Rauschenberg, Viewed in ‘Transparency,’ Is Clearly Dated

It’s funny how the more technologically advanced a work of art may have seemed in its day, the more dated it appears once its moment has passed.

This cultural truism hangs like a wet blanket over “Rauschenberg in Transparency,” at the Orange County Museum of Art, a decades-spanning sampler of Robert Rauschenberg’s “multiples” (objects produced in a limited edition), drawn from various collections, including the artist’s and the museum’s.

Rauschenberg’s work from the ‘50s and ‘60s--including mixed-media paintings, assemblages and experimental performances--offered a radically new way of being contemporary. Into an art world dominated by the pieties of Abstract Expressionist painting, he brashly introduced bits and pieces of real stuff--most famously, a stuffed goat wearing an old tire (“Monogram”).

This approach worked splendidly with castoff objects and silk-screened topical imagery from magazines. But the mechanical projects from the mid-’60s--part of a collaboration with engineers from Bell Labs in Princeton, N.J., known as “Experiments in Art and Technology”--are another story.

At the touch of a switch, five large motorized plexiglass disks silk-screened with various “found” images and mounted in a metal base are designed to rotate, either in tandem or singly. As they blur past one another, the disks are supposed to suggest an almost cinematic flow of visual information.

For eyes accustomed to the warp speed of commercial videos, though, the net effect of “Revolver” is decidedly underwhelming. The switches are large and clunky; the motors make a laborious, chugging sound, and the imagery moves at a glacial crawl. The antique “technology” nearly overwhelms the imagery.

The floating images--a detail from Ingres’ painting “Turkish Bath,” double views of a tennis player, an archer drawing his bow, a bicycle wheel--are related in dreamily elliptical ways. There is no left-brain logic at work here; the works operate on an intuitive level akin to the way notes and rhythms fit together in free jazz.

The museum has posted “do not touch” signs next to all but one of the other Rauschenberg pieces in the show, which apparently are too fragile to withstand a hands-on assault by casual viewers.

This edict turns “Shades”--Rauschenberg’s pioneering multiple from 1964, housed in a wooden box on a tripod that somewhat resembles an old-fashioned view camera--into more of a dinosaur than it is. The small, murky images on the six small plexiglass panels, which you are supposed to be able to pick up and rearrange, are all but unreadable.

The museum’s hands-off policy has less impact on Rauschenberg’s airy “Sling-Shots Lit” series from the mid-’80s. Fluorescent light boxes are covered by transparent sheets of Mylar attached to pulleys. These fanciful “window shades” are imprinted with photographic images linked by the vagaries of the artist’s imagination.

In “Sling-Shots Lit No. 1,” a pair of floating ice cream cones resonate with the same fleeting, off-duty pleasure of a stork poised in front of a languid ocean view. A splash of punk graffiti on an old sign urges, “Come take a holiday with the Holidays.”

An image of a window grille fancifully “mended” with awkwardly woven bits of rope relates visually to the finely etched patterns of dry tree branches against the sky. A piece of coastal hardware bristling with pipes and bolts begins to look almost like a barnacled sea creature; an almost invisible embroidery pattern links up formally with the fraying rope in the window and the tree.

In these deftly crafted pieces, transparency is no longer a cumbersome tool but simply a visual equivalent for the drifting images that layer and blur in our minds.

* “Rauschenberg in Transparency,” through April 18 at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. $5 adults, $4 students and seniors, free for children younger than 16. (949) 759-1122.