Relics of Past Perception in Rauschenberg’s Early

Combines

Graham Smith

There is no more subject in a combine than there is in a page

from a newspaper. Each thing that is there is a subject. It is

a situation involving multiplicity.

John Cage, ‘On Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’, 1961

All images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their

signifiers, a floating chain of signifieds, the reader able to

choose some and ignore others.

Roland Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, 1964

‘Is when Rauschenberg looks an idea?’ asked the composer John Cage in

‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’, an essay that he

published in May 1961 in the Italian journal Metro and reprinted later

the same year in an anthology of his lectures and writings. ‘Rather’,

Cage responded to his own question, ‘it is an entertainment in which to

celebrate unfixity’.1 In a later passage Cage used the metaphor of focus

(more precisely, ‘unfocus’) instead of fixity to characterise

Rauschenberg’s practice as an artist. ‘Were he saying something in

particular’, observed Cage, ‘[Rauschenberg] would have to focus the

painting; as it is he simply focuses himself, and everything […] is

appropriate, appropriate to poetry, a poetry of infinite possibilities’.2

Rauschenberg expressed his own ambivalence towards order in ‘Random

Order’, a picture essay that he published in 1963 in the first issue of

the New York magazine Location.3 Characterised by Rosalind Krauss as ‘part

manifesto, part diary, part poem’,4 ‘Random Order’ affirms

Rauschenberg’s acceptance of chance in his work, while also attesting to

the presence of an underlying order. The second and third pages of the

essay form a double-page spread incorporating photographs by

Rauschenberg together with pencilled texts in his handwriting.5 A

photograph of a truck occupies much of the top left quadrant of the

first page and is framed on two sides by the text: ‘With sound scale and

insistency trucks mobilize words and broadside our culture by a

combination of law and local motivation which produces an extremely

complex random order that cannot be described as accidental’.6 By

contrast, the final image represents Rauschenberg’s interior world,

showing the cooker and kitchen top in his Broadway studio. ‘Allegory’ is

inscribed below this photograph and functions as a caption to it – or,

perhaps, as a summation to the entire composition. Taken together, ‘an

extremely complex random order that cannot be described as accidental’

and ‘allegory’ encapsulate the nature of Rauschenberg’s work from the

1950s and early 1960s. The first affirms the compatibility of order and

chance, whereas the latter signals a type of work in which objects may

2

signify something other than – or in addition to – themselves and can

express hidden or indirect meanings.7

Cage’s rhetoric notwithstanding, Allegory, Archive, Collection, Monogram,

Rebus, Small Rebus (figure 1) and other combines by Rauschenberg invite

exegesis by virtue of their titles, and a number of scholars have

argued, with varying degrees of success, that there are latent messages

in Rebus, Odalisk, Monogram, Canyon and other works.8 Krauss, on the other

hand, has dismissed such interpretations, observing, ‘But, then, the

convinced iconographer is almost impossible to dissuade’.9

My goal is to shed light on Small Rebus by introducing new information

pertaining to its imagery, while also seeking to discover in it Cage’s

ideas of poetry and visual entertainment. I will also consider whether

the presence of the word ‘rebus’ in the title should be taken to mean

that Small Rebus may to be read as a word puzzle.

II

Michel Foucault’s 1967 lecture ‘On Other Places’ complements Cage’s and

Rauschenberg’s writings, and his concept of heterotopia provides another

mode of entry into the world of the combines.10 ‘We are in the epoch of

simultaneity’, declared Foucault near the beginning of his paper, ‘we

are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the

side-by-side, of the dispersed’. These ideas fit comfortably with Cage’s

notion of multiplicity and with the analogy he draws between the subject

3

matter of combines and the treatment of disparate subjects on a single

page of a newspaper. One principle of heterotopia, explains Foucault, is

that ‘[it] is capable of juxtaposing in a single space several spaces,

several sites that are in themselves incompatible’.11 To illustrate this

notion – and the related concept of heterochrony – he referred to

gardens, museums and libraries. Plants and flowers from various regions

1Notes

? – John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’, Metro 2

(May 1961), 36-51; reprinted in Cage, Silence, Middletown, Connecticut

1961, 98–108 (98).

2 – Ibid., 103.

3 – Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random Order’, Location 1:1 (1963), 27–31.

4 – Rosalind Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory’, in Robert Rauschenberg (October

Files 4), ed. Branden W. Joseph, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London

2002, 92–131 (99).

