Hold on. The Rauschenberg exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is an exhibit of prints? Really?

For an artist who built so much of his renown in wild three-dimensional experimentation, it seems very odd for the MIA to honor him with a show that's so, well, flat. "Robert Rauschenberg: Prints/Editions 1962-78" takes a look at one of the art world's most audacious experimenters, but through the lens of one of its most limiting and traditional media: printmaking. It's a collection of tepid two-dimensional work that dulls the brilliance of an otherwise riveting artist. Given Rauschenberg's recent passing (he died last May at age 82), the exhibition feels almost like a slight -- a banal tribute to an icon deserving of so much more.

Rauschenberg was a one-man Dada resurrection. He mounted blank canvases on gallery walls. He performed choreography wearing roller skates and a parachute. He partially erased a De Kooning painting and claimed it as his own. But it was his "combines," strange hybrids that straddled the line between painting and sculpture, that really made his name. These often involved piles of garbage, splotches of acrylic and, in one infamous example, a stuffed goat with a rubber truck tire ringing its belly. Coated liberally with paint stains and built from the junk of everyday life, the combines were the perfect bridge between Pollock's splatter-fests and Warhol's Brillo pads.

Confining Rauschenberg to a flat panel on a wall is like forcing Björk to make a record with a kazoo. Except that the Björk record might actually be interesting.

"He was a little reluctant to work in what he deemed a 'traditional manner,' meaning stone lithography," admits curator Dennis Michael Jon. "In fact, he was often quoted as saying, 'The second half of the 20th century is no time to start writing on stones.' [But the prints] are a central part of his work. He himself cited them as being influential in developing ideas for his paintings and other works."

Jon may be right. After all, Rauschenberg produced hundreds of these two-dimensional projects throughout his career, working at some of the most prestigious printmaking studios in the country. And some consider the 30-odd prints hanging in the MIA to be among the best American graphic work of the 1960s.

A 'Carnal Clock'

But the question remains: Can a '60s radical hippify a process invented in the 18th century? Rauschenberg certainly tried. He invented techniques to transfer images from magazines and newspapers directly onto the litho stone. As a result, most of his lithographs look more like photo collages than standard prints, a point made woefully clear by the five banal lithographs that begin the show. Process geeks might get a kick out of the techy details, but everyone else will breeze by these in a single pass.

"Don't worry," whispered a friend as I jotted notes on solvent transfers and emulsion baths. "It gets way less boring."

Indeed it does. The show includes the famous "Accident" print, during the making of which the lithograph stone cracked into pieces. Rauschenberg, a fetishist for freak occurrences, printed the paper anyway, and a thick white gash streaks down the side of the composition.

Other highlights include "Autobiography," a towering triptych of three giant collages filled with mementos of Rauschenberg's life that was originally intended as a billboard advertisement for the artist, and "Opal Gospel," a build-your-own-adventure artist book that allows readers to shuffle stacks of translucent pages to make their own imagery.

The most fascinating piece is the only three-dimensional work in the show -- "Acre," from his series of "Carnal Clocks." A reflective surface coats the face of a 4- by 4-foot light box. It seems like a standard mirror at first, except that you can make out a collage of faint, caramel-toned photographs lurking just beneath. Two lights glow dimly inside, and -- if you stand at an extremely acute angle -- you can make out the subject matter of the photos: close-ups of breasts, nipples, vaginas and other naughty bits belonging to the artist and his friends.

The entire apparatus works like a clock. One light is the minute hand; the other is the hour hand. They tick slowly around the collage, illuminating different flesh scenes depending on the time. A man's package hangs at 6 o'clock, cheeks at high noon. Twice a day, at noon and midnight, all of the lights illuminate -- the only times you can see the whole collage.

Here was the Rauschenberg we know -- a brilliant assemblage that spans at least three media: photography, collage, sculpture, functional timepiece. A bit of a gimmick, maybe, but undergirded by a brilliant concept. We've always been able to count the years by looking at someone's flesh. Why not count the minutes, too?

I rushed to the MIA the following day to stand before "Acre" at noon, expecting a jackpot light show of obscene images. Instead, I watched maybe four dull light bulbs tick on one by one in a slow circle around the edge of the collage. You could blink and miss it. Hyped for a Rauschenberg moment, I felt supremely let down, and left the exhibition with the same thought I had when I left the first time:

That's it? Really?