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February 19, 2008
In Kiley Gaffney's review of Branden Joseph's Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde it is stated that the historical and interpretive importance of his work is that it is a significant instigator of a neo-avant-garde movement, far more consistent and serious than the curatorial and intellectual conception of a mere repetition of earlier avant-garde movements.
Joseph argues that Rauschenberg and Cage initiated a new avant-garde project, one that approached the idea of difference not in terms of negation but as a positive force. Claiming that Rauschenberg's work cannot be understood solely from the standpoint of the Frankfurt School--whose theories have dominated discussions of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde aesthetics--Joseph turns to the theoretical positions of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Rauschenberg's neo-avant-garde was not a simple repetition of earlier avant-garde movements, Joseph shows, but a series of practices that opposed the rise of postwar spectacle, commodification, and mass conformity.Gaffney says:
By rearticulating avant-garde elements into a firm set of artistic practices and tropes, Rauschenberg resisted and opposed the spectacle, commodification and mass conformity of postwar life. His pictorial deployment of everyday visual ephemera (a ‘style’ often most famously accredited to Warhol’s Pop cohort) juxtaposed with reproductions of elements of old master paintings are the most celebrated of these works, both critically and aesthetically. Rauschenberg’s ‘Combine’ artworks aimed for an illogical compositional structure, as opposed to collage’s traditional calculated juxtaposition, and complicated the search for creative meaning.
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I don't know that much about Rauschenberg's "neo-avant-garde," but it is very interesting. It's amazing how much can be interpreted from art so long after it is made.