5 – Ibid., 101, 102.

6 – I take Rauschenberg to mean that trucks display explicit messages

and follow precise itineraries but also come together by coincidence. On

those occasions their disparate messages combine fortuitously to make

unexpected word combinations.

7 – Cage, ‘Rauschenberg’, 108, asserts to the contrary that ‘object is

fact, not symbol’ in Rauschenberg’s work.

8 – For a review of this literature, see Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory’,

130–31 n. 59. See also Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg

and the neo-avant-garde (An October Book), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and

London 2007, 158–63. For nicely balanced discussion of Reservoir, see4

may be collected in a single garden, and museums and libraries generally

house books and artifacts from diverse nations and disparate time

periods. Rauschenberg’s combines are in essence heterotopias bringing

together heterogeneous objects from disparate times and places ‘to

establish […] an ensemble of relations that makes them seem juxtaposed,

set off against one another, implicated by each other – that makes them

appear, in short, as a sort of configuration’.12

III

Except for brief analyses by Caroline Jones, Paul Schimmel and Thomas

Crow, Small Rebus has received little attention in the literature on

Rauschenberg.13 Calvin Tomkins does not mention it,14 and Branden Joseph

refers to it only fleetingly.15 The exhibition history in Rauschenberg

Combines indicates that Small Rebus was shown twice in the United States

before its acquisition in 1987 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los

Jonathan Fineberg, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s “Reservoir”’, American Art, 12:1

(Spring 1998), 84–88. For my thoughts on Odalisk, see ‘Robert

Rauschenberg’s “Odalisque”’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 44 (1984), 375–82.

9 – Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory’, 131 n. 59.

10 – Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (‘Des espaces autres’), trans.

Jan Miskowiec, in Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986), 22–7; reprinted in The

Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Nicolas Mirzoeff, London and New York

1998, 229–36.

11 – Ibid., 233.

12 – Ibid., 229. 5

Angeles.16 It was therefore absent from the retrospective organised in

1977 by the Smithsonian Institution and from that held in 1998 at the

Guggenheim Museum. This sparse exhibition history and bibliography

reflects the fact that between 1960 and 1987 Small Rebus was principally

in Milan in the private collection of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.

Small Rebus was completed after 12 March 1956, for Rauschenberg

incorporated into it a photograph from an article entitled ‘Santee’s

Overwhelming Saturday’ that had appeared in Sports Illustrated on that.17 Wes

Santee was one of three athletes who vied with each other in 1953 and

1954 to be first to break four minutes for the mile – the others being

13 – Caroline A. Jones, ‘Coca Cola Plan or, How New York Stole the Soul of

Giuseppe Panza’, in The Legacy of a Collector: The Panza di Biumo Collection at the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles 1999, 38–9; Paul

Schimmel, ‘Autobiography and Self-Portraiture in Rauschenberg’s

Combines’, in Robert Rauschenberg Combines, organized by Paul Schimmel, with

essays by Thomas Crow, Branden W. Joseph, Paul Schimmel and Charles

Stuckey and an afterword by Pontus Hultén, Los Angeles 2005, 222; Thomas

Crow, ‘Rise and Fall: Theme and Idea in the Combines of Robert

Rauschenberg’, in Rauschenberg Combines, 230–3.

14 – Calvin Tomkins, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’ in The Bride and the Bachelors: Five

Masters of the Avant-Garde, expanded edition, New York: 1968, and Off the Wall:

Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, New York 1980.

15 – Joseph, Random Order, 105, 344 n. 111.

16 – Mary Beth Carosello, ‘Inventory and Exhibition History of

Combines,’ 293.

