LouisKatz | Main / RepresentationPresentationRauschenberg

I am finally getting the sense that the traditional 2D arts are beginning to see thier products as objects as well as windows or images. Rauschenberg is perhaps best know for working with this transition.The conception of paintings as objects, presentation rather than representation. It cannot be stated that he began this, there was a sense of this in the gilt frames and shaped pieces of church painting and certainly in lots of folk art. It is odd that at the same time there is a movement in the ceramics field to represent rather than present pots. Rather than make pots themselves people began to make images of pots, pots about pots, nonfunctional pots, pots as subject mater, and other a flatening of full form into 2 dimensional objects. This progression of painting to presesntation and pottery to representation, was not a recognition of the falseness of division. It was not a vast understanding of the maya, the illusion of labels. In painting it came about as the product of rejection of representation. Beyond formalist painting, and abstract expressionism, the loss of representation and the domininant genre, forced painter to look beyond the picture plain for a reason to paint. In ceramics, the push toward flat, was and is multifaceted but it seems that more than a little of it was brought about by photographic representation. Slides, images of work, became more important than the work itself, and flat objects are easier to photograph. The other major pressure to flatten the breath from form seems to be the need for clayers to present work to painters in University Art Programs and Painting dominated galleries. It is clear that ceramics and other non paint media were and continue to be ignored in Art History as taught in universities. The dominance of paintings created and art world with a very limited understanding of form.

as not so much a coming together or blurring of lines but recognition of the lines as maya by a group of people not claiming any adherence to buddhist philosophy.

"The most famous thing he said was that he worked in the gap between art and life," said John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "I think what he meant by this is life was his materials as much as art was his materials." http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jatmDN7Lw1G048tSIFdlmViBpifwD90KVR6O0

Buddhism attracted many in New York's artistic circles in the 1950s, and Rauschenberg's friend John Cage had been a Buddhist adherent since the 1930s (Cage drove the automobile that in 1953 produced Rauschenberg's first wheel-image, a 23-foot-long tyre-print; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). (12) In his non-linear, scattershot manner of allusion, Rauschenberg further emphasised his Christ-goat's painful burden by leaving visible the stencilled quality-label of his canvas: EXTRA HEAVY. (12) On interest in Buddhism in post war New York, see Charles Stuckey, 'Minutiae and Rauschenberg's Combine Mode', in Schimmel, op. cit., p. 203. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAL/is_536_164/ai_n16818833 Kenneth Bendiner is professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Star bellied sneeches.