ROCI WELCOMED, ROCI CONFRONTED

In the Soviet Union of perestroika, ROCI matched the government’s shifting political needs even more than in China. Unlike China, the Soviet Union was not entirely disconnected from Western culture after World War II. Amerika, a lavishly illustrated magazine published by the United States Information Agency, had featured a number of articles on Rauschenberg and Pop art in the 1960s and ’70s, including color reproductions of works such as Bed (1955) and Monogram (1955– 59).¹ As the art historian Pamela Kachurin points out, in a country where abstraction was deemed “decadent,” the representational, everyday images of Pop art, including Rauschenberg’s work, could be interpreted as modern yet potentially antibourgeois at the same time. Indeed, one Soviet critic, writing in 1985, described Pop as an “original protest, an anarchist rebellion, not only against abstraction, but against bourgeois society.”²

Rauschenberg’s art thus offered a readymade compromise to the Soviet ministry of culture and to the Artists’ Union of the USSR (an organization of artists and critics who embraced socialist realism as the official Soviet art), both needing to demonstrate a reformist policy while appeasing the conservatives who wanted to maintain the status quo in the Soviet art scene. It served the Russian people’s growing hunger for Western culture as well: the exhibition sold 145,000 tickets, in addition to free tickets given to members of the Communist Party. Saff remembers long lines at the Tretyakov Gallery, with “Soviets coming from every republic to Moscow, taking weeks to travel and, for all I know, spending their last ruble to see the show.”³In Moscow ROCI USSR was accompanied by another Soviet-organized exhibition at the First Gallery, Rauschenberg to Us, We to Rauschenberg, structured as a bilateral art exchange featuring works by about thirty nonunion Russian artists who created works in tribute to the American artist. The parallel exhibitions evolved into the Soviet Union’s presentation at the 1990 Venice Biennale, making Rauschenberg the first (and most likely the last) American artist featured in the Russian Pavilion.⁴ It therefore hardly seemed rhetorical exaggeration when the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who wrote an essay in the ROCI USSR catalogue, declared at the opening, “I believe no more Iron Curtain will divide U.S. and Russian artists.”⁵

Yet ROCI caused controversy as well as enthusiasm. In China, for instance, when young, underground artists found out that Rauschenberg had agreed to make a portrait of Deng Xiaoping for the cover of Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” issue of 1985, he was criticized for cooperating with the government.⁶A similar confrontation, although a more strategic one, occurred in Cuba in 1988.⁷ There ROCI received especially generous treatment, arranged by an eminent poet, Roberto Fernández Retamar, who was the president of Casa de las Américas, an institution established in 1959 after the Cuban revolution to develop cultural relationships among the Latin American and Caribbean countries. Cuba covered all the exhibition’s expenses,⁸ offered three exhibition spaces (Casa de las Américas, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and the Castillo de la Fuerza, a sixteenth- century fortress that had never been used as a gallery before), and even sent a vessel called Bay of Pigs to Japan to pick up Rauschenberg’s works there. Fidel Castro hosted Rauschenberg at an official dinner in the Museo de la Revolución (the former presidential palace in Havana), where he invited the American artist to vacation in his summer place, Varadero. A different poster was created for each of the exhibition venues, all of which flew green ROCI banners with turtle logos fluttering in the wind.⁹

While Cubans hungry for information from the United States flocked to the show, some young artists questioned Rauschenberg’s “invasion.” When he began a lecture at the Museo Nacional, one of the opening events, three men stormed into the hall, two of them—Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas and Francisco Lastra—bearing a large panel depicting a profile of an “Indian” with the line “Very Good Rauschenberg.” Despite the moderator’s request that he wait until the end of the lecture, the third man, Glexis Novoa, insisted in Spanish—which Rauschenberg did not understand—that the American artist autograph one of the ROCI Cuba posters. Novoa made a point of having him use a brush and paint, thinking that it would later enhance the poster’s value. Rauschenberg, drunk but not offended, autographed it as requested.¹⁰ The young men, members of the anarchist Grupo Provisional,¹¹ planned this performance to critique the government’s decision to allow an American celebrity artist to monopolize their cultural space.

At the same event, as a separate performance, the artist Aldo Menéndez personified “El Indio.” Sitting on the floor directly in front of Rauschenberg, wearing only a loincloth around his waist, body paint to connote the indigenous people of the Americas, and with two arrows before him, he bowed to Rauschenberg a few times during the lecture while otherwise listening inscrutably. As the art historian Rachel Weiss has pointed out, these performances were intended to expose what these young Cubans considered the self-colonizing attitudes of their national cultural institutions.¹² They were staging themselves as the “conquered”—young groupies infatuated with a prestigious American artist in the case of Grupo Provisional, the mysterious yet subservient “Indian” in the case of Menéndez. All in their way played on the myth of the generosity and naïveté of the indigenous people of the Antilles, legendarily said to have given their conquerors gold in exchange for mirrors.¹³ The gesture had its ironies: Rauschenberg himself was part Cherokee in descent, although the Cuban artists didn’t know it at the time.

Though Novoa’s protest was aimed at the American “art imperialist,” his target was not Rauschenberg himself but the Cuban government. Novoa actually liked the artist—“You cannot avoid liking Rauschenberg as an artist,” he would later say— and Cuban artists were talking about the ROCI exhibition long after it closed, speaking of before-and-after-Rauschenberg eras just as Chinese artists did.¹⁴ Since the Bienal de la Habana had been inaugurated four years earlier, Novoa and his fellows had some familiarity with contemporary art. But that exhibition had so far focused on “non-Western art,” inviting artists from Latin America and the Caribbean only in 1984 and including artists from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in 1986. ROCI was the first big show of a North American contemporary artist in Cuba. And besides the work itself, it also implicitly offered lessons in exhibition- making: how to make different uses of materials and objects, how to fill gigantic spaces in multiple venues, how to renovate galleries into a condition suitable for the installation of art. Since white paint was unavailable in Cuba, Rauschenberg even brought it with him to paint the walls.¹⁵ For Novoa, in short, the most impressive aspect of ROCI was the way Rauschenberg and his team “transformed the museum in an American way.”¹⁶

INDUCING DIVERSITY IN THE GLOBAL ART SCENES

This “American” factor is crucial in evaluating ROCI’s legacy. Jack Cowart, a curator at the National Gallery when the show finally came to Washington, observed that “to foreign audiences, especially those in countries where freedom of information is unknown, the exhibition makes a powerful statement about America itself.”¹⁷ With the end of the Cold War and of the cultural blockade between the East and West, ROCI positioned Rauschenberg, long seen as a quintessentially “American” artist, as a model of what an artist could do in a “free” society.

Indeed, the Moscow painter and critic Leonid Bazhanov declared, “To us, the show symbolizes freedom.”¹⁸ Another Soviet critic saw Rauschenberg’s work as a proof of how contemporary art can grow “when it is free,” asking “How did we live without Rauschenberg?”¹⁹ It was this newly acquired “freedom,” even in its limited form, that allowed the five artists chosen from Rauschenberg to Us, We to Rauschenberg to debut at the 1990 Venice Biennale. ROCI also catalyzed the emergence of a commercial art system in Russia: the First Gallery, which presented Rauschenberg to Us, We to Rauschenberg, was the first commercial gallery to appear in the country since the revolution of 1917. Bazhanov, once an unofficial artist, said, “If only this had happened twenty years ago, it would have helped me greatly. For [younger] artists, though, the exhibition shows what they can do.”²⁰ ROCI thus helped to bridge the cultural time lag between divided countries.

Yet it would be misleading to think of ROCI as an endeavor to “Americanize” the art world. Its more profound legacy may have been to provide a destination: it prompted many young artists to move. Both Novoa and Rodríguez Cárdenas started working in the United States after encountering Rauschenberg.²¹ Xu Bing and many other underground Chinese artists similarly moved to either the United States or Europe, including some who had taken issue with Rauschenberg’s project. Of course each one was an individual case for whom many different motives may have prevailed, and their moves might have happened anyway, with or without Rauschenberg. Nonetheless, they formed a vital part of a larger, irreversible change in the global art scene of the late 1980s, when the contemporary-art system was beginning to globalize in full force; and ROCI encouraged this mobility, at a moment that saw a profusion of art fairs and biennials outside the traditional centers, and of artists from the former Eastern Bloc and the so-called Third World stepping one after another onto these international stages.

