Retread? Looking back...

A link to a bunch of assemblages by Raucschenberg....

I have not previously spent a lot of time studying Rauschenberg's work. Years ago, when I was in school, I spent some time looking at his silkscreens and mirrored surfaces when I was playing with paint and marks on mirrors and obsessing with the narrow space between a mark and its reflection in the mirror. I had put aside my mirrored work because of the very real and incredibly annoying fragility of the mirrors -- and yet, ironically, it seems a sense of fragility wants to be part of my work, regardless of the material used.

While I've known about Rauschenberg's Combines as a point of departure, I paid little attention to them until now. With the direction my work has taken, I've become more and more concerned about the line between strategy/device and gimmick and am spending time looking back at what others have done. The concern is more in the nature of differentiating from a mere retread across well-covered ground, even where a different path has brought one to that already covered ground.

My look back has taken me to Rauschenberg's assemblages, a very, very good reminder that "new" never seems to be so "new." There's a lot to study here. I have to spend more time thinking about the conceptual and visual space between and around these and Tuttle.

Today, I ran across this interesting critique by John Perreault on the Combines. The success or failure of combines, much like the success or failure of paintings, rests on the visual/conceptual integration producing something uniquely resonant and memorable, whatever media, device, strategy -- and, okay, let's degrade that to gimmick -- which includes conceptual reasons for the materials and device used and successful integration of the materials and device.