17 – Sports Illustrated, 12 March 1956, 22–5. 6

Roger Bannister, who ran 3 minutes 59.4 seconds at Oxford on 6 May 1954,

and John Landy of Australia, who ran 3 minutes 57.4 seconds at Turku,

Finland, forty-six days later.18 The event covered by the article was

the 1956 Columbian Mile, one of the highlights of the Knights of

Columbus meet in Madison Square Garden, New York. Santee was to run

against Ron Delaney, an Irish runner who had dominated the indoor

season. However, because of circumstances extending back to spring 1954,

it seemed on the morning of the event that the Columbian Mile might have

to be cancelled. Because of allegations that Santee had accepted

excessive expenses to run in California, the national AAU (Amateur

Athletic Union) suspended him from amateur competition. Thereafter a New

York law firm was retained to protect Santee’s interests and his

standing as a US medal hope at the Olympics to be held in Melbourne in

December 1956. After much back and forth between the interested parties,

Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympics Committee,

pronounced that if he were a runner, he ‘would not be running tonight

against Santee’. The meet organizers reached an unsatisfactory

compromise. Santee ran the Columbian mile, competing against two

unranked runners, whereas Delaney and the other principal competitors

ran against each other in a special race. Santee won his event by a

considerable margin, which explains why he appears to be the only figure

on the track. Delaney won the special race.19

7

A photograph of gymnasts in the lower right quadrant of Small Rebus

was also appropriated from Sports Illustrated, for it is extracted from an

illustration accompanying a piece featuring Pennsylvania State

University’s male gymnasts that appeared in the issue for 21 March

1955.20 Credited to Fernand Fonssagrives, the photograph shows eight

gymnasts and is bisected by a climbing rope.21 Rauschenberg painted over

the upper left section of Fonssagrives’s photograph with red-brown

pigment so that only three of the five Penn State gymnasts are visible.

These are identified in Sports Illustrated by a picture key as: Haag (rope

climbing); Paxton (back somersault); Weissend (straddle leg support).

Expunged are Rehm (handstand on parallel bars) and Fegley (half turn on

trampoline). Rauschenberg also incorporated a portion of the photograph

to the right of the climbing rope into the lower left quadrant of Small

Rebus, where it is largely hidden by a detail from a reproduction of

Titian’s celebrated Rape of Europa, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

in Boston. Only the gymnasts’ horse and the head, arms and torso of

18 – For Bannister’s account of the race to break four minutes, see his

First Four Minutes, London: Putnam 1955.

19 – Kenneth E. Silver, ‘Master Bedrooms, Master Narratives: Home,

Homosexuality and Post-War Art’, in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in

Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed, London 1996, 206–221 (214–

17).

20 – ‘Gymnastic Gyrations’, Sports Illustrated, 21 March 1955, 34–5.

21 – Fernand Fonssagrives was the first husband of Lisa Fonssagrives,

who became Helmut Newton’s wife and model.8

Marshall, who is performing a handstand, can be seen. In the magazine

Kline executes double leg circles on the horse, while Schwenzfeier

performs a handstand on the rings. In essence, Rauschenberg selected

four gymnasts from the Penn State team and transposed the left section

of the magazine illustration to the right side of his canvas, while

switching part of the right section to the left edge of the combine.

Henry Luce launched Sports Illustrated on 16 August 1954. The cover of

the first issue depicted a baseball game at Milwaukee between the Braves

and the New York Giants, and the first article, ‘Duel of the Four-Minute

Men’, covered the ‘miracle mile’ between Bannister and Landy at the

Empire Games in Vancouver on 7 August. The second feature was a profile

of Prince Philip, ‘The Dashing Duke of Edinburgh’, presenting him as

‘Britain’s first sportsman’, and other articles, included one on a world

title bout between Rocky Marciano and Ezzard Charles and one on baseball

cards.

For Rauschenberg Sports Illustrated was a lively new magazine: it was

certainly the case that he found in its early issues several photographs

that interested him. His practice in Small Rebus is unusual, however, for

he appropriated photographs from issues that had been published a year

apart. This suggests that he followed a deliberate process of

selection.22

IV

9

If any thinking is going to take place, it has to come from

inside the Mason jar which is suspended in Talisman, or from

the center of the rose (is it red) or the eyes of the pitcher

(looks like something out of a movie) or – the farther one

goes in this direction the more one sees nothing is in the

foreground: each minute point is at the center.

John Cage

22 – Rebus (1955) (Schimmel, Combines, plate 24) contains two photographs

from a series illustrating a feature entitled ‘Duel at 880 Yards’ that

was published on 30 May 1955. ‘Pitt’s deceptive Arnie Sowell floats from

obscurity to track fame in one uncanny moment of acceleration’, explains

the subhead. The first photograph in Sports Illustrated appears in the right

panel of Rebus, whereas that in left panel is the third photograph,

showing Sowell as he moved definitively past Tom Courtney of Fordham

University. At the bottom left corner of Untitled (Schimmel, Combines,

plate 32) is a full-page photograph of two fighting cocks that

illustrated John O’Reilly’s, ‘Chickens in the Rough’, 12 March 1956, 60–

2 (61). Schimmel’s date of ca 1955 for Untitled must therefore be revised.

