A bicycle wheel spinning at the bottom of the Guggenheim Museum last night served as a sort of portal to the top, where a small but punchy Robert Rauschenberg show just opened in one of the museum’s tower galleries to mark what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday. As part of a gala for the Guggenheim’s “Works & Process” series, a group of dancers performed Tracer (1962), a piece by choreographer Paul Taylor for which Rauschenberg created costumes and sets—including the mesmerizing wheel that functioned as a sort of motor, a timepiece, and a tribute to Rauschenberg’s good friend Marcel Duchamp, among so many other things.
Up the rotunda in “Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped”—which opened last week and continues through May 3—are a few select works from the Guggenheim’s collections along with loans from the artist’s foundation. Revolver II (1967) takes up the spinning theme in the form of five large Plexiglass discs that rotate and create layers of visions between them, like a kind of kaleidoscope at room-size scale. Autobiography (1968) is a looming vertical triptych that distills Rauschenberg into three parts: a full-body X-ray superimposed over his astrological chart, a circular presentation of written text cataloging significant moments in his life and work, and a picture of him roller-skating with a parachute deployed behind his back (from his storied 1963 performance Pelican).
A centerpiece of the exhibition is Barge (1962–63), the largest silkscreen painting Rauschenberg made during an early-’60s burst of such works and a behemoth by any measure at 7 feet tall and 32 feet wide. It’s easy to get lost in its layers upon layers of imagery: sewer grates, insects, construction sites, clouds, football, expressways, rocketry, a painting by Diego Velázquez—the list goes on. Barge is a prized showpiece at the Guggenheim Bilbao and, for this exhibition, is back in New York for the first time in nearly 25 years.
Another silkscreen painting near the end, Untitled from 1963, features a centerpiece picture of choreographer Merce Cunningham, making Rauschenberg’s longtime connection to dance clear. That is what occasioned the performance program last night, which featured another piece by Taylor (3 Epitaphs, from 1956) and, by Trisha Brown, Astral Converted (1991). The latter included a score by another close Rauschenberg compatriot: John Cage, whose spare soundtrack for an ensemble of woodwinds and horns played as a sort of reverent tribute to Rauschenberg—who would have turned 100 next week, on October 22.
