What is going to come next
The fatal car crash that ended Pollock’s life was a stun to the still fledgling American post-war art. His power and prowess dominated over whole legions of painters who saw him as a beacon of sorts, toward a new and more enlightened American mind. Pollock, like no other painter before him, was as wide an influence during his life as he was after his death. Fellow painters would mimic his gestures and methods in hopes of uncovering something for themselves. Scholars and thinkers would dissect his actions in search of information, clues. ¶Within a few years of his death, two art historians began to grapple with his legacy. Enrolled together at Columbia University, under the tutelage of Meier Shapiro, Donald Judd and Alan Kaprow began to unravel the legend behind America’s first Master Painter. Both scholars understood Pollock’s work as an endgame for art, and in that, saw his legacy as the roots of a coming harvest. Although these two men approached his concepts with different ends in mind, each revered Pollock. As such, both were perplexed and excited by the prospects of an American art after its first great hero. ¶Today, sadly, we will enter a similar cycle of unwinding influence. On Monday night Robert Rauschenberg died of heart failure. On Tuesday, newspapers and scholars will eulogize a man responsible for so many changes within American art. In the months and years to come, a multitude of readings into his legacy will surface, along with exhibitions, magazine articles and web-posting like this. ¶Simply put, Rauschenberg represents the second benchmark for our American Modernism. Together with Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg’s work from the late 1950’s marked a sea change by widening the spectrum of influence to encompass the world at large. Today, these two artists are refered to as Proto-Pop for this advancement. It was they who broke apart the hermetic formalism of post-war abstraction to allow for a bit of worldly sentiment. Johns took the more serious and heady route by catering his art to the introspective game of art-production and its many tricks. Rauschenberg, on the other hand, was more actively lighthearted while remaining intellectually driven. Some of his earliest works playfully questioned the difference between painting and sculpture or performance and printmaking. At his best, he defined a new sense of interdisciplinary art-making by seeking new ways of mingling the media. At his worst, he reworked and restated the same ideas, as if using himself as a popular culture reference. At all times he was an exceptional artist. ¶And so, in the wake of this loss, how will art maneuver?