Between 1959 and 1960, while working on a series of drawings

illustrating Dante’s Inferno, Rauschenberg continued to draw on Sports

Illustrated. Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, 223–6, linked Rauschenberg’s

Dante to a man wearing a towel around his waist who appears in an

advertisement for ‘True Temper Pro Fit’ golf clubs (19 May 1958, 9).

Likewise, a Canada goose, in ‘The Descent’, is taken from a vignette on

the contents page of the issue 8:16 (April 1958) announcing an article

entitled ‘The Great Migrator’. The principal figures in The Central Pit of

Malebolge, The Giants, the drawing illustrating Canto 31, are transfers from

a photograph commemorating the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. This photograph,

of the middle-heavyweight weight-lifting medallists, appeared in

‘Melbourne: A Human Story’, 7 January 1957, 37. See Laura Auricchio,

‘Lifting the Veil: Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Drawings for Dante’s Inferno10

Cage’s observations on Talisman and his reference to the rose in

particular draw attention to the fact that in the lower right quadrant

of Small Rebus Rauschenberg pasted a diagram elucidating the concept

‘rose’. Jones described this diagram as a ‘line drawing of the mind’s

memory sites’, and Schimmel characterised it as ‘a found diagram that

illustrates the process of sensory perception’, but neither scholar

identified it precisely.23 In fact, the diagram can be traced to an

article the distinguished American neurologist Moses Allen Starr (1854–

1932) published in October 1889 in the New York scientific journal

Popular Science Monthly (figure 2).24 Immediately below the caption to this

figure – ‘Diagram to illustrate the Concept Rose’ – appears the

explanation:

Each memory is the relic of a past perception, acquired through an organ of

sense. These memories are associated, forming together the concept.

The lines from the rose represent the channels of sensation; the lines

between the circles the association tracks. The mouth and hand are the

motor organs of speech and writing.

and the Commercial Homoerotic Imagery of 1950s America’, in The Gay ‘’90s:

Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, ed. Thomas Foster, Carol

Siegel and Ellen E. Berry, Genders 26, New York and London: 1997, 119–

54. For Rauschenberg’s Dante drawings, see Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective,

1997, 156–67, figs. 128–61.

23 – Jones, ‘Coca Cola Plan’, 38–9, and Schimmel, ‘Autobiography and Self-

Portraiture in Rauschenberg’s Combines’, 222.

24 – M. Allen Starr, ‘The Old and the New Phrenology’, The Popular Science

Monthly (October 1889), 730–48 (739, fig. 5).11

Starr begins by reminding readers of Plato’s metaphor likening memory to

a wax tablet capable of taking impressions of diverse images of various

strengths.25 He then introduces his own discussion of memory, observing:

‘In some way or another, we do not know exactly how, the sensations

leave behind them impressions or memory pictures’. He expands as

follows:

And these separate memory pictures are associated together, as they have

all come from the same object; so that, the association being once made,

any one will bring to mind the others, and hence if you perceive the

fragrance you remember the appearance of the flower from which it comes –

its color or its feel. This association of separate memory pictures is

secured by means of fine nerve-threads, which pass between the various

areas of the brain and join the parts of the mental image with each other.

This may be represented in the diagram by placing a circle for each memory-

picture in its appropriate place and joining the circles by lines. The

circles represent those little round masses of brain substance called

nerve-cells and the lines the association nerve-fibers uniting the cells.

The diagram shows the physical basis of the mental image of a rose – what

has been called by [George] Romanes a ‘recept’, since its elements have

been received by the senses. What is true of the rose is true of every

other object which we have learned to know, for of every object we have a

recept, or a series of mental images in the brain.26

25 – Ibid., 738–9.

26 – See also Starr, ‘Some Curiosities of Thinking’, The Popular Science

Monthly (April 1895), 721–37 (725).12

Starr’s schema had its origins in a diagram developed in 1884 by Jean-

Martin Charcot (1825–93), director of the Saltpêtrière clinic near

Paris, to explicate the concept ‘bell’ (figure 3).27 It is noteworthy

that Starr had travelled to Europe after graduating in 1880 from the New

York College of Physicians and had studied briefly with Charcot in

Paris.28

Rauschenberg could have found copies of Popular Science Monthly in a New

York bookshop. One in particular, at 23rd Street and 7th Avenue, carried

a huge stock of old magazines.29 It should also be borne in mind that

after having completed basic training for the United States Navy in

1943, Rauschenberg had been assigned to the naval hospital corps. After

working initially in a tuberculosis ward, he was trained at San Diego

Naval Hospital as a neuropsychiatric technician and then assigned to

Camp Pendleton, California, to work with marines suffering from battle

trauma and brain damage. He remained there until his discharge in the

27 – Désiré Bernard, De l’aphasie et de ses diverses forms, 2nd edition, Paris

1889, 37, fig. 4. This diagram is known as ‘Charcot’s bell’ (‘le schéma

de la cloche’).

