The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.

“I’m thinking of doing a self-portrait of innerman,” artist Robert Rauschenberg told Sydney Felsen in 1967. Felsen and his partner, Stanley Grinstein, had opened their print studio Gemini G.E.L. on Melrose Avenue just one year before. They wanted to do a project with Rauschenberg, then already revered for his pop-infused abstractions, but Felsen had no idea what a “self-portrait of innerman” meant. Later, when he picked Rauschenberg up at LAX, he learned that the artist wanted to take a full body X-ray of himself and make a print of his own skeleton. This proved difficult — Rauschenberg was six feet tall, and most machines could X-ray only one foot at a time. So Rauschenberg used six X-rays to make Booster, the long, frenetic, fragmented print of his body. It’s on view at LACMA right now, as part of "The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.," a show commemorating the studio’s 50th anniversary. Rauschenberg’s isn’t the only ambitiously quirky project — in Claes Oldenburg’s tongue-in-cheek storybook, the artist imagines covering ground in Kassel, Germany, with potato chips that resemble ears — and that's what makes the show good.