Moonwalkin' with Robert Rauschenberg
The A.V. Club roams Madison's galleries looking for inspiration
Courtesy Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art
A detail from "Signs."
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If artist Robert Rauschenberg wanted to work "in the gap between art and life," he was right to find inspiration in space travel: The first moon landing transmitted footage so wondrous and surreal that some viewers refused to believe it. Iconic images such as these fueled American art in the '60s, including Rauschenberg's work on display at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art's Signs Of The Times: Robert Rauschenberg's America, running through Jan. 3. The show focuses on three of his series from the turn of the decade, when the celebrated artist examined American identity by mashing together some of its icons.
"Signs" collages a crooning, red Joplin with magazine cutouts of Vietnam soldiers, protesting students, JFK and Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who rests peacefully in casket linens as a bloody riot victim crawls toward him. Taken together, these images evoke the violence, passion and social conscience of the late '60s. Another figure--Buzz Aldrin in astronaut gear, with a moonwalk image reflecting on his helmet--highlights the era's intellectual and technological achievements, which often get buried in the reminiscing about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
"Signs."Courtesy Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art
By the time you reach the Stoned Moon pieces, it's clear that Rauschenberg was fascinated with not only what space exploration said about America's dedication to scientific inquiry--the desire to solve the mysteries of how everything, including the stars and heavens, came to be--but also how it merged technology with spirituality.
The 1969 lithograph "Sky Garden" features a diagram of a rocket body, which glows as a bright, hot white amid bloody red paint strokes. Paired with the images of crystal-blue Florida water that crown the top of the piece, the piece brings out a demented sort of patriotism, one that twists the nature symbols of a travel brochure--palm trees and the Florida egret--into an advertisement for the moon resorts of the future. Meanwhile, a fiery yellow image of a takeoff blast, situated at the top of the rocket diagram, nods to the violence necessary to visit this faraway paradise.
"Sky Garden," from the Stoned Moon SeriesCourtesy Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art
Back toward the entrance, "Banner," another lithograph from 1969, uses a similar set of Florida colors and symbols to honor the space program while pondering how the race to claim the moon might change America's national identity and work against the quest to discover. In the piece's center, a rectangle filled with oranges and emblazoned with the Florida state seal tilts slightly to the left, as if toppling over. Inside the seal, a Native American woman stands on a palm tree-lined shore, surrounded by the words "In God We Trust." The outlines of these images are crisp, and their highlighter-orange hue is so loud that it would be difficult to look at if it weren't so interesting.
Once again, the margins of the piece--which, like those of "Sky Garden," are a stunning shade of blue--tell the rest of the story with barely visible figures of rockets, the moon, and the faces of early astronauts: The harder we charge toward progress, the harder it is to see the beauty and danger that lay beyond.
