Robert Rauschenberg "Combines" @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
December 20, 2005 - April 2, 2006
BEAUTIFUL MAN
Robert Rauschenberg, you are a beautiful man and I love you.
I was flipping through a Vanity Fair a month ago and I saw you in a photograph and you were old and fragile and I thought of how it is hard in America to love your ancestors. I don't know why exactly, we all love our grandmas, our grandpas, but we just don't see people as majestic in their old age or not easily as a culture, we don't see them, we see them but refer to the younger image, we flashback, we don't really look.
You were a beautiful man and you still are a beautiful man.
This love letter to you may not be true mettaartlove under the premise I put out originally, the premise that arises from my bratty contempt and struggle with the art world and my attempt to put right that attitude – to separate myself from jealousy and from my own fears of success. However in actuality, true metta is about sending love to everyone and anyone and thank god, really, thank god that alongside my insecurities and competitiveness there can be a more pure and substantive love, an admiration and more pure longing, thank god I can have a moment where I just long to join my tribe, my lineage, long to crawl into the pink cloud of the artist's studio with my brothers and sisters, with my grandmas and grandpas and nest there, safe, challenged, fed.
Bob, when I was in the museum looking at your work I ran into a fan of this project, mettaartlove, which was really, really exciting for me. It was exciting for him too and I took that as a good sign. He laughed when I told him I was working, by visiting your show and he said, "What's your problem with Rauschenberg? I thought metta was about loving people you were pissed off at." and I laughed and said "Even mettaartlove artists need to rest."
SENSITIVE LINING
When I was a kid I didn't know how to draw and art supplies just intimidated me. I remember one day I was in art class, I think I was in third grade and they gave us these precut shapes in all sorts of different colors and some of that amber mucilage for glue, the kind with the pink eraser nipple top that you pressed to the paper gently to make it stick. I was spacing out, as usual, not expecting anything from myself, but the freedom of moving the shapes around like puzzle pieces relaxed me. I remember my art teacher making a big deal about the picture I made that day and showing it to the class. It was the first time I ever made art that someone noticed and it was the first time I was able to make a fluid connection between the shy world inside my head to an audience, pretty much bypassing the technical coordinated use of fingers and I thought maybe I am an artist and this thought rose inside, first hitting the ceiling of my diaphragm with a light thud, then passing through and rising to the inside of my skull and hovered there, brushing against its sensitive lining.
I remember the first time I saw your work, Bob, at an art history class when I was an undergraduate at BU. It was 2 classes before the slide show on conceptual art when Professor Wiseman showed the slides of Schwarzkogler cutting himself and when my head completely spit open, never to be 'repaired'. The room was cavernous and the class size immense, probably close to 100 students. I was a freshman. I didn't know anything about art history but I thought it would help me understand my two other loves: rock and roll and the movies. The class started and ended in the dark. Professor Wiseman would sit in the projection booth and drone nasally into a microphone while dropping the slides, a disconnected voice that reeked of the cigarettes I know he was smoking up there, the cigarettes I watched later when I got him alone; hanging out of the corner of his mouth with inches of ashes that matched the color of his face dangling over his bottom lip.
I don't know if that class was the one on abstract expressionism or pop art, when I saw you for the first time, I remember it was through BED and MONOGRAM that I found you Bob, and I remember thinking boldly but I believe genuinely, joyfully and without ego -- I could make that.
MADE BED
It was at around that time that I had been photographing my bed every morning when I left it. My bed laid lengthwise under two windows and I liked the way the light looked on the sheets and pillow. It was a skinny twin bed. I lived in a dormitory. The pictures were black and white and I thought they looked kind of Japanese. I was 18. I craved a lover for those sheets but had only one, one night, and he never came back. I had a roommate. The room was small. But I loved my unmade bed, the left bed and I loved your BED.
I remember visiting your BED at the old MOMA and it was one of first times I went to a museum to see a piece of art that I loved in person. I liked going to MOMA and I went back. They showed photography which I understood. I had grown up visiting the Metropolitan with my parents, visiting the mummies, sometimes looking at the Impressionists and I was confused about what that meant, the mummies and the pretty paintings in this huge building that reminded me of the mausoleums on Dark Shadows and vampire movies. MOMA was clean and smaller, and had a cool cafe and garden. BED was downstairs in a dark intimate room and it was often empty.
But today you are at the Metropolitan with the mummies and I have to tell you Bob, we had a hard time finding you there. The museum was hot and filled with heavy-coated throngs too impatient to brave the long lines at the coat check. It was the day after Christmas. There were signs everywhere for Van Gogh and when we asked the people at the information booth where your show was, they said to ask the guards and the guards pointed us to some stairs and then turned away.
THEORETICALLY NOT ACTUALLY OPEN
We finally found you, threading our way through the crowd, waiting at the head of the Van Gogh line, as if we were at a traffic light or at a levee of a great river, waiting to pass.
The show was beautiful, of course, big work and everything was laid out chronologically with tons of signage. Museums are great about that. It really gives you perspective. Of course, I'm always backwards and I came in through the gift shop which was really the end of the show, but we figured it all out.
Sal and I stood in front of BLACK MARKET, the piece with all the clipboards, the ohio license plate, and the suitcase that says OPEN. We wanted to open the suitcase although everyone was standing about 2 yards away reading the signs. Sal asked the guard if the suitcase wass meant to be opened (at least I think that is how she put it). The guard said yes. Sal looks around and then approaches the suitcase. The guard steps in front of her and says:
"Theoretically, not actually."
But of course. It was the day after Christmas and it was the Met and there was a gift shop and signage and everything. That was the new theatre for your interaction right there. And the guards.
We had to be content with the text and our imaginations. The instructions said that we were (if we lived in 1961) to take an object out of the suitcase, then leave a record on clipboard (either drawing or writing) and also leave an object of our own so that there would always be objects in the suitcase to be retrieved. It reminded me a little bit of that strange and lovely show at Leo Koenig last fall, TANTAMOUNTER 24/7, where there those young Viennese artists GELITIN built themselves into a room-sized copy machine of their own design, where they manufactured three dimensional copies of what ever was sent into their "machine:" My daughter put in a fragile charm bracelet and received back a gold pleather disco with charm facsimiles cut out of a gay porn magazine. Everybody loved it Bob, and you would have too and I'm sure they were grateful to you in there, at least somewhere in their cellular art memory.
KEY TO THAT ROOM WE WANT TO LOVE
But the thing that really, really breaks my heart Bob, is that you had your painting too . . that really rang inside of me, that you had all this high concept and fun and that you could paint and that wicked sense of formalism that gave you the key into that secret art lineage. Like those special lounges in the airports, I don't have a key to that room. You know sometimes I hate the object but I totally romanticize the physicality of paint. I know, I hear, that one can fall in love with it. You can put your hand in it and move it around and it creeps into your blood stream. I only know the shy feeling inside my head and I move that around.
I love you Bob, I love the blue light bulbs and the ever present powercord. I love the feeling of lightness inside me when I stand front of CANYON with the eagle and its wide wings spread, the cinch of the rope around the dangling pillow.
What is it about art -- it either makes up open up inside or glaze over and move on. What is that opening.
Like the feeling of love in my solar plexus, even if it's not particularly pretty or singing, all tingling and connected and believing in the absolute, the best possible opportunity for everyone.
Thank you.
NEXT LOVE: MIRANDA JULY "LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE" & " ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW"
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