What mattered was not mobility itself but its effect: the globalization and diversification of the world’s art scenes. While change would have come sooner or later, young and aspiring artists in many of the countries that hosted ROCI responded deeply to seeing what contemporary art was like with their own eyes. So did the general public, hungry to reconnect with the world beyond their local regimes. Rauschenberg’s work on ROCI, if somewhat contradictory in nature, torn between altruistic service and egocentric self-aggrandizement, was nonetheless a crucial catalyst for the diversification of the global art scene in the years to come.

This is the second and final section of an essay by Hiroko Ikegami on the American artist Robert Rauschenberg, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends. Read the first section here.

The post Part 2: “Art Has No Borders”: Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange appeared first on post.

Rauschenberg made his first trip to China in 1982, to work on a project initiated by the Los Angeles print studio Gemini G.E.L.¹ The experience would change the course of his production. After traveling through China for three weeks, the artist worked for two weeks at the Xuan paper mill in Jingxian, Anhui Province, said to be the oldest paper mill in the world. The trip would have been impossible during the period of the Cultural Revolution; since then, Deng Xiaoping had initiated his open-door policy, but Rauschenberg still encountered difficulties in China. Although the central government had granted permission for the trip, for instance, officials in Jingxian at first feared that the Americans might steal their paper-making secrets and made the artist and his team stay at the Yellow Mountains, one of the most famous scenic sites in China, about forty miles away from the Xuan paper mill.

Even after entering the village, Rauschenberg was not allowed inside the mill and had to work in a “so-called VIP compound” where he gave instructions to craftsmen and created the paper-based collage series 7 Characters.² Meanwhile he was shocked to see Chinese people both deprived of the freedom to travel in their own country and completely disconnected from the outside world. Donald Saff, a print artist who accompanied him on the trip, would recall a conversation between Rauschenberg and the compound’s Chinese cook:

He said that he couldn’t see his family because he needed permission to go twenty miles away and he didn’t know what was happening there and he hadn’t been there for years or decades. Bob started thinking at that point that if these people didn’t know what was going on twenty miles away, they certainly didn’t know what was going on two thousand miles away or ten thousand miles away….This conversation —almost a singular conversation with this cook—somehow gave him the idea that what he needs to do is to introduce the world to itself through his art.³

The idea led to the development of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, or ROCI (pronounced “Rocky” after the artist’s pet turtle), a large-scale international traveling exhibition doubling as a cultural exchange program.⁴ Announced in 1984, the program was unprecedented in that Rauschenberg, through his experience in China, was determined to focus on what he called “sensitive areas” where freedom of expression was limited and people had little contact with democratic or capitalist countries such as the United States. He would therefore travel to Communist, totalitarian, or developing nations where people were unfamiliar with modern art or American culture. There he would create artworks based on local materials, hold a ROCI exhibition, present one work to the hosting institution as a gift, and then move on to the next country, where the ROCI exhibition would show works from the previous shows along with new ones made locally. Constantly incorporating new works as his response to different cultures, the ROCI exhibition was envisioned as an ever evolving enterprise to promote mutual understanding among diverse peoples.

ROCI coincided with a time of a radical change in the world order, the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the subsequent breakdown of the cultural blockade between East and West. Perhaps anticipating the times, Rauschenberg defined the project as a peace mission, explaining his belief that “a one-to-one contact through art contains potent and peaceful powers, and is the most nonelitist way to share exotic and common information.”⁵He envisioned his program as a way of enabling audiences in each country to see not only their own but also other cultures as interpreted through his art. For instance, visitors to ROCI Chile in 1985, the second country of the project, would see only ROCI Mexico and ROCI Chile works, as the tour would have just started, but would be able to see a variety of foreign works Rauschenberg had made earlier in the United States as well as in China and Japan. Meanwhile, audiences at ROCI USSR in 1989 would see a selection of all the ROCI works previously created, which would bring international audiences into indirect but mutual communication. Between 1984 and 1990, accordingly, Rauschenberg and his team held the ROCI exhibition in ten countries—Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Malaysia, in order of itinerary—before the project concluded in 1991 with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

As a cultural-exchange project by a single artist, ROCI was extraordinary in its magnitude. By 1991, it had generated more than 125 Rauschenberg artworks, over 2 million people around the world had seen a ROCI show, and the project’s overall budget had reached $11 million—mostly funded by the artist himself.⁶Because in many countries the ROCI exhibition was the first solo show by a contemporary Western artist, Rauschenberg and his team met many challenges. Organizing the exhibition often took a great deal of time and negotiation with foreign governments, and the team’s safety was not always guaranteed during their travels. Their visit to Santiago, Chile, in 1984, for instance, coincided with the dictator Augusto Pinochet’s declaration of a “state of siege,” creating a highly risky situation for the artist.⁷ For the same reason, though, ROCI had a great impact in countries where people were hungry for information from the so-called “Free World.” The exhibition in China, for example, in 1985, fell during the “Culture Fever” period of the country’s interest in Western art and thought, and drew as many as 300,000 visitors.⁸Similarly, ROCI USSR, in 1989, was made possible by the openings provided by glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, and met great enthusiasm in Moscow.⁹

From the vantage of the twenty-first century, ROCI seems to have marked a significant moment, pointing not only toward the globalization of art today but also to an idea of socially engaged or community-based art. Since the target of Rauschenberg’s engagement was the “world” as one large community, his home audiences sometimes saw the project as too ambitious and optimistic. Addressing the ROCI exhibition at the National Gallery, the New York Times critic Roberta Smith described the concept as “at once altruistic and self-aggrandizing,”¹⁰ while another reviewer even called Rauschenberg an “art imperialist” who lived as a “big- time visiting American aided by ambassadors and surrounded by his entourage.”¹¹ Granted, video recordings of ROCI often capture the artist receiving media attention, sitting for Q&A’s before overflowing audiences, and autographing countless ROCI catalogues and posters at visitors’ request. One young man in China even asked the artist to autograph his clothing, while in Chile one of the medallions on the facade of Santiago’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, otherwise featuring portraits of old masters such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, was replaced by one of Rauschenberg.¹²

All this can make ROCI seem a project of hero worship as well as a peace mission, and Saff—the printmaker who had accompanied Rauschenberg on the trip to Jingxiang, and who was now hired as ROCI’s artistic director—noted a dichotomy in the artist, who could be very egocentric on one occasion and wonderfully supportive on another.¹³ As a project addressing issues of creative expression under oppressive regimes, however, ROCI had a critical impact in the hosting countries outside the United States. The exhibition in China, for example, is still remembered there as a decisive catalyst in the emerging avant-garde art movement. In fact, in conceiving ROCI as a project of globally engaged art, Rauschenberg was trying to establish a model of cultural exchange where none existed.

THE LOGISTICS OF ROCI

Beginning with his participation in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s 1964 world tour as a set and costume designer,14 an experience he would later recall as a “good out-of-town rehearsal for ROCI,”¹⁴ Rauschenberg often produced artworks in foreign countries, using local materials and working with indigenous artisans. In 1974, for instance, he created the sculpture series Made in Israel during a visit to that country, using local materials such as sand, newspapers, and found objects for his 1975 exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. In 1982, right after the visit to Jingxiang, Rauschenberg stayed in Japan twice to work on two ceramic series, Japanese Clayworks and Japanese Recreational Clayworks (which he continued working on intermittently until 1985), in collaboration with chemists and craftsmen at the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company, Shigaraki. To realize ROCI in “sensitive areas,” though, required building a new team for the purpose, with new structures and procedures: whereas hosting institutions had once invited Rauschenberg to their countries, he now had to start by seeking out influential figures, who he hoped would be sympathetic to ROCI, in countries where he often had little or no connection.

Here Rauschenberg turned to Saff.¹⁵ Joining ROCI in 1984, Saff almost singlehandedly performed such tasks as fundraising, location hunting, and negotiating with national officials. ROCI’s logistics generally unfolded as follows: Saff would travel to a potential host country to meet with important cultural figures (often liberal-minded poets), scout exhibition venues, and find a writer for the catalogue. If he received a positive response, Rauschenberg and one or two assistants would make a ten- or fifteen-day visit armed with a “Briefing Paper” prepared by the staff, including a variety of information on the country such as its history, political situation, and sites important to visit. During the artist’s stay, he would take photographs, gather materials, and sometimes work with local artists or artisans, with his staff video-documenting his activities. The team would then return to Captiva to create artworks in time for the ROCI exhibition, while Saffwould fly to another country to begin the whole process again. For the opening of the ROCI exhibition, Rauschenberg and the team always went back to the country with more staff to install the show and participate in events and lectures.

