<snip>
About Pound, though: would he have appreciated being linked with
Rauschenberg? [...] the spirit of Pop Art is very different.
<snip>
A couple of points.
Firstly 'Pop' is unhelpful, I think. (So too is 'neo dada', though it's
better. Rauschenberg first met Duchamp round about 1960.) Rosenquist &
Lichtenstein (on the one hand) and Hockney & Blake (on the other) are in
some ways as academic and as similar as they are (all four) different from
Rauschenberg and his encounter with the 'possibilities' of what he uses from
the *real*, throughout his practice (including that as a dancer and as a
choreographer) from the erased de Kooning onwards.
Secondly, "What splendour, it all coheres!" could certainly describe much of
Rauschenberg. However, his openness is not a process of digestion but
'mutual coexistence' between the work and the environment in which it sits
and from which it draws its very 'real' intrusions, including the bed, the
goat, the balls, the broken cars, the radios, the silkscreened images and so
forth. And that is a very big difference.
CW
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'Lasciamo ai padroni lo champagne: noi abbiamo i pomodori'
(Let the bosses have the champagne: we've got the tomatoes)
- Potere Operaio, New Year 1968
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