(lively piano music)
Voiceover: We're on the 4th floor
of the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
and we're looking at Robert Rauschenberg's, "Bed."
This is a combine, not quite a sculpture,
not quite a painting, from 1955.
Voiceover: So, combine means a combination
of painting and sculpture?
Voiceover: Well, Johns and Rauschenberg
were actually thinking about their art
as between art and life,
and what is that narrow space between the two?
Voiceover: Instead of thinking about it
between painting and sculpture between these two things
that symbolize fine art in the grand tradition,
inserting life into that conversation.
Voiceover: Life and wit.
What we're looking at is, in fact, the stuff of a real bed.
We're looking at a real pillow.
We're looking at a real pillowcase,
and a handmade quilted blanket, sheets,
but if you look closely, you're also seeing pencil and paint.
Of course, all of this has been taken out
of the horizontal where you could lie down on this,
and put up on the wall.
Voiceover: I'm reminded of Pollock,
of Pollock painting on the floor,
and then those pieces of canvas being picked up
and put on the walls of a museum or a gallery.
The other way I'm reminded of Pollock
is in all the drips that we're seeing here.
Voiceover: This is a reference
that Rauschenberg wanted you to come to.
Voiceover: The Pollocks are just 5 years old,
the great drip paintings.
Voiceover: That's exactly right.
This artist wanted you to be thinking about Pollock.
This is really a confrontation with Pollock,
with abstract expressionism broadly.
That was the dominant contemporary art
of this moment in 1955.
Pollock would die the following year.
Voiceover: When I think about abstract expressionism,
I think about the personal subjective experience
of the artist on the canvas.
I guess it makes sense to me that this is a bed,
a place of our unconscious, of our dreams.
Voiceover: I think it's also tongue-in-cheek.
This notion that the abstract expressionist canvas
was somehow the manifestation of the internal state
of the artist.
Rauschenberg is saying, "You really believe that?
"Well let me give you the actual arena of the dream.
"I'm going to give you my bed."
Voiceover: So, you think he's making fun in a way?
Voiceover: Absolutely.
Art historians sometimes talked
about the kind of Oedipal relationship
between Rauschenberg or younger artists,
and the abstract expressionists that he was friends with at this time.
Voiceover: That makes this a kind of in-joke.
Voiceover: 1955, in the work of people like Johns and Rauschenberg,
is the moment when art moves from being modernist
in its sincerity to a kind of post-modern attitude
that is responsive and that is self-aware,
a kind of hyper self-awareness.
Voiceover: We could understand that as a switch
between modernism to post-modernism.
Voiceover: Or sincerity to irony.
Voiceover: It is true that when I think
about abstract expressionism, there is this attempt
by each of those artists, Newman, Pollock,
Rothko, Motherwell, the great artists
of the abstract expressionist movement,
each one of them has a very distinctive, individual style.
You can't say that there's an abstract expressionist style
because it's completely dependent on the individual.
There is that idea that the painting
is this manifestation of their personality, their psyche.
Voiceover: What happens here,
is we have an artist who is self-consciously imitating
that idea of the authentic.
If you look closely, the drip had become, by 1955,
almost a kind of emblem of the authentic experience
of the authentic moment.
Here, that is being replicated.
There's a kind of irony that's built into it.
I think of stepping back from buying that notion
that art can be this true internal thing.
Voiceover: By virtue of copying
what is supposed to be someone else's individual style,
there is a kind of irony, a kind of self-consciousness there,
a kind of adopting for another purpose.
Voiceover: But then, all of this
is [laid over] the found objects or objects
from Rauschenberg's bed.
There's something incredibly personal,
but also absurdist here.
That's why Johnson and Rauschenberg
are sometimes referred to as Neo-Dadist,
because they picked up the mantle,
the flag of people like Duchamp,
who are interested in irony, in playfulness,
in a reprising of ideas, and reconstructing
of a vocabulary of meaning.
Voiceover: Well, it is true that Duchamp took on
the tradition of Western art and all its seriousness
and high-mindedness.
I can see that here with the Rauschenberg
in that commenting on the sincerity and seriousness
of abstract expressionism.
(lively piano music)