Besides the difficulties of mounting exhibitions in places unfamiliar with contemporary American art, what impeded the procedure most was the lack of funding. Saff hired professional fundraisers to help him raise money, but they kept failing to secure sponsorship for the project.¹⁶ Rauschenberg himself admitted that he had been naïve in thinking that “collectors and corporations would be rushing to support something concrete like ROCI, which [was] dedicated to peace”—he had even made up a “list of contributors [he] wouldn’t accept.”¹⁷ In fact a number of potential sponsors ended up withdrawing their support because Rauschenberg wanted to retain all artistic and logistical control.¹⁸ Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, the artist’s main art dealers, were skeptical of the project: Sonnabend called it “professional artistic suicide” and Castelli was even reported to have delayed payments from the sale of the artist’s works lest the money should be wasted on ROCI.¹⁹

The financial worries were such that Saff and his staff considered abandoning the project even after successfully presenting the first ROCI exhibition, in Mexico in 1985.²⁰ Yet Rauschenberg was determined to continue, even at the cost of jettisoning the normal infrastructure of the art world. About a month after the opening of ROCI Mexico he asked Castelli to “put a freeze on the sales of [his] work until some sanity is realized financially for ROCI and the next four years,” partly because his “prices have not grown enough to support [his] late years work plans and artistic needs.”²¹ Rauschenberg subsequently funded the enterprise mostly on his own, by mortgaging his house and selling a number of artworks from his collection, including Jasper Johns’s Alley Oop (1958) and Andy Warhol’s _Dick Tracy _(1960).²²

ROCI eventually traveled to ten countries—an ambitious calendar enough, but Rauschenberg had originally wanted to bring it to twenty-two (his favorite number; his birthday was October 22), including Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Saff traveled to Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Peru, Senegal, and Spain; by letter or through meetings in the United States, he also explored possibilities in Australia, Colombia, Greece, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, Uruguay, Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe.²³ Although Saff remembers that most countries were interested in the proposal, it often turned out to be impossible or undesirable to hold an exhibition there. In some countries security seemed too large a risk—Saff decided to drop Peru after being robbed in the Lima airport and observing the increasing activities of the Shining Path, a brutal communist organization.²⁴ In others the schedule didn’t work out: for example, plans for ROCI Africa, which was supposed to take place in Senegal, had to be abandoned because of the lack of time between ROCI Malaysia and the final exhibition in Washington, D.C.²⁵

Meanwhile some countries reached out for the opportunity. Japan, not a sensitive area by any means, was chosen for practical and economic reasons, as the country offered not only to host ROCI but to store Rauschenberg’s work between ROCI China and ROCI Cuba.²⁶ Malaysia wanted ROCI partly because of its rivalry with Singapore:²⁷ the president of the Balai Seni Lukis Negara (the National Art Gallery) in Kuala Lumpur, Syed Ahmad Jamal, wanted the ROCI tour to conclude in his country as its only venue in South Asia,²⁸ and his plan conveniently coincided with Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s 1990 “Visit Malaysia Year” campaign, bringing the museum a budget to realize the exhibition. ROCI’s itinerary was thus determined in a rather ad hoc way, with “possible” places sometimes chosen over “desirable” ones.

ROCI CHINA

Yet it was imperative to include China, where Rauschenberg had conceived the project in the first place. He had already approached the Chinese Ministry of Culture during his 1982 visit, but an “anti-spiritual pollution campaign” in the fall of 1983 put a hold on the negotiation. In the summer of 1984, when that campaign was over, Chun-Wuei Su Chien, a Baltimore-based Chinese woman who had acted as Rauschenberg’s coordinator and translator in 1982, went to China and resumed the discussion with the Chinese Exhibition Agency. By that time the central government had launched a massive program to open up the country to Western cultures.

The shifting political climate helped Chien to reach an agreement with the agency but the requirements were stringent: Chien was to assume responsibility for the selection of the show’s artworks and the production of its catalogue, and all correspondence on the subject would go through her.²⁹The agency would review all works and video materials in advance, and Rauschenberg would be responsible for all exhibition expenses, including shipping, insurance, the gallery rental fee of the National Art Museum of China (which was $26,000 total), and the cost of a performance by the Trisha Brown Dance Company that was planned in conjunction with the exhibition opening.³⁰

Even after the agreement was reached, the show was the first solo exhibition by a living Western artist in a country that had been culturally closed since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and mounting it was a daunting task. When Rauschenberg and his team arrived in Beijing, in November 1985, they found the staff of the National Art Museum “exceedingly cold” and unhelpful and the workers “lethargic and truculent.”³¹ The gallery space was also in sorry condition—its walls had not been repainted since the museum’s opening, in 1962, as a showcase for idealizing and propagandistic Chinese art. To create an exhibition that approached American standards, Rauschenberg’s team, including the artist himself, cleaned the space, repainted the dusty walls, and installed temporary walls for exhibiting artworks. In fact, when Chien flew to Beijing in July to prepare for the show, she brought with her “rollers, trays, and 2,000 RMB [Renminbi, Chinese currency]” to ask the agency to paint the walls before the installation of ROCI China³²—a job not completed, she would remember, until the morning of the exhibition’s opening.³³

As the first exhibition of Western contemporary art in the country, ROCI China set benchmarks. First, the scale was gigantic, four large galleries occupying 2,250 square meters (about 7,380 square feet). Second, the work spanned multiple media. While most of Rauschenberg’s works involved mixed media, for ROCI China he made strategic use of photography: Chinese people unfamiliar with Western contemporary art, he noticed, reacted enthusiastically to photography, which represented “truth” for them.³⁴The Chinese Summerhall series, comprising photographs taken by the artist in various parts of China, was installed as a hundred-foot photo installation on an arched wall and impressed audiences. Last but not least, TV monitors were scattered around the galleries. One, at the entrance, introduced Rauschenberg’s life and work, while others showed his activities in other ROCI-hosting countries, as well as elements of American popular culture such as cartoons and musicals. Thus presented, the exhibition itself was an artwork, and an educational tool to show how to make contemporary art and how to make an exhibition.

Among Chinese audiences who responded to ROCI, the general public found the photography and video easier to relate to, and visually exciting, while artists, both inside and outside the academies, found Rauschenberg’s readymades an effective alternative to socialist realism and traditional art, the two dead-end avenues of expression condoned by the Communist Party at the time. The critic Li Xianting— an editor of Zhongguo Meishubao Fine Arts in China at the time, who compiled two issues on Rauschenberg for the magazine—has observed that ROCI inspired many artists to experiment with readymade strategies.³⁵ In 2008, calling ROCI China an “earthquake that sent shockwaves throughout China,” he looked back on its impact:

Whether it was the containers, the taxidermied animals, the installations, or the ready-mades and found objects, every piece of Rauschenberg’s work made Chinese artists’ brows sweat as they tried to figure out what Rauschenberg was doing. It posed the classic question of modern art: “Is this art?” The value of this question lies in the fact that it challenged the prevailing aesthetic values; at the very least the Chinese came to know that this too could be art….It is not at all an exaggeration to say that overnight there appeared a wave of ready-made and found object art in China.³⁶

Saff has similarly recalled that Chinese artists began talking about “art before Rauschenberg” and “art after Rauschenberg,”³⁷ and many artists outside Beijing traveled there just to see the exhibition, marking a decisive moment on the emerging avant-garde art scene. The year 1985 saw the beginning of radical art movements and groups throughout China, a development later called the ’85 New Wave Movement and coinciding with the student democratic movement.³⁸ Although both phenomena ended abruptly with the Tiananmen Square violence in 1989, ROCI China provided a much-needed impetus to the ’85 New Wave Movement. For Xu Bing, one of its representative figures who was then a young faculty member at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the show provided an occasion to think about his art and future, prompting him to decide to stop producing work in the official style.³⁹ A few years later he completed A Book from the Sky—a book of pseudo-Chinese characters—and he emigrated to the United States in 1990.

This is the first section of an essay by Hiroko Ikegami on the American artist Robert Rauschenberg, excerpted from the exhibition catalog Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, available at the MoMA bookstore. Read the second and final section here.

The post Part 1: “Art Has No Borders”: Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange appeared first on post.

