Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism by Gavin Parkinson;

Author:Gavin Parkinson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Figure 8.6 Christian Bernard and Jean-Claude Wallior, ‘Ce qui est surréaliste (???),’ Phases, Second Series, no. 1, May 1969, 84.

Pierre’s attempts to harmonize various current areas of art with Surrealism were, no doubt, far too eclectic and too assertive on the whole; both the uninhibited diversity paraded in his inventory of seventy-five artists and the overconfidence implied in the question mark missing from his title were emphatically alluded to by the three question marks appended to the title of Bernard and Wallior’s riposte. The Surrealist’s ongoing transition to an art critic and historian is evident here, but so is the trauma facing the Surrealist group, damaged by a split in February 1969 and threatened with the loss of its coherence and carefully drawn boundaries, not so much following Breton’s death two-and-a-half years earlier than the malaise that came after the failure of May ’68. That political and social reversal, along with its repercussions for Surrealism, was brought up by Pierre in the interview part of the article in La Galerie des arts in the form of disenchantment with the younger generation.105 Jaguer also wrote of a crisis in revolutionary consciousness, but from a quite different perspective that is critical of the stance taken by Pierre and his friends in that interview, in a brief, apprehensive text displaying alarm at the potential, imminent demise of Surrealism, placed in the same number of Phases as the one by Bernard and Wallior, on the page facing it.106

Pierre’s art-historically and philosophically contextualized interpretation of Rauschenberg in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ is far more subtly modulated and extensively linked to a history of Surrealist art than his epigrammatic pronouncements on Hans Haacke, Claes Oldenburg, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint-Phalle and most of the others in La Galerie des arts. His disappointed assessment of the artist’s trajectory as viewed from the end of the 1960s is finely poised, revealing contradictions at certain points in the Surrealist commentary on the artist, within Rauschenberg’s own project and also in the project of art history. Directed back critically towards the moment that Cage’s text of 1961 on Rauschenberg began its work of moulding the artist’s reception, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ also seems to approve certain of its utterances. Furthermore, it was published at the time that Rauschenberg was emphatically engaged in his art and life with contemporary social and political issues, to which Pierre did not refer but must have recognized were undermined by the artist’s commitment to technology, which, in turn, seems to have created no conflict in Rauschenberg’s own mind with his activism.

In addition to this, also unspoken and perhaps not even heeded by Pierre, the high years of Rauschenberg’s work are located in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ in 1953–62, almost exactly the period of the Algerian War of Independence. It is as though the Surrealist reading of an esoteric, ethical, aesthetico-poetic Rauschenberg was a figment of Pierre’s inference, entailing a suppression of both the political context in the United States to which the artist was then responding overtly and the one in France to which the author was responding covertly.

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