The Brooklyn Rail

Robert Rauschenberg was the type of artist who could effortlessly take an ordinary subject and transform it into something magnificent. With photographic images made in his student days at Black Mountain College all the way through his In + Out City Limits survey (1979–1981), Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World at the Museum of the City of New York is predominantly images of seemingly banal subjects from New York charged with an excitement that we, the viewers, have the benefit of experiencing through Rauschenberg’s lens. Selective cropping, high contrasts, and dramatic perspectives served as his primary ingredients.

The entrance foyer focuses on Rauschenberg’s early photographs, each of which demonstrating the artist’s natural eye for enticing the notable from the quotidian. Akin to his Black Paintings of the early-1950s, Rauschenberg’s Ceiling + Light Bulb (ca. 1951) pulls its subject—an off-centered, slightly out-of-focus ceiling bulb and cord—out of a sea of blackened space. N.Y.C. (Stop) (1951) achieves a similar effect with an isolated stop sign and foreshadows the decades-long infatuation Rauschenberg would develop with the commonplace semiotics that populate the world around us in the form of street signage, advertising, and mass media.

The adjoining room contains mostly photographs of New York from In + Out City Limits along with medium-adjacent works through which Rauschenberg appropriated his photographs as material substance. Additional objects include primary and secondary sources that further explicate the artistic motivations and biographical context specific to Rauschenberg’s photographic pursuits.

The multifariousness of New York exudes from Rauschenberg’s photographs, which do not fall into any formulaic tropes. Some images function as aesthetic marvels, be it the ostentatious dome of St. Bartholomew’s Church seen from the vantage point of a hotel room or the extremely off-kilter, above-ground view of a garbage heap on a desolate city corner that breaks with the formal rules of perspective. Other images raise questions about potential societal critiques Rauschenberg may have held—a likely reading given his consistent political commentaries—with one of the most noticeable being an image of a homeless man who lays along a sidewalk in front of the Bowery Savings Bank (1981). The man’s uncomfortable position does not even convey rest; instead, it looks almost as if he had been slain, perhaps a visualization of capitalism’s failures. All of this is done through a straightforward, spur-of-the-moment image that invokes Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.”

Based on the panoply of images exhibited, one begins to recognize that Rauschenberg, while armed with his camera, must have been perpetually in awe of the sights and sounds around him: window-front displays of antique goods, the bustling activity of a Chinatown market, the contrasts between old brick buildings with that of high-rise glass skyscrapers, or even the ubiquitous presence of fire hydrants along every city street.

The pairing of Rauschenberg’s photography with his silkscreens and other mixed-media works underscores precisely how he gave his photographs a second life. For Rauschenberg, the initial capture was only the beginning. A late-career silkscreen such as Bolts (Shiner) from 1992 made use of a photograph of three construction workers along the side of a building originally taken by Rauschenberg in the early-1980s. Here, the image has been blown-up and washed over in a fiery red acrylic on an aluminum surface that gives it a metallic sheen which contrasts with the all-over blue, reappropriated photograph of the Empire State Building to the left and the surrounding, transparent, negative space.

One small critique to raise concerns the naming of the exhibition. In the entrance foyer, there is a detailed map of the city marking important places in Rauschenberg's career. From spotlighting his time at the Art Students League to the studio building in which he worked a floor above Jasper Johns in the Financial District, it appears that just about every significant location is Manhattan-centric. With no mention of work in other boroughs, it merits clarification here that this exhibition is more Rauschenberg’s Manhattan, rather than New York overall.

Such a minor criticism aside, this eccentric group of images accomplishes two crucial goals in expanding our understanding of Rauschenberg’s photography: it showcases his unceasing interest in New York as an imagistic source of artistic inspiration as well as photography’s role in supplying Rauschenberg with essential materials to appropriate in his non-photographic projects. One of the best ways to understand Rauschenberg’s photographic interests is straight from the artist himself, with the thesis of the exhibition best articulated in his written correspondence included in the display: “PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE MOST DIRECT COMMUNICATION IN NONVIOLENT CONTACTS.”