Rauschenberg Rewrites the Playbook

SFMOMA closes out 2017 with a bang in one of its best shows of the year. "Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules," a retrospective enthralling not least for its astonishing variety, covers six decades of the prodigious, free-ranging career of the iconoclastic gay artist whose body of work has been called "the visual equivalent of the great American novel." An experimental, out-of-the-box painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer and graphic artist, he had a fondness for reconfigured contraptions and a zeal for collaboration. Dancers and choreographers like Merce Cunningham, composer/chance master John Cage, visual artist Jasper Johns, who was also one of his lovers, and assorted musicians, scientists and engineers were among those who fueled the creative energy of this sociable man who had a fine-tuned sensitivity to his environment in every sense of that word.

An omnivorous, innovative manipulator of images, Rauschenberg charted his own path forward after Abstract Expressionism with an adventurous use of materials, an inclination towards found objects, interactivity and new technologies before any of the above were in vogue, and an ability to digest just about everything, which makes his work, even from the 1950s and 60s, startlingly current.

The show of 150 objects in an array of media, enhanced by illuminating text that doesn't overpower the visual or intellectual experience of the art, is impeccably laid out and thought through by SFMOMA's superfine Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture Gary Garrels and co-organizer Sarah Roberts. (The artist, who died in 2008, had a long, fruitful relationship with the museum, dating back to the mid-1970s.)

Everywhere one looks there's something that catches the eye or piques the imagination, starting in one of the first galleries, where one finds a glass cabinet of curios containing memento boxes with stone talismans, fragments of frescoes and feathers; "Elemental Sculptures" of rocks tethered to metal rope slings that could be hurled by a medieval catapult; "Dirt Painting" (for John Cage, 1953), in which a generous dollop of mold and dirt is wedged into a wooden casing for posterity; and on a nearby wall, "Untitled (Gold Painting)" (1953), where crinkled metallic papers, housed in a handmade wood frame, form their own topographical map. Just across the room: "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (1953), a delicate, pivotal work with a back-story. After requesting a finished drawing from Willem de Kooning and making a persuasive case for his intentions, Rauschenberg erased it many times, leaving behind a faint ghost of the original work framed in gold. After some time spent out of view, it ignited the art world. The impact of the piece, regarded as the birth of the conceptual gesture, lay in the thoughts it provoked in the minds of viewers rather than what they actually saw.

During this productive early period - and what period wasn't? - the artist crumpled newspaper clippings and painted over them in black. Later, in two tactile, richly textured, rectangular works, literally ripped from the headlines, he added textiles and layers of gooey, lugubrious reds. "Shades" (1964), an unorthodox venture into bookmaking, arrived a decade later. An antiquated 3-D portable library in a terrarium-like frame that's lit from behind, the piece utilized Plexiglas "pages" with inky images from discarded New York Times printing plates.

Never short on humor, Rauschenberg bought a stuffed angora goat for $15, lodged a tire around its middle, and stationed it on collaged wooden blocks ("Monogram," 1955-59). How the tire came to be there and the work's meaning remain a matter of speculation, but the paint smudges on the subject's bewildered face suggest it took a nose dive into drip painting. It holds court in the same space as "Collection" (1954/55) and "Charlene" (1954), exhibited together for the first time in 40 years. These early "Combines," works of wildly colored controlled chaos that broke down barriers between painting and sculpture, were laced with street detritus, found photographs and veiled references to gay culture - or in the case of the erotic hybrid "Bed" (1955), an undisguised allusion to his love affair with artist Cy Twombly.

Rauschenberg's door was always open to new collaborators, and having a pulse wasn't a requirement. At a time when he was looking to prove himself as a serious commodity on the New York art scene, he produced a series of 34 illustrations based on Dante's "Inferno," one for each canto (1958-60). Irritated by the homophobic implications of "Punishment for the Sodomites," a section where the condemned are forced to walk through a rain of fire on scalding sands at the bottom of the seventh circle of hell, the artist registered his displeasure by including an outline of his toes in red crayon.

A prescient and wily fuser of art and technology, his five-part, found metal assemblage "Oracle" (1962-65) qualifies as his first technological artwork. The components of this dystopian auto-body graveyard - a detached car door mounted on a typewriter table, a sooty gray exhaust pipe on pushcart wheels - are embedded with radios. But if you're shopping for a torture device that can double as a surefire crowd-pleaser, "Mud Muse" (1968-71) is just the ticket. Working with a team from Teledyne, Rauschenberg engineered a huge cauldron with thousands of pounds of bubbling mud the color of split-pea soup; when activated by a sound recording, it erupts like the Old Faithful geyser.

And let us not forget the zippy "Money Thrower," a diminutive mascot Rauschenberg designed for kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely's 1960 event "Homage to New York." The small Rube Goldbergesque machine, a battered electric heater sporting second-hand coiled springs, spit silver dollars into the air with the aid of gunpowder, which is always handy to have around.

Take your time. Go twice. Have a ball.

Through March 25