When it comes to the topic of New Yorkers in Tokyo in the 1960s, Shinohara Ushio was the single most important artist among those who interacted with them in the city (fig. 1). With his sensational Mohawk hairdo, he had made his name as a regular of the legendary Yomiuri Independent Exhibition,¹ a founding member of the short-lived Neo Dada group,² and the “action” artist of the series of Boxing Paintings made in the early part of the decade. His work took a sharp “American” turn in 1963, when he started making Imitation Art based on reproductions of works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. When these American artists visited Japan in 1964, Shinohara showed them his imitations of their work, including Three Flags and Coca-Cola Plan. Inspired by Pop art, he began the Oiran (high-class courtesans) series the following year and wrote about his encounter with American art in his autobiography Avant-Garde Road, published in 1968.³ This essay examines how Shinohara’s dialogue with American art developed from Imitation Art—arguably a precursor of the postmodernist critique of originality—to the Oiran series, a kind of Pop ukiyo-e, with which he achieved his own style of Pop art by combining mechanical modes of production with motifs from the popular culture of premodern Japan.

Encounter with American Neo-Dada and Pop

Before everything, how did Shinohara encounter postwar American art? A key figure here is the critic Tōno Yoshiaki, who promoted post–Abstract Expressionist art in Japan. He introduced works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg for the first time to the Japanese audience in the art journal Geijutsu shinchō (New trends in art) in 1959.⁴ In 1962, in another art journal Mizue (Watercolor), he published a long essay on Rauschenberg with a number of illustrations.⁵ Among these was the photographic reproduction of Coca-Cola Plan (1958) that Shinohara would use as the model for his imitation of the work. Given the scarcity of information on overseas art movements at the time, the importance of art magazines as a source of inspiration for Japanese artists cannot be overestimated. In fact, some avant-garde artists in Tokyo were so eager to learn about and absorb the new art movements that were emerging one after another in New York that they felt they barely had enough time to develop their own style.

Shinohara discusses this impatience to keep up with the latest New York art movements in his autobiography Avant-Garde Road, which he serialized in Bijutsu techō (Art notebook) from 1966 to 1967.⁶ In this memoir, he candidly relates his amazement at the quick pace of shifting styles in New York when he and his friends saw the January 1963 issue of Art International. Declaring the arrival of Pop art, this issue features two articles related to the New Realists show at Sidney Janis Gallery. The impact of American Pop art was so enormous that he responded excitedly, “The first one to imitate will win.”⁷ Turning away from his performance-based Boxing Painting series, he decided to create a work of Pop art to submit to the Shell Art Award Exhibition in July 1963.

He then faced a dilemma: although Pop art was certainly a new style, its imitation by a Japanese artist wouldn’t qualify as new anymore. As he explains in his biography, “If you used food, that would be an Oldenburg, while human figures are taken by Segal, comics by Lichtenstein, flags by Johns, paint-pouring by Rauschenberg. There is no new style anywhere anymore. Shit! Why don’t I do all of them at once then!”⁸ He thus made his first imitation work, Drink More (fig. 2)—originally titled Lovely Lovely America, itself a significant title—an assemblage work with the Stars and Stripes painted in the background, from which protruded a plaster hand holding a Coca-Cola bottle. The work was a desperate attempt to emulate Johns, Rauschenberg, and Segal all at the same time in a single work. Shinohara exhibited the piece along with other works in a similar vein at Naiqua Gallery in September 1963, proclaiming, “This is Pop!” (fig. 3).

Imitation Art as Originality Critique

In 1964, Shinohara went on to produce a more or less exact copy of an original, based on the full-page reproduction of Rauschenberg’s Coca-Cola Plan in Tōno’s essay (figs. 4, 5, 6). However, Shinohara was not mindlessly imitating Rauschenberg as his cultural superior. Seen side by side, the difference between the original and the imitation is clear. For instance, because he could find them easily, Shinohara used Coca-Cola bottles made in Japan with logos in Japanese katakana (the syllabary used to represent foreign words phonetically). Likewise, he hand-made a mold from clay to cast the wings in plaster, as prefabricated cast-metal wings were not available in Japan. Finally, he painted the work with Day-Glo paint, because he was working with a black-and-white reproduction and didn’t know what colors had been used in the original. The resulting work indicates that Shinohara was likely playing with these altered details. This playful quality makes his work not so much a copy as a parody of the original.

Yet, calling an imitation one’s own work of art required considerable courage in the mid-1960s, when the concept of originality was generally still an incontestable credo of modern art. Shinohara recalls the embarrassment and exaltation that he simultaneously felt at the completion of the imitation: “My mother yelled at me, ‘What a shame to copy someone’s work!’ but I was filled with excitement to complete the work while feeling guilty.”⁹ The reaction of Shinohara’s mother, a painter herself, shows her belief in the concept of originality, which is precisely what her son was questioning. In those days, Shinohara was discontent with Japanese academic art education, which called for students to develop their own original styles yet had not changed its traditional teaching method of requiring them to copy old masters and plaster models. Enclosed within the tradition of yōga—Western-style oil painting—the model of originality in Japanese art schools was still that of French modernism, exemplified by such painters as Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin, or Picasso and Matisse for a more contemporary version.¹⁰

Shinohara called that situation “cultural seclusion,” which he ironically associated with Japan’s “island-nation” attitude toward foreign cultures during its period of national seclusion from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Against this background, Shinohara’s imitation of Rauschenberg can be seen as an ironic three-dimensional copy of a modern master, as opposed to the reverent two-dimensional copying of old masters required by art schools. Theorizing on his Imitation Art series after the fact, Shinohara declared: “After all, Imitation Art denies originality. In other words, there is no more time to pursue form or self in modern times. It’s more interesting to copy someone else’s work in this situation.”¹¹

What Shinohara describes as a phenomenon unique to his own time had been in fact an ongoing problem in Japanese art for centuries. The question of originality has always been an issue in the discourse of Japanese art history, for Japanese art developed by responding to information and techniques brought from abroad: Chinese influence (often via the Korean Peninsula) in its premodern era, European influence in its post-seclusion period, and then American influence after World War II. This history resulted in a perpetual identity crisis in Japanese art—especially in the modern era, when the system of “art” and the concept of “originality” imported from the West required Japan to create both its own unique art and its own art history. Since the Meiji era (1868–1912), many Japanese artists had gone to Europe to learn oil painting techniques and the latest currents of modern art, passing on the information to the Japanese art community upon their return home. Much Japanese modern art thus developed through responding to Western modern art, the perceived cultural superior.

This dynamic of response to a foreign source posed a serious dilemma for many Japanese artists, as it made it next to impossible for them to achieve “originality,” a prerequisite of modern art. In order to become practitioners of modern art, they first needed to acquire its basic vocabularies and then to keep up with its development, but doing so made them perpetual followers of Western art, which kept them from becoming equal and original players in the world art scene. As we have seen earlier, this dynamic remained unchanged after the end of World War II. Shinohara’s version of Coca-Cola Plan is thus a visual embodiment of this most fundamental issue in Japanese art, while simultaneously serving as a critique of the myth of originality that haunted its discourse. Ironically, Imitation Art proved that the “avant-garde road” in Japan might actually lie in imitation rather than originality, and thereby radically debunked the concept of originality as a sustaining myth for the avant-garde.

Meeting with Bob Rauschenberg

If this was the significance of Imitation Art in the context of Japanese art history, how would it appear to Rauschenberg? Although Shinohara never imagined that Rauschenberg would come to Tokyo, the American artist was already aware of Japanese Pop, most likely via his friend Tōno. In 1963, he told a Japanese journalist in New York that he wanted to go to Japan to see the imitations of Pop art that he heard were increasingly being made there.¹² About a year later, the day before his scheduled interview program “Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg” at the Sogetsu Art Center, Tōno granted his wish by taking him to Shinohara’s home. Shinohara recollects their encounter as follows:

“I showed one work after another to Bob, who remained silent. The Beatles, Lovely Lovely America, Don Shorander with Four Gold Medals, Air Mail—it was as if I were reproducing American Pop. But Rauschenberg impressed me as expected. He never said anything cowardly, like he wanted to see something more unique to Japan. To him, the Zen country of Japan did not matter. The only thing that mattered was the confrontation between works of art.”

Shinohara then asked Rauschenberg a “special question” about Imitation Art:

“May I imitate your works?”

There it was. My special question. I thought about showing him my Coca-Cola Plan as well, but didn’t have the courage to do so. I’d bring it out during tomorrow’s public interview anyway.

“Sure.”

