To stay ahead of the pack, you’ve got to keep moving. Taste doesn’t matter to you, because taste is what people who watch care about. All you can say with certainty about Robert Rauschenberg is that he was avant-garde – he has had too many different ideas to be able to skewer him – and the first retrospective since his death in 2008, at the Tate Modern (on until April 2), compresses these with ability and care.
We see the White Paintings, the Black Paintings, remnants of the first-ever art “happening” (which Rauschenberg organised with John Cage), his exuberant postmodern silkscreens, his sculpture-painting combines, and a large mud bath, which reacts to noise by bubbling. This, again, was part of one of his ground-breaking, hi-tech happenings, when full-sized tennis games would be synced to sensors and infra-red, in front of 2,500 people in autumnal New York in 1966.
