Viewing page 13 of 107
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
[[advertisement]] One of a Kind. [[image - logo]] The Kenneth R. Laurence Galleries presents the only for-sale collection of rare and historical documents, manuscripts, and stamps in the Southeast. 1007 Kane Concourse Bay Harbor Islands (305) 866-3600 Member, International Society of Appraisers [[/advertisement]] [[advertisement]] [[image - logo]] Lydia Harrison & Associates improving the human element in business Personnel Recruitment Executive Placement 1550 Madruga Avenue Suite 210 Coral Gables, Florida 33146 (305) 667-7455 [[/advertisement]] The World According To Bob Rauschenberg wit and good humor that are so characteristic of his work. Even at his crankiest and most grim, the artist is always capable of bouncing back into a kind of inspired playfulness that makes him fun to listen to, just as his paintings are fun to look at. With Rauschenberg, there is almost always a laugh building or a smile beginning to break. Given his enormous body of work over the last thirty years, all this magpie cheer can start to grate after awhile; even Time's adoring profile allowed as how Rauschenberg's work looks best when it has been selected and arranged by a judicious editor with powers of restraint. Hence, the inherent risk in his current project, alternately called the "Two Furlong" and "Quarter Mile" piece, the first 400-odd feet of which will be on exhibit in May and June at the Center for the Fine Arts in downtown Miami. Composed of continuous panels and freestanding pieces, collage and oil-on-canvas and photographs and silkscreen and lithography, a feast of scraps and main courses from all the periods and points of view that have made up the artist's long and singular career, this is Rauschenberg turned on full, a kind of stream-of-consciousness valedictory address. It is somehow a typically Rauschenberg notion, "the world's largest painting," in progress now for nearly three years and quite likely never to be finished. "I'm sure if we ever get to the quarter-mile, I'll say, ehhhh, maybe a half-mile," admits the artist. "We'll just keep adding and adding to it, and who knows what it'll end up as. I only have one house rule: I don't want it to be in an airport. I spend a lot of time in airports, and I'm always either missing a plane or waiting for a late one, and I'm only interested in getting where I'm going. I don't want to go anywhere else." Rauschenberg has achieved through his art a degree of financial success that permits him to devote full energy to a project like the "Quarter Mile," regardless of its final shape or place of installation, regardless of whether it's installed at all, ever finished or not. But, for all his awshucks put-downs of the artistic mission, he is in his heart dead-serious about his work. The piece, he says, "is a great luxury for me aesthetically," yet the "Quarter Mile" is no whimsical indulgence. The painter calls it his "state of the universe" message, and its images are ambitiously global, the product of inveterate traveling and inspired collaborations with artists all over the world. Despite the apparent spontaneity of his work, he admits to an obsessive desire to improve and polish - "I'm never finished with a piece until it's seen," he says. A month before the Quarter Mile's second public showing (the first 190 feet were exhibited at Edison Community College in Fort Myers in 1982) the artist had begun to inspire mutinous grumblings from the staff with his sudden and abrupt switches in direction. Visitors are a constant and disruptive presence, but the work gets done, for all the artist's changes of mind, for all the maddening delays in getting materials shipped from New York or Chicago, "leaving us standing around outside waiting for the UPS truck for days on end." Two hundred and ten linear feet of canvas is by any conventional standards a Herculean out-put for a period of two years, but Rauschenberg fairly bristles with creative energy. His work, he explains simply, is his "joy." An idiosyncratic work schedule keeps him up half the night in his studio and in bed most mornings until noon, but Rauschenberg has none of the look of the dissipate about him. He is tan and From the "Quarter Mile Piece" by Robert Rauschenberg [[image]] 20 MARQUEE MAY 1984