I was disappointed by his immediate OK. I was expecting him to hit me, or at least pause for a little bit. Well, since I got the OK in person, I will imitate his works more and more. But the outcome was the opposite, for after meeting with Bob, I lost interest in Imitation Art.¹³

Shinohara gave a different version of the story in an interview with the present author, claiming that he did show Rauschenberg the imitation of Coca-Cola Plan during his visit. Shinohara said the American artist was overjoyed and held the work adoringly in his arms, calling it “my son.”¹⁴ Whatever the case may have been, Rauschenberg was happy with the imitation as long as there was only one. Shinohara recalls that when Rauschenberg found out that the Japanese artist had actually made ten copies of the work, he seemed disturbed. As Shinohara himself would later say, “One imitation is philosophy, but ten of them makes it production!”¹⁵Perhaps Rauschenberg acutely sensed that multiple copies could turn the original—his work, that is—into a mere commodity.

One must remember, however, that the “original” from which Shinohara modeled his imitation of Coca-Cola Plan was already a reproduction, as Shinohara created his work based on a photograph in an art journal. Moreover, the serial logic of mass production is already plainly evident in Rauschenberg’s own Coca-Cola Plan, because he incorporated not just one or two but three Coke bottles in the work. By emphasizing the underlying logic of the original, Shinohara somehow unsettled Rauschenberg, which speaks for and demonstrates the critical power of imitation. In this sense, Imitation Art was a precedent of postmodernist appropriation, in that the imitator destabilized the authority of the original. The irony is that, in this particular instance, Rauschenberg, who since the late 1950s had countered the myth of originality with works such as Factum I and Factum II (both 1957), was cast in the role of the “original.” In another essay on post, the present author shows that this irony loomed even larger during “Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg,” an event in which Shinohara participated with his multiple imitations of Coca-Cola Plan.

Imitation Box: Coda to “American” Imitation

Despite receiving Rauschenberg’s permission to imitate his work, Shinohara gradually lost interest in Imitation Art and concluded the series with Imitation Box after the American artist went back to New York. In December 1964, Shinohara and his fellow artists organized a group exhibition titled Left Hook at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, in which Shinohara exhibited Imitation Box and Marcel Duchamp in Thought (fig. 7).

Imitation Box, which has since been destroyed, was a self-contained mini-retrospective of the Imitation Art series, featuring Shinohara’s own works, such as Drink More and Coca-Cola Plan, along with many others (figs. 8 and 9). Shinohara placed two of his Coca-Cola Plans within a discarded mini-bar-size refrigerator—itself a container of consumable products—and he used all of the flat planes to display other works. For instance, the back space of the refrigerator, which originally housed a radiator, was used to present an imitation of Johns’s Three Flags and Painted Bronze, while the side panels functioned as supports for Drink More and The Beatles. The front of the door displayed Air Mail, an imaginary letter from Rauschenberg, with the work’s title, “Imitation Box,” below it, and a study of Coca-Cola Plan was mounted on the back of the door. Furthermore, the back panel of the refrigerator bore images of Johns’s Painted Bronze and other works displayed in what appears to be a collector’s room, which was painted by hand. Upon closer inspection of a photograph of the work, we notice that the panel bears another smaller panel that holds a magazine in which the original page for Shinohara’s inspiration can be found.¹⁶

This sight of endless regression of American artworks seems to demonstrate the work’s logic of self-proliferation. The refrigerator is in fact a perfect “box” for carrying Shinohara’s portable works, as it is a sign of modern efficiency and consumer convenience. The refrigerator was one of the three electric appliances, or “three regalia,” that Japanese people dreamed of owning in the 1950s, along with a black-and-white television and a washing machine. In the 1960s, the three regalia were replaced by the “3 Cs”: a color television, a cooler (air conditioner), and a car. The model of this ideal domestic life was, of course, American. Japanese consumers followed trends of American life just as avidly as Shinohara followed the latest currents in the New York art scene.

Seen in this way, Shinohara’s Imitation Box aptly embodies what Homi K. Bhabha calls the “ambivalence of mimicry,” an effect created by imitating the original and multiplying it in a way that is “almost the same, but not quite.”¹⁷ Containing a number of imperfect copies of American artworks, Imitation Box demonstrates the difference between “being American” and “being Americanized.” The work is reminiscent of the ways in which Japanese consumers willingly hybridized their domestic life by incorporating the American way of life haphazardly, just as Shinohara played with differences from the original art in Imitation Art. Thus, Imitation Box effects its own lighthearted and yet unsettling critique of the hegemony of American art and culture, which had had a drastic, bulldozing impact on Japan throughout the post–World War II years.

Indeed, meeting American artists in person had a demystifying effect on Shinohara. When the “cool Yankee” presented himself as a real human being to Shinohara, the Japanese artist started looking at American art differently. As a consequence, by 1966, when Twenty Years of American Painting—the first large-scale postwar American art exhibition in Japan, organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York—opened at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Shinohara was no longer as enthusiastic about American art. He described his disappointment in the show in his autobiography, under the subtitle “American art that lost its glory”:

“American art—this vivid monster appeared before our eyes only through journals until a couple of years ago. It seemed as if American art had been marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting. However, what an old sight this digest of twenty years offers us! . . . Jasper Johns’s Target or Flag was not our glorious saviour. The closer I got to Americans who came to Japan (Jasper, Jim [Rosenquist], and George [Montgomery]), the further their glory receded into the distance.”¹⁸

Rauschenberg, who had come to Japan two years earlier, was not an exception; Shinohara no longer idolized the American artist as his hero. Therefore, Imitation Box should be understood as marking the end of Shinohara’s “imitation era,” a declaration that American art no longer represented such an immediate, irresistible appeal for him. He was ready for a new stage in his career.

How to Make Pop Ukiyo-e

Shinohara had an epiphany in the fall of 1965, when he discovered a set of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints), Twenty-Eight Famous Murders with Verse (Eimei nijūhasshū ku, 1866–67), by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi—aka Bloody Yoshitoshi. The prints depicted scenes of bloodshed based on true stories that had been adapted to Kabuki plays.¹⁹ Shinohara saw the series in the collection of Takashi Yamamoto, the owner of Tokyo Gallery, along with works by other late-Edo masters, including Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, and Eisen.²⁰ Associating the gruesome subjects of these prints with ravaging images of the Vietnam War that he had seen in a TV documentary,²¹ he started making paintings based on these muzan-e (atrocity pictures), which developed into the Oiran series.

The shift from Imitation Art of American Pop to the Oiran series, inspired by gory ukiyo-e, might seem like an abrupt jump, but the mechanical processes used in making the former provided a useful technical basis for the latter. It was also a necessary step for Shinohara to further develop his image-making method. In Imitation Art, there was little room for new design, for the iconicity of the original Pop works had to be preserved for his imitations to be successful, as exemplified by the straight appropriation of Coca-Cola Plan. By contrast, for the Oiran series, Shinohara drew inspiration from ukiyo-e while reinterpreting the genre and creating his own stories or subjects by freely combining characters. His encounter with late-Edo ukiyo-e provided such impetus that he held three exhibitions on the theme within six months at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, Naiqua Gallery, and Tokyo Gallery in 1965–66.

Among them, the exhibition at Tokyo Gallery in February 1966 was a tour de force, constituting Shinohara’s real debut exhibition, as it was sited at one of the few commercial galleries in Tokyo specializing in contemporary art at the time (fig. 10).²² Entitled Doll Festival, the whole exhibition was carefully planned around the traditional holiday in March to celebrate girl children and was accompanied by the publication of an origami-folded catalogue (fig. 11). As gleaned from a documentary photograph of the installation, at the one end of the gallery was a pair of hina dolls, representing an imperial couple, seated on a traditionally patterned platform. Behind them was a folding screen that depicted a gaudy oiran-style kanzashi (hair ornament). Two walls were covered by large canvases that depicted various types of women, including oiran in diverse settings, with even the ceiling adorned with a gigantic hagoita (battledore) bearing the image of a monster. Three works not visible in this photograph include Doll Festival (fig. 12), a large, three-panel painting that shared the exhibition’s title.

