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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: from the Hoarfrost series, at Ace, Venice.

Rauschenberg's "Hoarfrost Series

Los Angeles  Melinda Wortz

Rauschenberg's new series, which he has titled Hoarfrost, represents a major development in the continually fertile germination of his career and an incredible breakthrough in the printmaking process.  The new series may be seen at Act Gallery, Venice, through November 23 and subsequently will be released by Gemini as an edition of prints.  The works at Ace are unique, while the work done at Gemini exists, of course, in multiple editions.  In terms of approach and technique the unique pieces and edition pieces are otherwise comparable. 
 
Hoarfrost - evanescent, silvery, crystalline coatings with elusive, delicate patterns which change before your very eyes in a subtle disappearing act.  Rauschenberg's Hoarfrost - soft silks, cheesecloth, satins, intricate laces bedecked with ribbons, polka dotted cottons, striped mattress ticking, casually hung on the wall with tacks.  These are sensuous tapestries of many layers, emblazoned with transfer drawings of media images and stuffed with litter, crumpled-up paper that creates pregnant, swelling contours.  Only organic fabrics, no synthetics, will accept the transfer drawings, so the detritus of everyday life becomes immortalized on elegant, tactile surfaces.  Through layers of transparent, translucent and opaque soft stuffs images emerge and disappear in a shimmering game of hide and seek.  Slight air currents activate the delicate hangings with subtle, undulating movement.  The rich textural variety of surface begs to be stroked, admired, enjoyed.  

In one piece a panel of yellow mattress ticking with orange stripes provides the surface for images of speed garnered from newspaper photographs - ice hockey, car racing - combined with cigarettes, fruit trees and furniture advertisements.  Vertically aligned on the central panel of the same piece are penguins on an artic shore, tide pools, a golfer, an ad for scissors, a flower, a cat sitting in the window and various blurred images of advertisements at the bottom.  A third, right-hand panel contains images involved with danger and the Metropolitan Museum's Unicorn Tapestry in brilliant pink.  Rauschenberg serves up a compendium of life's delights - food, tobacco, speed, nature and art - compiled from the media.

A three-panel overlay of cheesecloth and chiffon includes images Indians, Sears ads and comics in folded, twisted configurations on pale blue.  The pieces allow us to wonder anew at the beauty of what we throw away each day.

The use of transfer drawings from the public media has been a preoccupation of Rauschenberg's for many years, but never before has he employed them on such soft and sensuous surfaces.  In the past the jumble of media messages often had violent overtones; in the new work this has been replaced with gentleness and subtlety.  As before the chaotic combinations of images are given coherence by a rhythmic repetition of vertical and horizontal lines as in cubist compositions.  Often structural patterns in the fabrics themselves - stripes, woven ribbons - are integrated into the compositional format.  An early use of material as an integral component of the work occurred, of course, n Rauschenberg's Bed of 1955 with its disturbing intimations of violence.  In the new pieces the pleasurable tactility of surface and seductive pastel coloration speak of sensual delight, a marked contrast to the paint splattered Bed.  Chance and accident still play large parts in the new work, from the casual hanging which allows interaction with the force of gravity and the air currents in the room to the gestural folding and wadding of fabric and paper. 

The incorporation of multitudinous processes - layered transfer drawings, stuffing bags between the layers, folding newspapers, laminating fabrics -into a printing methodology is a formidable undertaking.  Again only the finest, and most expensive, natural fabrics could be used.  media images selected by Rauschenberg had to be enlarged several times before they were printed, and each image could be transferred only once.  Thus in a print with an edition of thirty containing perhaps twenty-five different images, 750 enlarged images had to be made form 750 original media sources.  in cases where not enough surplus newspapers or magazines were available, they had to be reprinted.  The sheer bulk and thickness of layered, stuffed and laminated fabrics proved impossible for the bar of the press to accommodate, and a new system had to be engineered.  To find a person with an embroidery machine to make the round button holes from which the pieces would hang required an extensive search.  And so on.  Each stage of each print brought up unique problems calling for unprecedented solutions in terms of printmaking technology. 

The results are spectacular.  When I first saw one of the Gemini pieces I could not believe it was a print; I thought it must be a prototype.  One of the most striking examples has an image of a diver suspended in indeterminate space, either upon or within a cheesecloth swath hung in a loose fold over a field of blue.  The cheesecloth panel is affixed to the back piece of material at the lower edge, so what is behind is somewhat hidden.  One of the diver's arms is a paper bag, and media transfer images form a border along the lower edge of the piece.  

A highly enigmatic three-panel piece contains an Egyptian statue with a rumpled piece contains an Egyptian statue with a rumpled paper bag head standing between two 1930's automobiles, which also are aligned in a rigid frontality.  Some folded newspaper rubbings in a horizontal band along the lower section of this piece turned the phrase "Miracle Mile Dollar Days" into "Miracle Days." Delighted with the accident, Rauschenberg specified that the newspapers be folded in the same configuration for the entire edition. 

The delicacy and hedonism of Rauschenberg's Hoarfrost series reflects a sensibility in the midst of fecund change, but one which maintains a strong sense of continuity with its own past.  The new softness and lyricism may be a reflection of the pastel skies and seductive air of Rauschenberg's island home of Captiva, where he now spends a much time as possible rather than in New York.  Or perhaps the new work expresses a mellowing of spirit as the artist enters his fifty-first year.  His enthusiastic embrace of the richness that is at hand has results in a lovely body of work and serves as a reminder to us the proliferation of pleasures to be found in our everyday environment, pleasures which are all too easily buried beneath fruitless burdens of anxiety. 

ARTWEEK NOV. 16, 1974