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.
23
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