28 – Starr earned his first degree at Princeton, where he studied with

James McCosh. After returning from Europe, he provided his former

teacher with a version of Charcot’s bell which McCosh included in his

textbook, Psychology: The Cognitive Powers, New York 1906, 202, fig. 5.

29 – Gerald Malanga, ‘Freezing a Motion Picture’, in Andy Warhol

Photography, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Hamburg Kunsthalle

1999, 121. 13

summer of 1945. In an interview, Rauschenberg acknowledged that he had

‘toyed’ for a time with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist but

abandoned it because he took the work ‘too personally to be effective

for any long time’.30

I have no intention of presenting Starr’s diagram as ‘the’ key to

Small Rebus, but it is helpful to think of it as providing a visual

analogue to Rauschenberg’s manner of thinking. Although it does not

encapsulate a single concept, Small Rebus makes visible a personal

anthology of visual memories. Furthermore, these multifarious signs and

pictures may be linked to each other to form diverse configurations,

much like those in the rose schema. Alternatively, an analogy may be

provided by the stars of the night sky, which permit us to form

recognisable configurations within myriad possibilities.

V

We know two ways to unfocus attention: symmetry is one of

them; the other is the over-all where each small part is a

sample of what you find elsewhere. In either case, there is at

least the possibility of looking anywhere, not just where

someone arranged you should.

John Cage

30 – Tomkins, Off the Wall, 17–18. 14

For Small Rebus Rauschenberg adopted a ‘loose gridlike configuration of

materials’,31 what he termed ‘a relaxed symmetry’, one generating ‘a

neutral shape as opposed to a form of design’.32 In essence, this was –

as Cage put it – ‘a symmetry so obvious as not to attract interest

(nothing special)’.33 Except for the skein of paint manufacturer’s

colour samples, which divides the canvas horizontally, the overall field

is partitioned by panels of various sizes and materials – seven above

the horizontal ribbon and eight below it. Interspersed among these

sections are fabrics, drawings, and photographic images,34 some of which

are linked by ribbons of pigment, while others are partly hidden by

patches of colour. In contrast to Rebus, where the collaged elements

appear to be arranged sequentially in a band above the frieze of paint

samples, in Small Rebus these elements are disposed freely at differing

levels above and below the paint samples.35

If one reads clockwise from the upper right quadrant of the canvas

(an arbitrary decision in view of what has been said earlier), the

additional collaged images are: the Sports Illustrated photograph of Santee;

a photograph of a horse’s head; a snapshot depicting Rauschenberg’s

31 – Joseph, Random Order, 141.

32 – Ibid., 142.

33 – Cage, ‘Rauschenberg’, 100.

34 – See Lisa Wainwright, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Fabrics: Reconstructing

Domestic Space’, in Not at Home, 193–205.

35 – Crow, ‘Rise and Fall’, 230–55.15

parents and sister; the diagram of the rose; a reproduction of a

photograph by Giorgio Sommer (1834–1914) showing the cast of a dog

uncovered at Pompeii in 1879;36 the Sports Illustrated photograph showing

three gymnasts; a fragment of a map showing part of the USA and Canada,

together with one showing the Warsaw Pact countries;37 schematic

drawings of swans; a 4 x 2 strip of 3₵ US postage stamps; a photograph

of a man whose face has been scratched out;38 the Sports Illustrated

photograph showing the side-horse and the upside-down gymnast; a detail

from a reproduction of Titian’s Rape of Europa; a pocket watch with no

hands, such as the White Rabbit or the Hatter might have carried in

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland;39 a press clipping showing a matador

performing a ‘veronica’ while kneeling.40

Being mindful of the problematic nature of seeking conventional

iconographic themes in Rauschenberg’s work, I want to focus initially

upon the visual intelligence and wit that permeate Small Rebus, drawing

attention to affinities that exist within it. The most prominent image36 – See Eugene Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, Ann Arbor, MI 2010, 87–8, fig.

