Robert Rauschenberg • James Macdonell and the Problem of Making Sense

 Robert Rauschenberg photo by Richard ‘Dickie’ Landry

By MARK LEAVENS February 5th, 2026

Art criticism tries to define an artwork’s movement, lineage, and history, yet some practices resist this by intentionally avoiding a stable definition. Rauschenberg and Macdonell’s work belong here, calling for attention to process: how meaning forms, slips, and reforms over time. Considering them together highlights a shared commitment to thinking through experience without resolving it into doctrine, nor equivalence or influence.

Rauschenberg’s legacy is clear: he dismantled the limits of modernism. Macdonell’s work responds in the expanded space Rauschenberg created, but rather than simply extending his project, Macdonell tests its resilience under new pressures. Rauschenberg turns outward to inclusion and openness. Macdonell turns inward, focusing on memory and endurance. The difference lies in time and ethics, not just style.

James Macdonell photo by Jameson Stokes

Rauschenberg and the Refusal of Mastery

Rauschenberg’s early work displays deep skepticism toward mastery as an artistic value. The White Paintings of the 1950s, often misread as empty, function as devices for attentiveness. They register ambient conditions —light, shadow, dust, viewers—but do not turn them into expressive content. The artist’s agency recedes, not from absence, but by being shared. The work avoids finality.

This refusal shows in the Black and Red Paintings. These works use found materials and body traces. They break the idea that painting is just an inner expression. Instead, painting becomes a meeting place for different forces, without trying to unify them.

The Combines extend this idea. Rauschenberg doesn’t absorb objects into painterly illusion; he lets them remain themselves. A bed stays a bed, a tire a tire, a goat a goat. The work asks for tolerance of proximity, not for decoding symbolism. Meaning arises from adjacency and friction, not metaphor.

What stands out is restraint, not variety. Rauschenberg does not rank his materials. He neither elevates nor demeans them. He lets them exist together with loose connections. This is not detachment; it is a choice not to force meaning.

 
Robert Rauschenberg, Viaduct, 40.5 x 29 inches, Lithograph, 1991

Openness as a Method

Rauschenberg’s oft-cited aspiration to work “in the gap between art and life” has sometimes been romanticized as a gesture of liberation. Yet the gap itself deserves scrutiny. It is not a collapse of distinction but a maintained interval. This interval acknowledges that art and life remain distinct systems. Even as they inform one another, the work occupies this interval. It neither seals itself off nor dissolves into experience.

This orientation has consequences for how Rauschenberg’s work handles time. His compositions often feel contemporary at the time of their creation, reflecting the pressures of the present moment. Newspaper clippings, photographic imagery, and mass-media references do not function as historical markers so much as indices of immediacy. The work appears to operate in real time, absorbing information as it circulates.

This immediacy does not bring clarity. Instead, Rauschenberg’s works feel full to the point of overload. Images hide, overlap, and break into each other. The viewer is not led to a single answer but is faced with many questions. The work shows that modern life is layered and unfinished.

This unresolved state is not a failure but a refusal of false coherence. Rauschenberg’s openness is a method, not just expression. It values freedom as responsiveness rather than self-expression.

James Macdonell, Campus, 48 x 38 in. Mixed Media Mounted on Aluminum, 2016

Macdonell and the Weight of Duration

James Macdonell’s work uses related strategies: assemblage, layering, and found materials. Yet the effect is markedly different. Rauschenberg’s materials retain immediacy and freshness; Macdonell’s carry the weight of time, arriving marked by use and erosion. This contrast highlights their different temporal weights.

Macdonell’s surfaces reveal themselves through accumulation. Layers of wood, metal, photo fragments, and pigment appear embedded, not applied. Images surface partly, often obscured. This partial visibility isn’t decoration; it expresses memory’s instability.

Unlike Rauschenberg, Macdonell does not seem interested in simultaneity. His work does not present multiple moments at once so much as multiple moments compressed into a single moment. Time in Macdonell’s work is sedimentary. Past events do not disappear; they settle, leaving traces that continue to exert pressure.

