Thoughts on excess: Rauschenberg’s Gluts and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

{Note: I have written this in a specific voice. I determined the voice by imagining the audience to which I would be writing. My Uncle Tim, commenting on my blog entries from last year, has said that I need to “dumb things down” (quoting Andy Rooney), but instead of that I have opted to give more backstory in order to contextualize the ideas that I bring up. If things are still confusing, please email me and ask for clarification. Another option besides dumbing things down for an audience is for the audience itself to formulate questions about what exactly is unclear.}

Here are some definitions for the word “Glut”:
1. Gorge: overeat or eat immodestly; make a pig of oneself
2. Flood: supply with an excess of
3. The quality of being so overabundant that prices fall

After I paid 12 euro and entered the Guggenheim museum in Venice, known specifically as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (I’ll come back to this nuance later), I came upon the first room, which is called Capolavori degli artisti di Futurismo [Masterworks by the Futurists]. If you are familiar with the Futurists, then this will strike you as grimly ironic since those artists, the same ones who declared that Venice should be destroyed along with all of its museums and desires to archive the past, would never have allowed their works to dwell in such a place. The Futurists set upon Venice with an onslaught of words and manifesti, but they never burned it down. Now, years after all of them have died and as a sort of silent laugh in their faces, their works belong to one of the wealthiest art collectors of the West. Peggy Guggenheim: the last great patron of Modern Art.

I had forgotten about the Futurist collection and I had also forgotten that the museum was showing a collection of Robert Rauschenberg’s Gluts. I was extremely pleased to find this exhibit since Rauschenberg is one of my favorite artists, someone who made me think a lot when I started learning about Modern art in college. For me, he was most important for his work with collage. He scoured the streets of NYC looking for “junk,” or “found objects,” and then assembled them into sculptures that spoke to the various performances of the everyday. One such performance was that of discarding junk, i.e., throwing shit out. In NYC, one man’s junk is another man’s fortune – and this was literally true for Rauschenberg who made his career with these collages and sculptural assemblages.

Fortune was with me as I entered the gallery where Rauschenberg’s Gluts were displayed and discovered that there was a “talk” about to begin on the pieces, offered by an American woman who was roughly my age (28). I’m always interested in hearing what people have to say about works of art like this for a couple reasons. First, these works of art are not simple, though neither are they complex. They are time and space specific, meaning that, taking Rauschenberg-like collage as an example, assemblages made from “junk” come from the Marcel Duchamp line of art-objects and, as such, have a strong anti-museum quality to them. The Guggenheim lecturer pointed this out by showing us one glut called Primary Mobiloid (see picture below) and acknowledged its relation to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. She also mentioned his more famous Fountain. But, she neglected to relay the backstory on the latter, which Duchamp signed as R. Mutt and submitted to an art competition to see if the judges would accept it. Initially, they did not accept it. Once Duchamp revealed his true name, however, the judges changed their minds and accepted the art object as a true work of art. Fountain, Bicycle Wheel, and the Gluts are very specific to a time and space (the 1940s-1960s, New York City) where artists brought the everyday into museums in order to displace the “high art” that had previously existed there. Duchamp and Rauschenberg put the everyday under a microscope with their found art objects or “readymades” and demanded that museum-goers interact with museum art in a new way. Why, for example, is one item in a museum but another is not? Can I touch this piece of art? No? Why not? What’s it worth? 27 million dollars? Is that ridiculous? The readymade objects displayed, tacitly, an agreement between museum-goers and the museum establishment itself that basically reserved the space of the museum for a kind of art that only a certain slice of the population could afford and that another slice could pay 12 euro to see. Again, though, the last laugh may be on Duchamp and his ilk because all of that “junk” has been transformed into high art, and the everydayness to which those objects once spoke is now lost to history. Packed inside the objects is an certain enigmaticalness, to use a word coined by Theodor W. Adorno, which consists in the split personality of artworks. On the one hand, they represents and (again, tacitly) speak to the everyday, but on the other hand they point to another place, one in which neither high nor low art exists because there is no need for art, no need to point our a disparity between high and low classes because the disparity has been rectified.

The Guggenheim talker/lecturer walked us through the exhibit and gave a brief overview about the pieces. She began by telling us that Rauschenberg, who lived in Texas in the 1980s during the oil glut, spent nearly a decade constructing this series of Gluts. Why use that word? Well, the intention of the artist is long gone. Looking at the object and trying to parse its enigmaticalness I would say that the word “Glut” functions dialectically to call to mind and challenge precisely the excesses caused by something like a surplus of oil. You can think of the dialectic like two poles, contained within the art-object itself, around which the energy of the piece oscillates. The poles here are, oddly, both excess. One pole represents, perhaps, the excess or surplus of oil that buffered the oil companies in the 1980s. The other represents the excessive poverty produced by the lay-offs issued by the oil companies in places like Texas. The art object isn’t polemical. Instead, it embodies the dialectic of glut and should cause us to think about the materiality of the works.

For example, the majority of the works consist of bent metal. They are extremely cheap in and of themselves. They are scraps or maybe even garbage that people, even poor people, would discard. Why do we discard things? One reason is that we can no longer find a use for the object at hand. Rauschenberg essentially re-purposes the scraps by sculpting them into artworks. There was one called Sunset Glut, or something like that, for which the artist took the stick shift and speedometer from what looked like an old truck and surrounded it, much like the way our lower set of eyelashes encompass our eyes, with streams of yellow metal. The streams resemble rays of the sun. Our talker/lecturer commented, astutely, that the work reminded her of driving into the sunset, with the sun visor down, and seeing the glare of the sun in her peripheral vision as she tried to continue driving into the blinding light. This image fits into the dialectical oscillation I spoke of above. The visor blocks out the main thrust of the sun, but the excess light lingers in our vision. Even when the sun goes down, its light still illuminates the sky. What seems like a mere after-effect actually functions as a major source of light to guide us through the later hours of the day. These Gluts are similar to that after-effect. They re-use pieces of junk and persist like the after glow of the setting sun, but the image they provide is only peripheral. We can see in our periphery the enigmaticalness of the artworks, though the main thrust of the economic complexities surrounding the time and place of the artworks’ emergence is out of sight.

When the tour was over and the crowd of auditors had dispersed I asked the talker/lecturer a question. I asked her to comment on the irony of these works of art, works that obliquely speak of economic hardship and that, in and of themselves, have little economic value, have been purchased for hundreds of thousands of dollars and sit in Peggy Guggenheim’s collection. Acknowledging the irony, the talker/lecturer asked me to remember that Peggy Guggenheim was never extremely rich. Compared to her father (uncle?), Solomon Guggenheim, she was merely well-disposed (my words). This comment, however, requires us to compare Peggy Guggenheim to the majority of other people in the world. After all, who has a back porch and garden that sits on the Grand Canal? Who has Futurist paintings and sculptures in their bedroom? Regardless of the Guggenheim’s intentions, or Rauschenberg’s for that matter, the Gluts exist as enigmatical art-objects that call to mind the extreme excesses brought about by economic success, both on the side of the successful and the side of those who labor for the successful. This kind of regard for the social situation of the artworks was completely absent from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.