The second historical anchor for In the Making has been Robert Rauschenberg’s collaborative practice, which famously included assistants and friends Dorothea Rockburne and Brice Marden. On view in the exhibition were examples of Rauschenberg’s works from the Tablet series, comprising spare sheets of paper embossed atop cardboard, evoking the textured surfaces of nearby works by Rockburne and Marden. During a period when Rockburne was completing a body of process-based works made from chipboard stained with crude oil, her own assistant was Carroll Dunham, whose early paintings employed different types of industrial wood as support that, in their material investigations, harken back to this period. Examples from both bodies of work by Rockburne and Dunham were shown there.
While some of the connections traced by In the Making are familiar, others have been less known. Seen together, the constellations of artworks and individuals suggested possible channels of influence, collaboration, and convergence.
They raised questions about authorship and aura, and the sacredness of “the artist’s hand”. Considering the 15th century example of the head of an angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (1472-1475) that was famously painted by his workshop prodigy Leonardo da Vinci, we ask ourselves, does it change our understanding and appreciation of a contemporary artwork if we know that it was executed by an assistant whose own independent work we have come to associate with an altogether different approach? How do different notions of craft and technical execution stand in relation to artistic vision? And how do we chart directions and echoes of influence within the artist-and-assistant network?
Among other highlights of In the Making was a photograph from Cindy Sherman’s Disasters and Fairytales series, featuring an inflated doll as an object hovering between the animate and the inanimate. This little known work inspired a new sculpture with surrealist underpinning by artist Margaret Lee, who has served as Sherman’s longtime assistant. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Robert Gober’s “dumb” piece of Plywood – a handmade object laboriously crafted to imitate a commercially available readymade – appeared next to a stack of chairs by former Gober assistant Banks Violette. Cast in salt, Violette’s chairs continued the investigation into the potential for affect in everyday objects. Meanwhile, Urs Fischer’s installation of body orifices suspended from the ceiling, presented there for the first time in New York, received a surprising digital extension in a new work by Darren Bader, Fischer’s former assistant and sometimes collaborator.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1987-91. Chromogenic color print, 31 ½ x 41 n. Edition of 6.
Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures and Luxembourg & Dayan, New York.
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