"Life Can’t Be Stopped" at the Guggenheim Museum, or Rauschenberg @ 100

By MIKE MAIZELS October 30th, 2025

“In  effect,  our  century  represents  The  Great  Median  Strip  running  down  the  center  of  human  history.”—Kenneth Boulding, 1966

On October 10, the Guggenheim opened “Life Can’t Be Stopped,” a small exhibition marking the 100th birthday of artist Robert Rauschenberg. The show admirably lite-steps through otherwise ponderous stretches of historical time—from postwar to post industrial and beyond. Dance is one kind of endogenous metaphor, signals propagation another. For a one-room exhibition—albeit a large room—it really does pack in a lot. 

The centerpiece is the mural-sized Barge (1963), a massive, tour de force of screenprint that sits somehow perfectly between Picasso’s Guernica and Rosenquist’s F-111.  Black and white scatter aesthetics and the fascination with mid century rocketry on mural scale. The sprawling canvas contains numerous iconographic finds for the Rauschenberg aficionado—recycling or presaging imagery that recurs in well know works including Retroactive, Pelican, Breakthrough, and the EAT performances. Barge was executed in a ferocious 24 hour burst at the behest of CBS News and, perhaps, helped pave the way for Bob’s historic Golden Lion award in 1964. The timing, and proximity to Peggy Guggenheim, must not have hurt.

Barge, 1962–63, Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 6 feet 8 1/4 inches x 32 feet 2 inches (203.9 x 980.4 cm), © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Barge is flanked by a number of other compelling works stretching through the arc of Rauschenberg ’s career. Untitled (Red) attends to his early-’50s encounters with Josef Albers at Black Mountain. Red, Rauschenberg is supposed to have quipped, was difficult to work with.  The piece invokes an immanent alternative to New York School abstraction—a Barnett Newman left out in the rain. Across from Untitled, a suite of transfer prints present Rauschenberg’s technical evolution, from the makeshift pen-and-newspaper rubbings of his early days to his use of eco-conscious solvents in the 1970s. That later environmental turn is the subject of Handle with Care, a concurrent centenary exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. The Guggenheim show then pulls forward into the 1980s. Red oxide returns to encrust newspaper collages with traces of stock market movement and athletic prowess frozen in time.  Around this moment, Rauschenberg enjoyed a solo exhibition in rapidly liberalizing China—a first among living Western artists. Somehow Bob became again an ambassador of feedforward change twenty years on from Barge, no mean feat.

Untitled (Red Painting), ca. 1953, Oil, fabric, and newspaper on canvas, with wood, 79 x 33 1/8 inches (200.7 x 84.1 cm), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Walter K. Gutman, 1963, © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
 

Finally the show loops back in time to the open of Guggenheim’s branch in Bilbao, as Barge has historically served as a visual anchor at the Spanish museum since its opening in 1997. The Bilbao-90s moment is also captured in uncommonly sentimental screen-print collage made out of images Rauschenberg snapped on his visit to the installation.  He again appears on the wave crest of what Rosalind Krauss would denounce as the "The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum”—a postindustrial site (falsely?) revivified as a globalist-cosmopolitan no place. Simpler worries for simpler times that a global museum might open in a working class town. A catalyst to reflect on how much have changed since the anxieties of “late capitalism” or “post capitalism” were articulated before the advent of at-home internet.

Barge’s significance may belong to history, but its meaning is irrevocably about the moment of its own making. Namely, the oversize work represents an of apotheosis of what critic Leo Steinberg cited as Rauschneberg’s key pictorial and conceptual innovation—jettisoning the centuries-old tradition of painting as window and instead reconceptualizing the canvas as a “flatbed picture plane.” Painting not as a hole or transparent membrane, but an opaque surface onto which the world would imprint its content.  For both Steinberg and Rauschenberg, the immanence of material mixed with techno-fascination around signals encoding—the FBPP was a “receptor surface on which objects are scattered” as well as one “on which data is entered.” A neutral substrate on which the world was supposed to register its information, marked by indexicality and shot through with electrical signal. The concept has been explored at length by me and by numerous others.  It thinks like “pervasive computing,” but acts like a vacuum tube.  Its ostensibly anti-museological, but it is always is a step beyond time.

If Rauschenberg has been a harbinger, it may often appear that the ideas raised by his early works—intermedia in every possible conception—have become so pervasively absorbed as to have become ubiquitous. Referencing his own frustration with the ubiquity of one kind of Abstract thinking, founding MoMA director Alfred Barr is recorded as having asked an esteemed art world panel in 1958,  “I look forward to a rebellion, but I don't see it. Am I blind or does it exist?” In the audience that night was the not-yet successful dealer Leo Castelli, who was poised to open sequential shows of Rauschenberg and his close collaborator Jasper Johns over the next several months. With vision, passion, and a dose of inadvertent, morally questionable financial engineering, Castelli enframed Rauschenberg and Johns as the next turn of the art historical screw, catapulting these relative unknowns into the stratosphere of the global avant-garde. One can ask again about what comes next, and look once again to Rauschenberg for clues.  The most interesting signals of the future, he might remind us, live in the interstices between the experimental arts and forward-looking engineering.

Happy birthday Bob, and kudos to curators Joan Young and Tracey Bashkoff on a sterling little show. WM