The most noteworthy aspect of this show was its technical sophistication. While the paintings in the first two exhibitions were hand-painted in a rough and crude manner, the works in Doll Festival, prepared over a month with grant money from the Copley Foundation, demonstrated the artist’s mechanical mode of production, in which he entirely did away with brushwork. To make them, Shinohara not only employed such tools as stencils, masking tape, and an airbrush, as he had done with Drink More, but also exploited new industrial materials including fluorescent paint, aluminum sheets, metal foil, and acrylic sheets. In order to ensure a professional finish, he even had the plastic sheets cut with a power saw at a sign maker’s shop in the shapes of motifs such as kanzashi and a woman’s face, which he attached to the canvas.²³

Making “Bloody” Oiran

Shinohara developed this mode of mechanical production as the Oiran series unfolded over six months. For instance, as the surviving photograph shows (fig. 13), in the no longer extant Murder of Oiran, exhibited at Naiqua Gallery in October 1965, Shinohara hand painted an oiran’s head being chopped off by a sword in crude lines with a brush, while using plaster to cover her face. At the end of that year, Shinohara rendered the same motif with pink metal foil in the background and white plastic for an oiran’s face; the work was a finalist in the annual juried exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Nagaoka (fig. 14). Then, in Peeling Off Face Skin, shown at Tokyo Gallery, Shinohara achieved a more precise and exact line in fashioning an oiran’s head by using a stencil and masking tape and attaching a piece of clear, bright red plastic over the red-painted face (fig. 15). The motif was borrowed from a Yoshitoshi print showing the famous criminal Naosuke Gonbei peeling off a victim’s skin in order to obfuscate his identity (fig. 16). Changing the victim to an oiran and the setting to a brothel, Shinohara used mechanical means to represent the scene in a sharp, clear-cut Pop style that showed few, if any, traces of the artist’s hand. Although the work does not survive today, the garish color of the painting, along with the blood-dripping sword, must have had a striking effect. Hyūga Akiko, one of the very few female critics in Japan then, praised the exhibition as a “festival in the color of women’s blood” that was “extremely beautiful and superbly gorgeous.”²⁴

In terms of iconography, Shinohara’s exhibition was clearly at odds with the traditional doll festival. First of all, the hina dolls portraying the emperor and empress—a motif inspired by the classical Japanese dolls that his mother crafted for a living—were enlarged to life-size and had aluminum boxlike bodies. While Shinohara conflated the empress with an oiran by adorning her head with a gaudy kanzashi, he gave her companion an even wilder treatment: when a switch was turned on, the figure’s head rotated at a high speed, driven by an electric motor inside, which emitted a tremendous noise. Shinohara further complicated the iconography with representations of women from diverse times and social classes, including a Heian (9th–12th century) princess and an Edo komachi (a beautiful daughter of a townsman). Even more sensational was the exhibition’s sexual overtone, represented by two paintings: one, depicting a pair of phalluses, and the other, a couple making love, inspired by erotic ukiyo-e. This wide array of female types depicted in the show suggests that for Shinohara, the series was not just about oiran per se but about a female archetype of olden Japan, which he created through conflating various images of women.

A key to understanding this iconographical conflation is Shinohara’s Okichi Story, a set of illustrations he executed in 1965 with his virtuoso draftsmanship, and intended for an artist’s book (fig. 17). The series derives from another inspiration Shinohara found at the time: bunraku, the Edo-era puppet play, and its popular repertoire, The Woman Killer and the Hell of Oil, which he saw on TV. The play is particularly famous for its over-the-top murder scene in which Okichi, the beautiful wife of an oil vendor, is killed, in an accidentally spilled pool of oil, by Yohei, the adopted prodigal son of another oil vendor. In the original story, there is no sexual relationship between Okichi and Yohei, despite the suggestive murder scene in oil and blood. However, in Shinohara’s adaptation, Okichi is an oil vendor’s daughter, touted as a komachi for her exceptional beauty, and has sex with her admirer on their first date. During their lovemaking, Okichi is raped by Monster Frog and transforms into a cursed oiran, complete with an oiran hairdo. In her fate following this ghastly rape, “every man she made love to was violently murdered,” as Shinohara annotated in one of the scenes (fig. 18). Thus, the artist conflated images of komachi and oiran in his story, establishing his own icon of “Oiran.”

In Doll Festival, a scene of Okichi’s lovemaking by the irises reappeared, with the jealous Monster Frog hovering overhead to hint at an imminent atrocity (fig. 19). In other works, too, Shinohara extended this narrative-inspired approach to depict women in various settings, drawing from numerous inspirations. This rather complex “celebration” of women is more aptly articulated in the exhibition’s Japanese title, Onna no matsuri, or “Women’s Festival,” than in the English title “Doll Festival,” which denotes the childlike innocence of a “girls’ festival.” Under the Japanese title, Shinohara portrayed women in drama-infused images evolved from prototypes in Yoshitoshi and late-Edo erotica. By creating ukiyo-e–inspired works with modern mechanical methods, Shinohara devised a perfect foundation for his image-making, recasting late Edo muzan-e into what can be called “Pop ukiyo-e” or “Bloody Pop.” ²⁵

Many critics recognized Shinohara’s breakthrough achievement with Doll Festival. In addition to Hyūga Akiko, Miki Tamon hailed the artist’s “unprecedented maturity of style” in his review,²⁶ which, unusual for that time, was accompanied by a full-page color reproduction of an installation view of the exhibition (fig. 20). Despite the show’s critical success, however, the reality for Shinohara was tough. None of the works from the show sold, and Shinohara was disappointed by the silence of the influential “Big Three” critics—that is, Tōno Yoshiaki, Nakahara Yūsuke, and Haryū Ichirō. Furthermore, because the show yielded no profit, the gallery demanded that that the artist pay for exhibition expenses.²⁷ Unable to pay the bill, Shinohara gave Doll Festival, a major piece in the exhibition, to the gallery.²⁸ If critical success and artistic maturity were still not enough for Shinohara to make a living as an artist in Japan, the only thing left for him to do was to move to New York, his long-held dream that had been frustrated in 1964. To explore the possibility, Shinohara wrote to Porter McCray, director of The JDR 3rd Fund, whom he had met in Tokyo the previous year.²⁹ After three years, he was finally awarded a yearlong fellowship and left Tokyo for New York in May 1969 to begin a new chapter in his long career, which continues to this day.

For the extended version of this essay, please see chapter four of Hiroko Ikegami’s The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010). See also “Shinohara Pops! When Oiran Rides a Motorcycle, Wonder Woman Swings a Samurai Sword,” in Hiroko Ikegami and Reiko Tomii, Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), pp. 10–25.

The post Shinohara Ushio’s Dialogue with American Art: From Imitation Art to Pop Ukiyo-e appeared first on post.

Among numerous events that involved New York artists in Tokyo in the 1960s, “Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg,” which took place at the Sogetsu Art Center in November 1964, is perhaps the most legendary. It staged the public making of a work by the world-famous artist who had just received the Grand Prize at that year’s Venice Biennale. The work, Gold Standard (fig. 1), remains one of Rauschenberg’s most important “combines,” serving as testimony to the cross-cultural communication—or discommunication—that marked the artist’s first visit to Japan and setting a precedent for many of his subsequent overseas projects. This essay will examine how the theme of communication and its failure surface in the works that Rauschenberg created in Tokyo and will consider how Japanese artists strategically negotiated the presence of overwhelmingly influential American art.

“A Cool Yankee” in Tokyo

What brought Rauschenberg to Tokyo in the first place? He came to Japan as the set and costume designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s first world tour, which started in Paris in June and ended in Tokyo in November 1964, stopping in thirty cities in twelve countries in Europe and Asia. At the time of his arrival in Tokyo, Rauschenberg’s fame in Japan was at its zenith: in addition to the critic Tōno Yoshiaki’s enthusiastic promotion of post–Abstract Expressionist art since 1959,¹ Rauschenberg had just won the Venice Biennale’s Grand Prize, a first for an American artist. The artist Shinohara Ushio² described his first impression of the American artist in Tokyo this way: “Gilt-edged sunglasses and a khaki jacket. He’s such a cool Yankee that he doesn’t quite look like a modern master. He’s dressed so well that the wannabe Ivy Leaguers in Ginza would immediately want to imitate his look.”³ Rauschenberg was thus an object of adoration as a figure who embodied not only the cutting edge art of New York but also the trendy pop culture of America.

However, it should be noted that Rauschenberg was a subject “to see” as much as an object “to be seen,” since he himself was a tourist trying to make some sense of this foreign city. Thus, Rauschenberg’s trip to Tokyo involved two intertwining gazes: the artist’s gaze upon the city as an outsider and the Japanese audience’s gaze upon the star artist from America. Although these gazes, each oriented according to its own interests and fantasies, did not quite meet and resulted in a kind of cross-cultural discommunication, Rauschenberg’s interaction with the Tokyo avant-garde offers an important case study for thinking about global modernisms.

