Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]

O’Hara had turned a tabloid celebrity drama into a poem. 

By 1962 O’Hara was not a big fan of Lowell’s work. He read the Lana Turner poem at the reading, telling the audience that he had written on the trip there. The audience  loved it.

Lowell, however, did not like being upstaged by the stunt. When it was his turn to read he told the audience that he was sorry he had not written a poem on his way to the reading and that the poems he would read had taken more time to write. 

I’m pairing this poem with work by Robert Rauschenbrg. Rauschenberg was a friend and O’Hara – as an art critic and MoMA curator – had supported his work. He even wrote a poem for him.  This week I went to MoMA to see the exhibit that’s there until September 17 – Robert Rauschenberg:Among Friends.

The introduction to the exhibit includes this 1959 quotation from the artist’:

 Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)

I have no idea what that means – perhaps it too was intended as a spoof – but I rather like what follows;

My whole area of art has always been addressed to working with other people. Ideas are not real estate.

It’s a terrific exhibit and that interdisciplinary spirit of collaboration – working with others, sharing, sampling and borrowing from them – is on full display.

Rauschenberg was a painter, printmaker, photographer, collagist, sculptor, theater designer, performance artist, and technologist but what he was above all was a collaborator. It’s as if Rauschenberg was in constant conversation with other artists and with ideas and as well as with materials and artistic techniques. It’s clear he was a relentless innovator who thrived on the art of combining disparate materials, genres and creating relationships between and among them that were fresh, often startling and always inventive.

Rauschenberg invented his life as a stark contrast to his upbringing. He even invented his first name. His fundamentalist parents had named him Milton. When he was demobbed from the army he returned to Port Arthur, but – without telling him – his family had moved 120 miles away to Louisiana.

Rauschenberg headed to California where he worked as a shipping clerk at the Ballerina Bathing Suit factory. Pat Pearman, who worked there as a designer, told him, “Do you know why you are so unhappy? You’re really an artist.” She suggested art school on the G.I. Bill. Rauschenberg applied to the Kansas City Art Institute and was accepted. It was there that he decided on his new name, Bob.

The works on display reveal a persistent putting of one thing with another; trying of new techniques and adding just one more object, idea or image to a full repertoire. Like T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland Rauschenberg moves fluidly from high seriousness to the mundane.

Poet John Ashbery was also a friend and supporter as well as a fellow collagist. What Ashbery does with words, Rauschenberg does with anything he could lay his hands on. The exhibit shows an artist who was endlessly open to new ideas and curious about the world.

And like Ashbery – and O’Hara in Lana Turner – Rauschenberg was drawn to reflecting on popular culture and incorporating it in his work.  He escaped from the same Texas town – Port Arthur – as Janis Joplin so it was not surprising to see her image included in Signs.

So many wonderful pieces it seems idle to choose just a few but I did particularly love Hiccups, 1978.  It’s 97 sheets of handmade paper with lithographed images taken from popular magazines. They are connected by zippers and the work can be assembled in any order, like a pop bead necklace. The museum card suggests that the idea for zippers may have come from his work at the bathing suit company.

Below are a few strips from the work that stretches along two walls of the gallery.  The featured image is from Sor Aqua (Venetian) 1973

A quick postscript to the poem after a news item I saw today, June 3rd: