ART NOW

Found-object art is hardly news. Back in the 1950s, Rauschenberg himself was christened a neo-Dadaist for reinterpreting Duchamp when he started to incorporate junk — most famously, a stuffed goat and an unmade bed — into his “Combines”. Those early works, with their radical juxtaposition of painting and object, made the artist a legend in his own time. In tandem with the flags and targets of Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg’s lover , the Combines wrested art out of the romanticism of abstract expressionism and paved the way for pop art, conceptualism and arte povera. Since then, the art world has moved on. The painting that Rauschenberg rubbished as reactionary has made a knowing, self-conscious comeback; video has hijacked the issues of temporality that obsessed him and his avant-garde peers; new technologies have made explorations of materiality no longer fashionable.

-Businessday
June 12 2009