Rauschenberg’s “Tokyo”

The first work Rauschenberg made after his arrival is a collage titled For John Cage (fig. 3). The work illustrates a printed program of events that included “Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg” (originally announced as a public interview) and a concert by John Cage and David Tudor. The ground of this collage is an aerial photograph of Shinjuku, a recently redeveloped subcenter of Tokyo, where the Shinjuku Station on the Keio train line opened in 1963 and the Keio Department Store opened in 1964. Rauschenberg seems to have found this image on a postcard or in a brochure for tourists.

To create the work, Rauschenberg pasted words and phrases cut out from a phrase book onto the photographic image of the sky over Shinjuku.⁴ Japanese language fragments sprinkled over the picture form several groups—individual words on the left, conversations for tourists on the top and bottom, and maxims and sayings on the right—but do not make logical sense as a whole, thereby creating the kind of linguistic chaos that a tourist might feel in a foreign city. In addition, the cityscape of Tokyo had a new look at the time. The Olympic Games had just taken place there in October, in preparation for which the Japanese government had constructed the Olympic roads and the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway to receive throngs of international guests. Rauschenberg’s eyes thus adroitly responded to a city that had just undergone the first stage of modernization.

Since phrase books are usually bilingual, Rauschenberg must have known what those snippets of Japanese meant in English. However, those words and phrases, “suspended” without speech subjects, do not form a coherent statement. Rather, as the work’s title For John Cage suggests, the linguistic syncopation that visually pulses over the image of Tokyo functions as Cagean urban noise. Its syncopated rhythm actually corresponds to Rauschenberg’s description of the city as “staccato,” the word he used when Tōno asked about his impression of the city.⁵ Rauschenberg thus gave visual form to his first impression of Tokyo and presented it as a greeting card to the Japanese audience.

However, in contrast to Cage, who was very learned about Japanese culture and aesthetics, Rauschenberg seems to have accepted the fact that he was a mere traveler through Tokyo and mocks the tourist’s fantasy of having a firsthand experience of the cultural other. The fact that he cut up a phrase book (originally meant for a tourist such as himself) and rendered it useless can be seen as an indication of his skepticism about cross-cultural communication, which is, in fact, often mediated by such standardized guidebooks.

But since he was an artist as well as a tourist, Rauschenberg was not free from the problematics of representing the cultural other. A look at Tokyo (fig. 4), a collage he created for Japan’s leading newspaper, Yomiuri shimbun, provides quite a different take on the city. For this work, Rauschenberg cut out illustrations from popular magazines and other readily available sources, juxtaposing traditional and modern aspects of Tokyo. While images of Buddha, a castle, and a scene of acrobatics are included as exotic features, pictures of highways, a subway map, and a discount sale convey a sense of a busy and modern urban atmosphere. This seemingly simplistic juxtaposition of the old and new in the Japanese metropolis was not meant to be a complete work in itself. Yomiuri shimbun had originally commissioned Rauschenberg to write an essay on Tokyo and to pair it with a collage. But the artist came up with a plan of his own and requested that the work be printed on the newspaper’s front page. As he explained to Tōno, “I wanted the surrounding articles to be printed in color as well, as opposed to the regular black ink. I wanted one article printed in blue, the other in red, and the editorial in yellow. . . .”⁶

Surprisingly, this unorthodox request was initially approved by the company. The artist, who said that he would consider the work complete only in its final stage (that is, when printed in the newspaper), told Tōno: “I have no idea how it will turn out. Nobody knows what kind of news will be published nor is it possible to predict what kind of color it will be finally printed in. But the whole page—including articles—would be my essay on Tokyo.”⁷

Commenting on the democratic significance of the work’s appearing in a newspaper and being distributed as such, he praised Yomiuri shimbun for taking on such a bold project: “When it’s printed, people would open the newspaper as they normally do, read the colored news of the day, and also read a work of art. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? It would not be just a thing that belongs to just art fans anymore, but it would be a thing that is just there. . . . You might think I’m crazy to ask such an outrageous thing of a big newspaper company, but it’s great that it was accepted. It could never happen with the New York Times.”⁸

As a matter of fact, it could never happen with Yomiuri shimbun either; the company eventually canceled the project. Let us consider the reason why by imagining the way Tokyo might have actually appeared in the newspaper. In early December 1964, right after Rauschenberg left Tokyo to return to New York, the Japanese daily’s front page was filled with a variety of articles on foreign affairs. Topics included Japan’s diplomatic issues with South Korea and China, America’s bombing of Vietnam, and developments in space exploration. Surrounded by international news, Rauschenberg’s Tokyo would have stood out as a local news item. Moreover, with articles printed in different colors, the page would have had an interesting visual effect analogous to the monitor of a color television.

However, the work would also have posed many problems, for Rauschenberg would have transformed what Marshall McLuhan once acclaimed as “a collective work of art,”⁹ that is, the front page of a newspaper, into his own artwork. Delivered as the production of a single artist, the page would have lost its collective nature and objective neutrality—the fundamental principles of major newspapers—and become something literally “colored” by the artist’s subjectivity. The statements quoted above indicate that, as far as this project was concerned, Tokyo was for Rauschenberg a marvelous place, where he could achieve things he would not have been able to at home. Juxtaposed with an article on the bombing of Vietnam, Rauschenberg’s “essay on Tokyo” inevitably would have revealed the artist’s utopian or even colonial optimism by literally invading, if unintentionally, the sphere of public discourse in a foreign land. This issue would resurface on the stage of “Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg” at the Sogetsu Art Center.

“Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg”

It is well-known that Gold Standard was created during “Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg,” the now legendary event organized by the critic Tōno. But just how did the program, originally announced as a public interview with the artist, turn into a performance-like production of the work? According to Rauschenberg’s longtime friend, the artist Nakaya Fujiko, it was Teshigahara Sōfū, a sponsor of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s tour in Japan, who prompted Rauschenberg to produce a work on a gold screen. Sōfū held a party one night for the entire troupe at a high-class, traditional Japanese-style restaurant. On that occasion, Sōfū told Rauschenberg about a Japanese custom—although no longer commonly practiced—whereby a guest would paint a picture or write a piece of calligraphy for his host as a token of gratitude. Seeing that Rauschenberg was inspired by the story, Sōfū offered him a gold folding screen, which the artist decided to use in his public interview appearance at the Sogetsu Art Center, since he was not really interested in the ordinary interview that was slated.¹⁰

The program began on schedule on November 28, 1964, with Rauschenberg working on the screen with Alex Hay, his technical assistant during the dance company’s world tour (figs. 5). First, they removed the black frame from the upper edge of the screen to create a kind of free, open space. This was a typical gesture for Rauschenberg, who always presented his work as an open field with which a viewer could be engaged. He then accented its surface with paint while Hay affixed to it a road barrier from a local construction site. After splashing black and white paint over the screen, Rauschenberg went on to attach items such as a speedometer, a clock, Coca-Cola bottles, and a gold-painted necktie—all typically Rauschenbergian objects—while also creating an improvisational transfer drawing with a page from the Japan Times.

While the baffled audience looked on politely, the critic Tōno, who had known what would occur, enacted his own “happening.” He created questions by appropriating published statements by Rauschenberg and various critics who had written about his work. Thus, the artist’s famous utterance—“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two)”¹¹ —was turned into: “Does painting relate to both art and life? Can neither be made? Do you try to act in the gap between the two?” When Tōno uttered his questions, however, the audience was unable to decipher what he was saying because his speech was channeled through an electronic sound distorter made by the composer Ichiyanagi Toshi (who had studied with Cage in New York in the 1950s) and reached the audience as noise. Although this was the critic’s attempt to treat his own medium—words and logic, that is—as readymade material with which to create a kind of linguistic “combine,” the idea was not clearly communicated to the audience, whose incomprehension was thereby doubled.

In addition, Tōno had invited Shinohara and the artist Kojima Nobuaki to pose questions to Rauschenberg directly. When Tōno raised his hand twice, as arranged, the two went up on the stage with Shinohara’s work Marcel Duchamp in Thought and imitations of Coca-Cola Plan, and also Standing Figure (known as “Man with a Flag”) by Kojima, which held a placard that said “QUESTION” (fig. 6). Shinohara read out his questions in Japanese and in English with the help of the interpreter Takashina Shūji, a leading art critic and, at the time, a curator at the National Museum of Western Art. According to Takashina, Rauschenberg reflexively looked back when addressed by the interpreter as “Mr. Rauschenberg,” but immediately returned to work when he recognized that it was a question.¹² Frustrated, Shinohara placed at Rauschenberg’s feet a sheet of paper bearing a translated question, which the artist then pasted onto the gold screen (fig. 7). He went on to complete the work by attaching additional objects, such as a cardboard box from Sony, a worn-out pair of leather shoes, an electric light, and, at the end of a leash-like rope, a ceramic figure of the Japan Victor dog (identical to the RCA Victor dog and retained as a mascot when the Japanese branch of the business split off from the American company at the beginning of World War II). When the piece was finally completed, more than four hours had passed.

