ART REVIEWS : Rauschenberg: Creativity ‘on the Hoof ‘

Robert Rauschenberg’s place in history is inarguably secure, and that makes it particularly impressive that he embarked on the most ambitious project of his career at the age of 60.

Beginning in 1984, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange took the artist to 12 foreign countries where he immersed himself in the local culture, filmed and photographed whatever struck his fancy, then translated his findings into artworks often made while on the road in collaboration with local artisans. Spanning seven years and generating more than 125 artworks, the project sounds taxing enough to exhaust a 20-year-old. The eternally boyish artist cheerfully summarizes it as “a giant creative piece on the hoof.”

The entire body of work went on view last month at the National Gallery in Washington; Angelenos can get a look at a single chapter of the cultural interchange at the Pence Gallery in Santa Monica, where Rauschenberg’s visual impressions of the Soviet Union and the United States are on view. Titled “The Soviet/American Array I--IV,” the show is composed of six large, multicolored photogravures.

Rauschenberg’s work has always been informed with tremendous heart and that’s especially true of this exercise in ambassadorial good will. The inventor of the combine painting and an innovator who took the printmaking medium into uncharted territory, Rauschenberg launched his career in the ‘60s and he still honors the spirit of that era. Rauschenberg seems to have weathered the ‘80s untouched by the greed and careerism that infected the art world during that decade--perhaps because he was busy with this endearingly idealistic project. “(The cultural interchange) started with my middle-aged attitude that I have to give more to the world,” says the artist, who financed this road show by selling several pieces from his personal art collection.

The body of work that resulted from this extended ramble is varied and includes sculpture, fabric pieces, collage, combines, and pure painting. “The Soviet/American Arrays,” is primarily a photographic work and marks the first time in several years that Rauschenberg has devoted himself to photography.

In the tradition of Robert Frank, Rauschenberg’s pictures can be described as poetic photojournalism, and most of the images here are of everyday things that caught his eye in city streets. Among them: Soviet soldiers, beautifully ornate old buildings, sweatshop laborers, a slum dwelling, statues of Lenin, advertising images, drugstores, a cat on a stairway watching the world go by. The most striking thing about Rauschenberg’s visual portrait of these two countries is how remarkably alike they look.

Compositionally, these are very orderly works--the images fit together like casually assembled patchwork quilts--and they also read as hard edge geometric abstractions; superimposed over the photographs are grids of colors. The artist favors reds, purples and chartreuse, and these wild colors inject an element of vitality into black-and-white pictures that could’ve come off as drab. “The Soviet/American Array” is an engagingly empathetic body of work, however, one needs to flip through the catalogue from the cultural interchange show at the National to grasp the full sweep of Rauschenberg’s achievement with this project. It’s really quite impressive.

Also on view is a survey of drawings by L.A. artist Nelsen Valentine. One of the generation of young landscape artists that includes Joan Nelson, Mark Innerst and April Gornik, Valentine serves up an austere, post-modern version of the romantic landscape tradition.

Like Vija Celmins (who seems to be this artist’s most significant influence), Valentine zeros in on a tiny piece of nature--a patch of sky, a roiling stretch of the sea--and freeze-dries it. His pale, muted nature studies seem drained of the cathartic sense of grandeur and infinity that we associate with landscape, and what we experience instead is a feeling of self-consciousness and restraint. In these discreet views, Valentine inverts nature from the macrocosm to the microcosm; his work seems to be about the idea of nature and the way it operates in the mind’s eye, rather than how it exists.

Pence Gallery: 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; to July 6; (213) 393-0069. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Feats of Clay: Ken Price has all the components required to be a hugely successful artist. The subject of an exhibition at the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica, Price has been well connected in the art world for more than three decades (he launched his career at the legendary Ferus Gallery), and he certainly has the technical skill and the intelligence.

The only glitch in this otherwise perfect plan is that Price’s primary vehicle is clay, a material which, despite the best efforts of fine-art ceramicists like Peter Voulkos, John Mason and Ron Nagel, continues to be regarded as having a more limited range than paint and canvas. Clay is generally seen as a craftsy material for amateurs; however, in Price’s masterful hand, this earthy material is invested with complexity, subtlety and wit.

Throughout his career Price has been investigating the forms and ideas central to vessels (in fact, his best-loved body of work continues to be the asymmetrical geometric cups he began making in the ‘60s). He continues that inquiry here with a series of 20 cups and bowls decorated with images of a Southwestern city, executed in bright glazes that put one in mind of cheap souvenir pottery. Price has an extremely flamboyant sense of color (he uses pink with the fearlessness of an Avon Lady) and the network of colors that sit atop his sculptures have a life of their own. Like David Hockney, Price likes his colors hot and psychedelic.

The imagery on these vessels--middle-class homes with cars parked in the driveway, a skyline punctuated with palm trees, a cluster of skyscrapers--have the flat affectlessness of paintings by Alex Katz. These images combine with the clay forms they embellish in a very ambiguous way; the forms have a human touch and are clearly handmade, while the images are impersonal and rather cold. These conflicting currents lend the pieces a disoriented, jarring quality.

Completing the show are 10 drawings that seem to show the interiors of the buildings whose exteriors appear on the vessels. Depicting stark, luridly colored uninhabited rooms furnished with swollen easy chairs, the drawings revolve around big picture windows that look out onto an urban skyline. The city seems to pour in through those windows; and, inside and outside seem equally alienating.

James Corcoran Gallery: 1327 5th St., Santa Monica; to June 29; (213) 451-4666. Closed Sundays and Mondays.