There isn’t much new I expected to learn from a commercial excavation of an artist as thoroughly researched as the father of Neo-Dadaism Rauschenberg. This framing of his exhibition travels to cultural foes like Mexico, Venezuela, China, Japan, the Soviet Union, and East Germany in the 1980s, however, had me surprised. The project known as the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange and endearingly abbreviated to “Rocky” after the artist’s pet turtle outs Rauschenberg as a propagandist if not an outright Fed.
I happened to visit the gallery as one of its sales staff showered the work with adjectives for the benefit of a collector from one of these “alien but same” cultures. The American’s travel to politically “hostile” territories was “brave”. His wall assembly of Cuban cardboard boxes was “beautiful” and “profound” in a way only a child of American democracy could aspire to. That a visit to Tibet gave rise to a series of sculptures made of detritus was “remarkable”. Above all, Rauschenberg’s belief in the power of art to overcome division was “commendably unwavering”.
It is no secret that the CIA supported American Abstract Expressionism at the height of the Cold War. That celebrating art’s complicity with regime propagation decades later would be profitable will need a future historian to untangle.