The resulting work, Gold Standard, created on a stage where verbal communication was blocked, looks like an arena in which Rauschenberg’s gestures were carefully improvised to achieve a fine balance between the traditional opulence of the gold screen and the objects salvaged from the streets of Tokyo. Indeed, such high-contrast juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern was (and still is) what makes Japan attractive as a tourist destination: it is timeless and traditional, but with the familiarities and comforts of modern urban life. Rauschenberg’s work thus predicted the stereotypical image of Japan as a country where tradition and technology coexist without friction. The Japan Victor dog, seated on a bicycle saddle and tied to the gold screen, seems quite lost in this rather disorienting symbolic landscape of Tokyo. With its quizzical expression and inclined head, the figure reads as a kind of surrogate tourist in an unfamiliar place—where a clear order, let alone “His Master’s Voice,” does not exist.

In a later interview with Tōno, Rauschenberg said that he “had tried very hard not to answer any questions during the program because that would have entirely changed the significance of the whole event.”¹³ Tōno paraphrased what the artist said as follows: “What is dialogue anyway? . . . Can you just call it a dialogue or interview if a critic and an artist discuss issues with words and the artist states his opinion? Maybe there is a trap in that idea, a trap that you somehow assume you will be understood after all. I do wonder if communication should make such coherent sense. . . .”¹⁴ Given Rauschenberg’s distrust of words as vehicles for communication, it cannot have been by coincidence that he pasted the Japanese saying Fugen Jikkou (which corresponds to the English aphorism, “Actions speak louder than words”)—in the middle of the collage For John Cage. The confusion of the Victor dog would therefore seem not to reflect the state of Rauschenberg the performer, for it was he who chose not to employ speech onstage. Rather, it mirrors the resulting discommunication and the puzzlement of other participants and the audience, who were denied any sort of verbal exchange with the artist.

Cross-Cultural Discommunication in Gold Standard

Yet Rauschenberg’s creation of Gold Standard was not entirely silent; it was accompanied by image and sound from a small television that played onstage during the entire program, as if to make up for the absence of verbal interaction (fig. 8). The TV functioned as a formal element of the performance, as a modern screen emanating light from within, in contrast to the traditional gold screen, which reflected light from outside. Moreover, according to Nakaya, putting the TV onstage was Rauschenberg’s “path of least resistance” to the pressure of making a work in public.¹⁵ The television, a tool of mass communication, was intended to keep Rauschenberg company during the production as well as to mediate between the artist and the audience. It is an ironic fact of the cultural exchange that Rauschenberg, anxious about his stage performance, felt more at ease with a TV than with his “foreign” audience.

However, I would venture to argue that Rauschenberg’s anxiety was more than just stage fright. It is highly possible that he also feared his own role as a model to be imitated. In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha theorizes the logic of mimicry as a strategy to challenge colonial authority, taking the example of localized usage of the Bible in colonial India.¹⁶ Similarly, the rather uncanny sight of Rauschenberg surrounded by Shinohara’s imitations of his work and Kojima’s figure enveloped in a cloth resembling the U.S. flag¹⁷ seems to point to a kind of postcolonial paradox at work in Tokyo, where the impact of American art and culture was so immense in the postwar years that it amounted to cultural colonialism. It should be recalled at this point that Rauschenberg himself had been critical of the myth of originality since the late 1950s, with works such as Factum I and Factum II (both 1957). Rauschenberg’s “fear” thus must have encompassed his discomfort at being imitated by the cultural other, an act that would position him as the orthodox and “original” figure of modern art.

The title of the work, Gold Standard, must be closely read as well. As an economic term, it refers to the system of using the value of gold as the standard on which to base the value of money. The title thus implies that there is a foundational standard in this work as well. Rauschenberg chose this title “first of all, because it [the work] is gold, and second of all, because it stands, and also because I think this work is the standard itself.”¹⁸ Judging from this statement, the title seems to imply that the standard was the artist’s belief in his own artistic capacity, which enabled him to complete the work despite the anxiety he suffered onstage. Beyond this, the title reads as another reference to the cultural and economic hegemony of postwar America: as we know, the gold standard under the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1948 was in fact the gold-dollar standard, in which U.S. dollars, as the privileged international currency, had the same exchange value as gold.

However, the gold-dollar standard was not unshakable, since its stability depended upon the steady growth of the American economy. In reality, as the economist Milton Gilbert warned in 1968, it was becoming increasingly clear by the mid-1960s that the system would become untenable because of the ever-increasing outflow of U.S. dollars to the country’s military involvement in Vietnam.¹⁹ Just as Rauschenberg’s authority as the cultural superior was brought into question onstage in Tokyo, the very paradigm symbolized by the gold standard in the postwar world—that is, Pax Americana—was starting to crumble.

It remains unknown whether Rauschenberg was aware of the ironic implications of his title. Nonetheless, it seems highly significant that he refused to be “lost in translation” in this situation and presented the screen and sound of the TV as “the master’s voice” for the event, where the very notion of communication was put into question. Seen in this light, the TV stands in for the ultimate failure of communication not only in the verbal and mass-mediated realms, but also, disquietingly, in art as well. For the TV onstage seems to proclaim that, with the arrival of the “society of the spectacle,” TV might replace art as a universal tool of communication: watching TV should be as good as watching Rauschenberg’s live performance.

Japan was just taking its first steps toward becoming such a society, since color television became a common household feature in most households on the occasion of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. The international sports festival arguably transformed Japan’s capital into a newly made city. The government had not only constructed the inner-city highways, but also employed every means to clean up Tokyo before the start of the Olympic Games, which presented Japan with the first opportunity to show its face to the international community since the country’s defeat in World War II. The collective obsession to beautify Tokyo was so intense that it became the object of mockery: the artists’ group Hi Red Center organized a work called Cleaning Event, in which performers disguised as public sanitation workers obsessively and impeccably cleaned a street in the Ginza district, using dusters and toothbrushes (fig. 9).

This situation explains why the two right-hand panels of Gold Standard are relatively empty except for an electric light and a pair of old shoes dangling from the top. Rauschenberg actually had difficulty scavenging materials from which to make his work in a city so clean and devoid of litter; he ran out of objects to complete the last two panels of Gold Standard.²⁰ As a result, these last two panels bear the traces of Rauschenberg and Hay’s almost tautological gestures: the artist and his assistant added a layer of gold leaf to the lower part of the fifth panel and then painted a black bar above the black frame of the bottom edge of the sixth panel. In this context, a street sign that Rauschenberg attached to the top of the third panel from the left reads ironically. It says, “Let’s start by making a hygienic environment in order to construct a bright city” (fig. 10).

As in the two collages discussed earlier, Rauschenberg responded to what he saw in Tokyo in Gold Standard, with a clear awareness of his status as a tourist passing through. Thus, the work is another of Rauschenberg’s deliberately touristic views of Tokyo, in which the artist does not claim an authentic experience or profound understanding of the cultural other—because he is aware that any communication could be just another form of miscommunication.

A question remains: did Gold Standard become Rauschenberg’s parting gift to the host Sōfū Teshigahara? In fact, the work turned out to be a serious case of cultural misunderstanding. While Rauschenberg assumed that Sōfū would purchase the piece before Rauschenberg returned to New York, Sōfū expected the artist to present it to him as a gift for sponsoring the Cunningham Company. After some negotiation, the work entered Sōfū’s art collection, later becoming one of the key works in the collection of the Sōgetsu Art Museum.²¹ It remained there until a financial crisis in the early 2000s forced the Sōgetsu Foundation to sell the work and close the museum. Now Gold Standard is in a private collection in the United States, after having been sold from a commercial gallery in Tokyo to one in New York. In today’s globalized and speculative art market, the name of Rauschenberg is an established brand, functioning as a “standard” that sets the high price of his work, which perhaps adds another layer of irony to the work’s title.

This text is based on chapter four of Hiroko Ikegami’s The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 2010) and has been revised and abridged by the author for post.

The post Lost in Translation? “Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg” appeared first on post.