25.

37 –Jones, ‘Coca Cola Plan’, 39.

38 – Ibid., 48, n. 56.

39 – There is an identical drawing in Migration (1959) (Schimmel, Combines,

plate 91).

40 – ‘Mano a Mano’, an article on an encounter between Luis Miguel

Dominguin and César Girón, appears immediately after than on Santee in

Sports Illustrated, 12 March 1956, 26–31 and 58–9.16

is that of Santee rounding the final curve to win the Columbian Mile.

Its importance is evident from its size and position and from the fact

that it is not jostled by other elements in the composition. Santee’s

importance is also made clear by the blue-black circle that Rauschenberg

brushed around him and is underlined literally by the heavy patch of

black on the fabric attached immediately below the photograph. The black

circle also links Santee to the turnip watch at the left edge of the

canvas – a stop(ped) watch. More than any other track event in the mid-

1950s, the mile was as much a race against time as it was a competition

between runners. Before the 1956 Columbian Mile, only five runners had

broken the four-minute barrier, and this may have been what spectators

had hoped to see at Madison Square Garden had Santee and Delaney raced

each other. The connection between Santee and the watch is therefore

replete with meaning. The watch is also linked across the canvas to the

oval of the rose diagram, which then returns the viewer to the circle

around Santee. Finally, a ribbon of blue pigment runs across the upper

section of Small Rebus connecting the runner and the watch once more.

The horse adjacent to Santee is another running animal, and the fact

that it is confined to its stable perhaps makes a comment on Santee’s

predicament, for Santee had been immobilised by the AAU’s injunction. At

the same time, the horse generates another web of visual connections. It

might be a picador’s horse, in which case it may also be linked to the

drama taking place in the bullring. At the same time, it appears to look

17

with interest at the gymnasts’ horse – an odd breed, he may be thinking.

A further link in the upper section of Small Rebus is provided by the

conjunction of the bullfight and the patch of red to the right. This is

made explicit by the fact that the photograph is connected to the paint

by a viscous umbilical ribbon of yellow which completes its journey in

the panel of red. The red suggests blood, omnipresent in the bullring,

but it is also telling that the yellow connects the matador’s cape to

the red paint, as if it too were a swatch of material. Rauschenberg may

simply have intended the bull to ‘see’ red. The clipping of the

bullfight also connects with the rape of Europa. Jupiter and the

fighting bull are related and opposed, for one is white and the other is

black, but the relationship extends also to the bulls’ adversaries, in

so far as Europa’s rose draperies echo the matador’s cape.

In the lower right section of the combine the three gymnasts are

linked by number to the family group, and two of the athletes echo

loosely the contorted form of Sommer’s dog. Arrested in its death throes

and rotated through 270°, the convulsive pose of the animal mirrors that

of the gymnast performing the straddle leg support, while also echoing

that of the athlete performing the back somersault. It is also telling

that the climbing rope descends to a point almost directly above the

dog’s collar, possibly providing a reminder that the animal was tied up

when Vesuvius poured its volcanic ash upon Pompeii. The rope also finds

an echo in the stems of the forms in the photograph immediately to the

18

left of the gymnast, while forming a negative to the long black paint

drip that descends from below the patch of white.

In the hermetic world of Small Rebus the only characters that look

outside the combine are the bull and Rauschenberg’s father, mother and

sister. The family snapshot, in particular, places Rauschenberg in the

position of the viewer, suggesting that he is connected emotionally and

visually with his family, but the link with the bull is also meaningful.

Jupiter’s gaze suggests complicity, and it may be that he expects the

viewer’s response also to be sexual in nature. In this respect, the

theme recalls another of Jupiter’s rapes – the rape of Ganymede.41

VI

I think you might do something better with the time […] than

wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

‘Rebus’, derived from the Latin noun ‘res’, means literally ‘by things’.

The word was assimilated into English to describe a type of puzzle in

which pictures take the place of words or parts of words. For instance,

a drawing of an eye followed by one of a rose before the preposition

‘at’ and the number ‘7’ forms the simple rebus ‘I rose at seven’.