Macdonell’s motifs—boats, ladders, architecture—suggest movement, but not arrival. They act as metaphors for passage, not narrative devices. The work admits transition without promising resolution.

 Robert Rauschenberg, Lily Scent, 32 x 24 inches, Lithograph, 1981

Assemblage as Ethical Labor

Both artists use assemblage, but their aims diverge. Rauschenberg uses it to establish equivalence; Macdonell, for reckoning. Macdonell chooses materials for memory and loss, not neutrality.

Macdonell’s work does not praise how much is available but focuses on how things last. Objects do not just fill space. They show what occurred. This is not a story, but it is built into the work. The art admits that experience leaves traces that do not fully fit in.

Macdonell shifts the assemblage from the inclusion of everything to taking responsibility. The issue is not whether art takes in life, but whether it can hold what resists being taken in.

Silence, Restraint, and the Limits of Openness

A major difference between Rauschenberg and Macdonell is the density of their art. Rauschenberg often creates crowded, busy surfaces. Macdonell is more restrained. His works are not minimal but use quieter, inward energy. This shows the abundance of Rauschenberg compared to Macdonell’s quieter style.

Silence matters in Macdonell’s work. Obscured areas are active, not blank. They slow down how we look, stopping quick understanding. This patience sets Macdonell apart from more instant assemblage.

This difference marks a broader shift in openness within their practices. For Rauschenberg, openness is expansive and inclusive. For Macdonell, it is vulnerable, highlighting what cannot be absorbed. This clarifies the contrast between outward expansion and careful containment.

Influence Without Resolution

Any attempt to discuss Macdonell’s work in relation to Rauschenberg must confront the problem of influence. Influence implies directionality and hierarchy. Yet Macdonell’s work resists reduction to derivation. His practice does not replicate Rauschenberg’s strategies. Instead, it interrogates their consequences.

If Rauschenberg demonstrates that art can include the world, Macdonell asks what happens after that inclusion. What remains unresolved? What persists as residue? What demands care rather than openness?

These questions do not negate Rauschenberg’s achievement. They depend upon it. Yet they mark a shift from expansion to endurance—from the opening of the field to the labor of inhabiting it.

James Macdonell, Tarp, 44 X 32 in. Mixed Media, 2018

Two Temporalities

Their divergence is best understood as one of temporality, not intention. Rauschenberg aligns with an era of expansion, his openness reflecting confidence in circulation and exchange.

Macdonell’s work emerges within a different condition. It is marked by fragmentation, loss, and historical saturation. His practice reflects an awareness that expansion has consequences. Inclusion alone does not resolve meaning.

This shift does not render Rauschenberg’s work obsolete. On the contrary, it underscores its continued relevance. Yet it also reveals the limits of openness as a singular value. Macdonell’s work suggests that art must also attend to what resists circulation. It must address what remains heavy, unresolved, and difficult to hold.

Robert Rauschenberg, Features XX, 102 x 102cm, Screenprint, 1970

Meaning as a Provisional State

Both Rauschenberg and Macdonell construct works that resist interpretive closure. Yet the terms of this resistance differ. Rauschenberg’s refusal of closure affirms multiplicity. Macdonell’s refusal acknowledges fragility.

In both cases, meaning remains provisional. It is not delivered but negotiated. The viewer is not instructed; they are implicated. This implication is not merely cognitive; it is temporal. The work demands time, not to reveal a hidden message, but to register its own conditions of making.

James Macdonell, Amede, 36 x 36 in. Mixed Media on Aluminum, 2015

Conclusion: Holding Without Resolving

To consider Rauschenberg and Macdonell together is not to collapse difference but to clarify it. Their practices intersect at the level of method—through assemblage, openness, and resistance to purity, yet diverge in affect, temporality, and ethical orientation.

Rauschenberg’s art urges responsiveness to complexity; Macdonell’s demands accountability for what remains. Collectively, their work shows that art’s true task is not simplification, but enduring engagement, holding experience steady even when it is contradictory and uncertain.

Viewed together, these practices affirm art as sustained attention, a refusal to resolve or explain an experience completely, but to engage with it deeply and honestly.