WEBVTT

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(lively piano music)

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Voiceover: We're on the 4th floor

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of the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

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and we're looking at Robert
Rauschenberg's, "Bed."

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This is a combine, not quite a sculpture,

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not quite a painting, from 1955.

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Voiceover: So, combine means a combination

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of painting and sculpture?

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Voiceover: Well, Johns and Rauschenberg

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were actually thinking about their art

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as between art and life,

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and what is that narrow
space between the two?

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Voiceover: Instead of thinking about it

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between painting and sculpture
between these two things

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that symbolize fine art
in the grand tradition,

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inserting life into that conversation.

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Voiceover: Life and wit.

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What we're looking at is, in
fact, the stuff of a real bed.

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We're looking at a real pillow.

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We're looking at a real pillowcase,

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and a handmade quilted blanket, sheets,

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but if you look closely, you're
also seeing pencil and paint.

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Of course, all of this has been taken out

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of the horizontal where
you could lie down on this,

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and put up on the wall.

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Voiceover: I'm reminded of Pollock,

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of Pollock painting on the floor,

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and then those pieces of
canvas being picked up

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and put on the walls of
a museum or a gallery.

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The other way I'm reminded of Pollock

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is in all the drips
that we're seeing here.

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Voiceover: This is a reference

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that Rauschenberg wanted you to come to.

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Voiceover: The Pollocks
are just 5 years old,

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the great drip paintings.

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Voiceover: That's exactly right.

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This artist wanted you to
be thinking about Pollock.

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This is really a
confrontation with Pollock,

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with abstract expressionism broadly.

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That was the dominant contemporary art

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of this moment in 1955.

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Pollock would die the following year.

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Voiceover: When I think
about abstract expressionism,

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I think about the personal
subjective experience

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of the artist on the canvas.

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I guess it makes sense
to me that this is a bed,

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a place of our unconscious, of our dreams.

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Voiceover: I think it's
also tongue-in-cheek.

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This notion that the
abstract expressionist canvas

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was somehow the manifestation
of the internal state

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of the artist.

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Rauschenberg is saying,
"You really believe that?

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"Well let me give you the
actual arena of the dream.

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"I'm going to give you my bed."

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Voiceover: So, you think
he's making fun in a way?

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Voiceover: Absolutely.

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Art historians sometimes talked

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about the kind of Oedipal relationship

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between Rauschenberg or younger artists,

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and the abstract expressionists that
he was friends with at this time.

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Voiceover: That makes
this a kind of in-joke.

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Voiceover: 1955, in the work of
people like Johns and Rauschenberg,

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is the moment when art
moves from being modernist

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in its sincerity to a kind
of post-modern attitude

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that is responsive and that is self-aware,

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a kind of hyper self-awareness.

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Voiceover: We could
understand that as a switch

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between modernism to post-modernism.

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Voiceover: Or sincerity to irony.

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Voiceover: It is true that when I think

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about abstract expressionism,
there is this attempt

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by each of those artists, Newman, Pollock,

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Rothko, Motherwell, the great artists

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of the abstract expressionist movement,

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each one of them has a very
distinctive, individual style.

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You can't say that there's an
abstract expressionist style

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because it's completely
dependent on the individual.

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There is that idea that the painting

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is this manifestation of their
personality, their psyche.

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Voiceover: What happens here,

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is we have an artist who is
self-consciously imitating

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that idea of the authentic.

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If you look closely, the
drip had become, by 1955,

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almost a kind of emblem of
the authentic experience

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of the authentic moment.

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Here, that is being replicated.

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There's a kind of irony
that's built into it.

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I think of stepping back
from buying that notion

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that art can be this true internal thing.

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Voiceover: By virtue of copying

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what is supposed to be someone
else's individual style,

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there is a kind of irony, a kind
of self-consciousness there,

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a kind of adopting for another purpose.

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Voiceover: But then, all of this

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is [laid over] the
found objects or objects

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from Rauschenberg's bed.

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There's something incredibly personal,

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but also absurdist here.

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That's why Johnson and Rauschenberg

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are sometimes referred to as Neo-Dadist,

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because they picked up the mantle,

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the flag of people like Duchamp,

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who are interested in
irony, in playfulness,

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in a reprising of ideas,
and reconstructing

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of a vocabulary of meaning.

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Voiceover: Well, it is
true that Duchamp took on

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the tradition of Western
art and all its seriousness

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and high-mindedness.

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I can see that here with the Rauschenberg

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in that commenting on the
sincerity and seriousness

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of abstract expressionism.

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(lively piano music)