Gap Poem by gershon hepner

The gap between great art and life
we fill with our extravaganzas
that with some luck, plus a good wife,
may take us far away from Kansas
to New York, London, Tel-Aviv,
and even, sometimes, to LA,
but those in Kansas won’t forgive
that we have left them far away.

There’ll always be a Wizard there,
who’ll tell you that you should have stayed,
but it is right that you are where
his warnings may be disobeyed,
because he’s only out to clap
you in his chains. So make you life
away from him: preserve the gap
between you both––but not your wife.

Inspired by an appreciation of Robert Rauschenberg written by Barbara Rose in the WSJ on May 14,2008:

Robert Rauschenberg, whom many, including this writer, believe to be the biggest innovator in art after Jackson Pollock, died on Monday at age 82, an acknowledged hero of the avant garde. The passings of these two artists could not have been more different. Pollock careened to his death in a fatal 1956 car crash at age 44. Rauschenberg, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, did not go gently into that good night. Paralyzed by a stroke, like his own hero de Kooning, he continued to work until the end of a long and productive life. From a wheelchair in his beachfront studio in Captiva, Fla., where he had retired from the New York art scene in the late 1960s, he selected images from the vast archive of his own photographs and, working with the aid of assistants, continued to turn out a steady stream of canvases and sculptures. Nor did he let the stroke keep him from attending openings and festivities…. Absenting himself from the New York art world, Rauschenberg seemed to disappear from sight until, in 1997, the late Walter Hopps, the eccentric museum director and curator noted for his infallible eye, organized a full-scale retrospective of his works for the Menil Collection and the Guggenheim Museum that became the inaugural exhibition of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. By that time he had created virtually everything from Conceptual to Pop art, from assemblage to performance to media-based extravaganzas filling, as he so famously put it, 'the gap between art and life.' Although he himself is now gone, both Rauschenberg's life and his art, his fearless experimentation and his nonstop innovation, continue to inspire the generations of artists who succeed him.

9/23/09