Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 x 80 x 20.3 cm (The Museum of Modern Art) © 2013 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris & Dr. Steven Zucker

(lively piano music)

Voiceover: We're on the 4th floor

of the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

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

This is a combine, not quite a sculpture,

not quite a painting, from 1955.

Voiceover: So, combine means a combination

of painting and sculpture?

Voiceover: Well, Johns and Rauschenberg

were actually thinking about their art

as between art and life,

and what is that narrow
space between the two?

Voiceover: Instead of thinking about it

between painting and sculpture
between these two things

that symbolize fine art
in the grand tradition,

inserting life into that conversation.

Voiceover: Life and wit.

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

We're looking at a real pillow.

We're looking at a real pillowcase,

and a handmade quilted blanket, sheets,

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

Of course, all of this has been taken out

of the horizontal where
you could lie down on this,

and put up on the wall.

Voiceover: I'm reminded of Pollock,

of Pollock painting on the floor,

and then those pieces of
canvas being picked up

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

The other way I'm reminded of Pollock

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

Voiceover: This is a reference

that Rauschenberg wanted you to come to.

Voiceover: The Pollocks
are just 5 years old,

the great drip paintings.

Voiceover: That's exactly right.

This artist wanted you to
be thinking about Pollock.

This is really a
confrontation with Pollock,

with abstract expressionism broadly.

That was the dominant contemporary art

of this moment in 1955.

Pollock would die the following year.

Voiceover: When I think
about abstract expressionism,

I think about the personal
subjective experience

of the artist on the canvas.

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

a place of our unconscious, of our dreams.

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

This notion that the
abstract expressionist canvas

was somehow the manifestation
of the internal state

of the artist.

Rauschenberg is saying,
"You really believe that?

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

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

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

Voiceover: Absolutely.

Art historians sometimes talked

about the kind of Oedipal relationship

between Rauschenberg or younger artists,

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

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

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

is the moment when art
moves from being modernist

in its sincerity to a kind
of post-modern attitude

that is responsive and that is self-aware,

a kind of hyper self-awareness.

Voiceover: We could
understand that as a switch

between modernism to post-modernism.

Voiceover: Or sincerity to irony.

Voiceover: It is true that when I think

about abstract expressionism,
there is this attempt

by each of those artists, Newman, Pollock,

Rothko, Motherwell, the great artists

of the abstract expressionist movement,

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

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

because it's completely
dependent on the individual.

There is that idea that the painting

is this manifestation of their
personality, their psyche.

Voiceover: What happens here,

is we have an artist who is
self-consciously imitating

that idea of the authentic.

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

almost a kind of emblem of
the authentic experience

of the authentic moment.

Here, that is being replicated.

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

I think of stepping back
from buying that notion

that art can be this true internal thing.

Voiceover: By virtue of copying

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

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

a kind of adopting for another purpose.

Voiceover: But then, all of this

is [laid over] the
found objects or objects

from Rauschenberg's bed.

There's something incredibly personal,

but also absurdist here.

That's why Johnson and Rauschenberg

are sometimes referred to as Neo-Dadist,

because they picked up the mantle,

the flag of people like Duchamp,

who are interested in
irony, in playfulness,

in a reprising of ideas,
and reconstructing

of a vocabulary of meaning.

Voiceover: Well, it is
true that Duchamp took on

the tradition of Western
art and all its seriousness

and high-mindedness.

I can see that here with the Rauschenberg

in that commenting on the
sincerity and seriousness

of abstract expressionism.

(lively piano music)