The Death and Life of a Creative Genius

Posted by Polly - May 15th, 2008

Yesterday’s papers were full of obituaries and essays exalting the life and work of artist Robert Rauschenberg, who died on Monday. Rauschenberg has been called pioneering, prolific, protean—and is universally considered one of the art world’s most important innovators. It’s his resonance beyond the art world—and his relevance to anyone who aspires to bountiful, joyful, sustainable success in his or her work—that I’d like to pay my respects to here. In addition to leaving behind a monumental body of work (the Guggenheim mounted its largest exhibition ever with 400 works for his 1998 retrospective), Rauschenberg’s approach to that work offers up some profound lessons for innovators and artists of all stripes. Here are just three:

Boundarylessness

That may not be a word, but Rauschenberg was a virtuoso practitioner. Rauschenberg wasn’t locked in by the categories that constrain so many of us—career, profession, industry, medium. Instead, he imagined for himself a playing field with no boundaries. He was at once a painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, theater designer, choreographer, performer, and engineer—and his work in each realm pushed at the established borders.

He is probably most famous for his “Combines”—the act and result of finding and combining an array of elements. His “Monogram” (1959) combined a stuffed angora goat, a police barrier, a shoe heel, a tennis ball, and paint. But perhaps his greatest boundary-crossing feat (and his greatest gift to the world) was to, as he put it “work in the gap between art and life.” Famed art critic Robert Hughes puts it better than I could. He calls Rauschenberg “a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art. [He] didn’t give a fig for consistency, or curating his reputation; his taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman.”

That approach to work certainly won Rauschenberg acclaim and financial reward (he’s the only artist to win both the grand prize at the Venice Biennale and a Grammy—for his album design of the Talking Heads’ “Speaking in Tongues”), but it also afforded him the ultimate richness: to be truly awake in the world. As he put it, late in his life: “I’m curious. It’s very rewarding. I’m still discovering things every day.”

Fearless Experimentation

It’s no secret that experimentation (and the failure that goes along with it) is at the core of innovation. While we’ve all probably absorbed the maxims—”fail faster to succeed sooner” or “let 1000 flowers bloom”—few of us have cultivated the insatiable appetite for experimentation that Rauschenberg considered his true work (the art itself, he said, was more like “souvenirs of creation”). Dig a little bit into his story and it’s hard not to be infected and inspired by his adventurous avidity for trying new things—from kinetic sculptures to composing (he was both artistic director of Merce Cunningham’s dance company for years and a collaborator with John Cage).

But it seems Rauschenberg wasn’t just fueled by some inner light—he was propelled by diverse and deep collaborations with everyone from stage performers to engineers. At one point, he founded a collective called E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) to match up artists, scientists and engineers. Most of all, he had the ability to look upon mistakes and failures as a gift: “Screwing up is a virtue,” he said. “Being correct is never the point. . . Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” And that’s a lesson for all of us: productivity and genuine good-humor toward our inevitable stumbles, rather than a particular talent, puts us on the path toward success (and may in fact be the definition of success itself).

Generosity of Spirit

We tend to think of great artists as obsessive, in the grips of a vision that separates them from the world. Rauschenberg, on the other hand seemed to see a world outside his art—or his art as a way of connecting with and changing the world. Not only was he quite generous when it came to spreading his wealth around, his work was increasingly about spreading the rewards of art around. He funded a major exhibition of his works in China (the first show by and American artist there) and conceived of a world tour called ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange) in which he traveled around the world, created collaborative works with people in places like Tibet and Cuba, and exchanged art from one culture to the next.

While few of us will walk out of this life with a body of work like Rauschenberg’s to represent us, we all can aspire to follow the principles he practiced.

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