‘Art + Art = Art’: The Walker Art Center Presents Representation Through Combination

Art is, at its core, about combination: a painter combines red pigment with yellow pigment and creates the color that gives poets nightmares; he combines pigment with canvas to create images that give art students headaches; and he combines talent with skill to create re-workings that give himself conniption fits.

One artist most associated with combination art — his most famous pieces are called “combines” — is Robert Rauschenberg. Herr Rauschenberg’s résumé is the combination of painting, sculpting, photography, printmaking, papermaking and — sure, why not? — performance. Working in so many disciplines makes art-combining nearly a foregone conclusion.

His work has been alternately described as “Neo-Dadist” and “Abstract Expressionism” … which is the experts’ way of saying, “We have no idea what to call this guy’s stuff, but it’s definitely art.”

Rauschenberg himself stated that “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.” 

He died in 2008, aged 82 years. But his work, his one-piece-of-this-and-one-part-of-that work, lives on.

Perhaps his most memorable, his most insistent, his most immortal combination will be visiting Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in the very near future. “Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy” is … well, it’s a combination — it’s lots of things, all at the same time.

“Glacial Decoy” is, as described on the Walker’s website, an “iconic dancework,” one that, like many improbable combinations, might seem a little jarring upon first experiencing it. This may be because, in this instance, Rauschenberg is not just combining one medium with another; he’s combining his art with that of another artist, as well.

The choreography of “Glacial Decoy” was provided by the equally iconic late Trisha Brown, whose body of work is remembered by experts as “post-modern dancing.”

That’s an especially effective description when one realizes that, as the Walker website puts it, “‘Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy’ pays homage to the original 1979 dance, which debuted at the Walker,” commingling the past with the present.

The most notable element of “Glacial Decoy” is composed of four dancers, moving across the proscenium like the confused ghosts of acrobats. Second most notable is the performance’s sound, composed wholly of the claps and stomps of the dancers whose movements are free of music … because the stage is free of music, a combination through attrition.

The white, amorphous costumes worn by the dancers, which contribute to the surreality of the whole experience, were designed by Rauschenberg.

Less surreally, Rauschenberg designed the set where the dancers (more or less) soundlessly ply their trade.

The most notable part of this set is composed of four tall canvases, each of which features the projection of a black-and-white photograph taken by Rauschenberg specifically for this challenging exhibit: one screen shows a close-up of a truck tire, waiting to be called to work; this dissolves into the long shot image of four horses grazing behind a fence; these turn into a nondescript building that turns into a nondescript woods that turns into a nondescript lawn with three adjacent screens enduring similarly-constant, similarly-mundane transformations.

All of this is intended as mere background for the dancers who change their body positions on a similar scale, a forward step becoming a backward step, becoming a twirl, becoming an exit, becoming an entrance. 

As the website puts it, “Anchoring both the dance and this exhibition is a projection of the 159 unique photographs Rauschenberg created to accompany Brown’s choreography.” 

In other words, by designing both the costumes and the set, Rauschenberg is combining the surreal with the real.

Reviving “Glacial Decoy” is part of a larger celebration that recognizes Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday. Perhaps most relevant to the Twin Cities’ 2025 celebration of Pride, Robert Rauschenberg was a kind of way-paver for the Pop Art movement, whose movers, in addition to expanding creative boundaries, also resisted and defied social boundaries.

In those days when the love that dare not speak its name really didn’t speak its name, Robert Rauschenberg was as openly gay as anyone could be. He was in an unapologetic relationship with contemporary painter Jasper Johns, and his work would frequently include and display gay themes — sometimes coded, often shouted.

Even the name of the work, “Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy,”combines two combinations — that of artists and arts … but thanks to the Walker Art Center re-presenting the work to the Twin Cities, the most vital combination is enabled — that of art and audience.

walkerart.org/calendar/2025/trisha-brown-and-robert-rauschenberg-glacial-decoy/
Walker Art Center
Medtronic Gallery
June 26, 2025 to May 24, 2026