Sometimes the picture represents a word explicitly, but the connection

41 – For this theme, see Kenneth Bendiner, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s

“Canyon’”, Arts Magazine 56:10 (June 1982), 57–9. 19

between the image and the word often requires an imaginative leap, as in

the substitution of ‘eye’ for ‘I’ and that of the noun ‘rose’ for past

tense of the verb ‘to rise’. It was common in the nineteenth century to

compose rebus-letters for children by using a mixture of words, letters

and images. Lewis Carroll is the well known for composing such letters,

but in November 1881 Mark Twain sent a rebus-letter to his wife Olivia

and his three young daughters, including the written explanation, ‘There

– that’s for the children – was not sure that they could read writing,

especially Jean, who is strangely ignorant in some things’. In fairness

to Jean, it should be mentioned that she was only fifteen months old at

the time.

I am not convinced that there is a sustained picture puzzle rebus

hidden in Small Rebus.42 However, it is possible to discover several

‘small rebuses’ in it – rebus-phrases rather than a rebus-letter.

Readers may find some of these more plausible than others and should

accept or reject them as they please. When read in conjunction with the

photograph of Santee, the horse brings to mind the homoerotic phrase

‘Pony Boy’, an observation supported by the fact that in Rebus the

message ‘Pony Boys’ is scrawled next to two runners. Likewise, the

circle around Santee can be combined with the photograph of the

bullfight to form ‘bullring’, and the watch and bull may be read as a

42 – Jones’s reading – ‘No time [for] bullfight, win horse’ – in ‘Coca

Cola Plan’, 48 n. 54, is unconvincing. An alternative might be: Watch

bull; bull sees red; boy runs; take bull by the horns; dog rose climbs. 20

warning ‘watch bull’. Alternatively, the conjunction of bull and watch

may bring to mind the ‘Gold Plated “Bull” Watch Charm’ that was offered

in May 1914 to anyone sending 5₵ for a sack of ‘Bull’ Durham smoking

tobacco’.43 The bulls also connect across the canvas with the dog to

form ‘bulldog’, while the watch may combine with it to form ‘watchdog’

(which is what the animal was). Finally, Europa in Titian’s painting

enacts the saying, ‘take the bull by the horns’. On the other hand, in

the lower right quadrant of the canvas the juxtaposition of the rose

diagram and the dog suggests ‘dog rose’, a wild climbing rose, and the

rose also connects with the gymnast climbing the rope to form the phrase

‘climbing rose’.44

Lewis Carroll’s Alice might not have accepted my observations as an

answer to Small Rebus, but I believe they are in accord with Cage’s

characterisation of Rauschenberg’s work as ‘an entertainment in which to

celebrate unfixity’. They show also that Rauschenberg’s combine does

indeed encompass ‘a poetry of infinite possibilities’. Taking into account the

suggestive wordplay that appears to be present in Small Rebus, it is

tempting also to connect our reading of Rauschenberg with the concepts

43 – This offer appeared in the advertising sections of Cosmopolitan

Magazine and Popular Mechanics Magazine.

44 – Of course, Rauschenberg might have responded ‘bullshit’. Forscatological elements in Rauschenberg’s work, see Yve-Alain Bois,

‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines: two views’, Artforum International (1 March

2006).21

of ‘plaisir’ (pleasure) and ‘jouissance’ (bliss or coming) in reading

that Roland Barthes formulated in The Pleasure of the Text.45 In fact,

Barthes’s concepts translate easily into the art historical context, for

they echo the sexual compound ‘joiejouerjouir’ that Marcel Duchamp

coined for Man Ray and that Robert Rosenblum elucidated in his classic

study of the typography of Cubism.46

45 – Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, with a

note on the text by Richard Howard, New York 1975.

46 – Robert Rosenblum, ‘Picasso and the Typography of Cubism’, in Picasso

in Retrospect, ed. Roland Penrose and John Golding, London 1978, 49–75

(51): ‘joie=joy; jouer=to play; jouir=to enjoy or, in sexual slang, to

come’.22

Figure 1. Robert Rauschenberg, Small Rebus, 1956. Oil, graphite, paint

swatches, paper, newspaper, magazine clippings, black-and-white

photograph, map fragments, fabrics, and three-cent stamps on canvas, 35

x 46 x 1¾ inches. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza

Collection.

Figure 2. ‘Diagram to illustrate the Concept Rose’. From Popular Science Monthly,

October 1889.

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Figure 3. ‘Charcot’s Bell’ (‘le schéma de la cloche’). From Désiré Bernard, De l’aphasie

et de ses diverses forms, 2nd edition, Paris 1889.

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