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- for HAM. on her starting out
So thorough is the extent of the art world celebration of Robert Rauschenberg, and all its attendant media industriousness, that a serious intellectual accounting of his cultural importance has become both difficult and necessary. Such an accounting requires us to readjust our way of seeing, for even if he is not unquestionably what some would claim - the equal of Picasso - Rauschenberg is an artist already operating (and being celebrated) in a pre-canonical haze. This haze multiplies the force of his presence, so that we can see his influence in hundreds of artists from Soho to Los Angeles, and in a handful of media, even to the point where we could readily forgive anyone who saw no further back than his combines and therefore had no reason to acknowledge the "post-retinal" watershed of Duchamp and his readymades. Rauschenberg, or at least the large body of his work, faces a dilemma: his art has become rather too easy to look at, and therefore hard to see.
At a recent showing restricted to members of the Guggenheim, I found myself alone on the top of the ramp, while down below hundreds of other members had rushed in to buy the catalog from the museum shop and present it to the artist for his signature. I don't know the number of books Rauschenberg inscribed that evening, but I estimate it was several times as numerous as the plentiful supply of paintings, lithographs, sculptures, photographs, and other mixed-media objects that graced the walls and galleries of the museum to the point of a rapturous and indulgent overflowing. He seemed, in my few quick glimpses of him, to be remarkably at ease, relaxed in a sort of demotic coronation. Some wag suggested it was especially good and timely to be the subject of a retrospective now that no Picasso show was currently drawing New York crowds, and now that de Kooning had passed away and Johns had earlier been likewise celebrated by MOMA. The day - perhaps the year - belonged to this Proteus from Port Arthur, Texas, who had struck some chord in the early 1950's at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and had lived to hear it resound throughout...