of Caesars, signaling leadership and authority. Above the echoed hand an inverted bin of
9

Krauss, Rosalind. Perpetual Inventory, in October Files; 4 - Robert Rauschenberg ed. Branden W. Joseph (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 110
10

Krauss, Inventory, 123. Bill Gusky

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apples can be interpreted as abundance lost or its benefits perverted, or even as an abundance of forbidden fruit freely available and, one would suppose, freely indulged upon. The astronaut dominating the top left corner was launched spaceward due to Kennedys initiatives and now falls to Earth, one might suppose, upon Kennedys demise. All the while workmen build, seen in the top right and bottom left corners, as a paint-smeared explosion marks the discharge, if not the target, of Oswalds rifle. The narrative might be seen as ending at bottom right in an expulsion from whatever paradise the artist sees Kennedy as potentially providing. Perhaps its worth noting that, in this or a similar narrative interpretation at least, Rauschenberg can be seen buying into the Kennedy myth, pervasive even then, as uncritically as Warhol bought into corporate products. As regards his culture, Rauschenbergs image relates to television and to political developments as they unfolded in the early 1960s. President Kennedy was a fairly frequent presence on television of the time. Technology's growing importance is also seen in the prominence of the astronaut whose silver pressure suit brings to mind the silvery canvas of Triple Silver Disaster. The burgeoning economy intrudes in the full bin of shiny new apples and in the busy construction zones. The large smear above Kennedys head recalls Gottliebs atom bomb explosions and underscores contemporary Cold War concerns. In its flatbed nature the space of Retroactive I might be considered a kind of index, in the sense that the items that appear within it are not unique to that space, and could, formally speaking, be swapped out with others just as objects on a table can be

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removed and replaced by similar or dissimilar objects. Unlike a glue trap or a tar pit, its in the nature of a bed to be easily lain in and easily gotten up from. Similarly, the space of Retroactive I is unlike the space of a picture in the classic sense. While all its elements are clearly laid upon a white surface, their unity derives from their size, scale and color aspects, and from the handful of freely brushed marks that appear in discrete locations. In other words, the objects in Retroactive I cohere in much the same way that objects crowding a table top might remain on the table top with the help of a few pieces of scotch tape holding some of them together. Rauschenbergs flatbed space bears only superficial resemblance to the collage esthetic that might have suggested it. In collage, small found printed images are trimmed from larger sources, then selected and arranged to compose a single, cohesive image deploying a classic compositional dynamic that derives from earlier painting, photography, cinema, and/or graphic arts. The collage space is not an index in the sense that its elements are intended to bear relationship one to another conceptually and/or esthetically. In deploying flatbed space, Rauschenbergs position is neither as god-like creator nor as worshipper, but as a collector, and, somewhat, as commentator. Even considering its vertical orientation and the god-like centrality of the Kennedy image, Rauschenberg avoided the kind of pervasive moralizing and invective of the time that might have seduced a lesser artist: photos of the Dallas motorcade, of weeping mourners or the stoic Jacqueline and her saluting toddler. No Eternal Flame, not even an American flag intrudes upon this work. Rauschenberg is willing to show his opinion that a loss followed Kennedys fall, but he refuses to finger a specific loss or even a suspect. And a

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summative interpretation of lost innocence would greatly oversimplify the considerations of a notably thoughtful and sophisticated artist. Rauschenberg remains cool and nonjudgmental in the face of the maelstrom of controversy swirling from Kennedys assassination. The paintings Triple Silver Disaster and Retroactive I reveal the claims two artists staked in a world of growing media pervasiveness. In Andy Warhols use of multiple silkscreened images composed upon a painted ground he deployed a space which was nascent in the Modernism of the early 20th century and had come to full birth through the pervasiveness of consumer culture mere decades later, waiting out in the open for anyone the equal of Warhol in drive, talent, intelligence and worship of rampant consumerism to find it. Yet it seems that some aspect of this space was foreclosed in Warhols use. Through his persona and through the votive spaces his work invokes the artist hovers over all, omnipresent and god-like. Similarly inclined Pop Art greats of our day who engage the same space seem driven to compensate for Warhol's self-deification by running extremes of size, output, facture and satire; think Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami. Robert Rauschenbergs arrangements of different silkscreened images composed upon gessoed canvas deployed a unique flatbed space the boundaries of which were only barely hinted at previously, a space which he opened and developed through 2D and 3D explorations into a vast indexical table land that transcends movements, and which have continued beyond the end of the narrative of which Rauschenberg is such an important part. In these works the artist stands alongside the viewer, in a sense, and presents imageobjects the viewer herself might have collected, but arranged according to the artist's

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unique interests and drives. The works of artists as diverse as Thomas Hirschhorn, Mike Kelley and Jessica Stockholder reflect the power and endurance of his legacy.

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Works Cited Dalton, David. "Andy Warhol." The New York Times Topics, no date given, http://www.nytimes.com/info/andy-warhol/. Dyer, Jennifer. 2004. The Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhols Serial Imagery. Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 25, No. 49: 33-47. Mattick, Paul. 1998. The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No.4: 965-987. Krauss, Rosalind. Perpetual Inventory. In October Files; 4 - Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph, 93-137. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. Steinberg, Leo. Reflections on the State of Criticism. In October Files; 4 - Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph, 7-37. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.

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