Eager not to miss the Rauschenberg retrospective at the Tate Modern, Graham Hooper guides us through this extraordinary show.
The last image in the 412-page catalogue for Tate Modern’s current high profile retrospective, “Robert Rauschenberg”, shows one on the artists most iconic ‘combines’ in x-ray. Called Monogram, it combines sculpture (a stuffed goat and a car tyre) with painting and general mixed media collage to create, as the name suggests, a very personal motif. The alchemy of hugely diverse materials (newspaper cuttings, metal, wood and plaster, with a shoe and tennis ball all set on casters) and in such a playful and daring mix is probably just as provocative and exciting now as it was back in late 50’s America. The fact that it is no ordinary photograph, but an x-ray no less, highlights the inventive use of technology and the desire to see the world differently that was so characteristic of this all-rounder artist.
Born in the small oil-town of Port Arthur, Texas, where being an artist wasn’t ever a career option, Rauschenberg only discovered the possibility after a chance encounter with art in a gallery whilst on leave from the Navy. He recognised a Gainsborough as the design from a reproduction on the back of a set of playing cards. Such experiences, plus his formative years in Post-War Texas, were to influence the rest of his prolific and diverse creative output over the next six decades. Port Arthur, now the site of a significant oil refinery, always had the petro-chemical industry in its soul, and Rauschenberg’s work is no different. Throughout his long and productive career oil, cars, tyres all reappear to remind us of his roots.
Some of the earliest images in this epic show, life-size blue print photograms of his then fiancé, pre-date (and reverse the colours of) the full-body blue figures of Yves Klein (on show at Liverpool Tate until March 5) by a decade. It is probably fair to say that if Rauschenberg didn’t do it first he either did it bigger or better. His all-white and then all-black paintings are just as innovative and revolutionary, and pre-empt the work of the American minimalist painters by ten years.
The Tate retrospective is the first survey of Rauschenberg’s work since his death in 2008. The last similarly expansive Guggenheim overview toured the world in 1998, though never came to the UK, so this is a significant and very welcome exhibition. If you only see one show this year, perhaps in your lifetime, you could do a lot worse than see this.
Rauschenberg is unique in the history of art in being so all encompassing, so confident and competent, in such a wide-range of processes and materials, and whilst often combining them all simultaneously too. The work on display puts the photographic image centre stage throughout, and rightly so, as the artist’s own images, plus those plundered from every other kind of source, were frequently put to use as re-appropriated fodder for his often large-scale imaginings. He is still credited with having produced the world’s biggest artwork; ¼ mile or 2-furlong piece, in 1983, but even his 1953 ‘Automobile Car Tire Print’ was almost 7 meters long.
Wheels of all kinds make an appearance in various bizarre and fruitful guises during the half-century of Rauschenberg’s career – in choreographed dance performances on roller-skates with Pelican in 1963, for instance. They were cheap, fun, highly symbolic and crucially very accessible. The recycled objects that fill the Tate perfectly reflect the current trend for re-using found items to create new and charming object d’art.
The oil industry, the navy, Americana of all kinds fed into the potent mix of cross-disciplinary approaches being explored when the young Rauschenberg arrived at Black Mountain Collage at the start of the 1950’s. Studying under the German émigré, and master of colour theory, Josef Albers, it was at the now-infamous rural art community that Rauschenberg met and worked alongside figures who would become highly significant and influential cultural icons in their own right. Cy Twombly went onto become a leading abstract artist, Merce Cunningham, the dancer known for using chance procedures and ‘everyday’ body movements and John Cage, the avant-garde musician most famous for his silent 4’33” composition. These were heady times; for a young man discovering his sexuality (he soon split with his wife after having a son) and beginning his odyssey into the furthest reaches of what art could be, this was seminal. The deep understanding for the way colour behaves never left him, making reappearances throughout his career, from his early geometric monochromes to his last muted washes.
For all the hands-on cut-and-stick of much of the work here Rauschenberg’s love of and involvement with technology cannot be ignored. Collaboration didn’t stop with lovers and artist friends. Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) established by the artist in the mid-sixties, at the height of the cold war space-race, with some of the most important figures in science, led to the creation of Mud Muse (1968), a sound activated vat of liquid clay, which can be experienced first-hand in this show, poetically popping and plopping away.
Space is represented by his installations, which bring together arrangements of large sculptural compositions, as well as his more figurative depictions of rockets and astronauts. Travel – real and imagined – was reoccurring idea for Rauschenberg. Always optimistic and positive, Rauschenberg looked to make connections, between ideas and people. He spent two and a half years at the end of the fifties illustrating Dante’s inferno (the 34 cantos depicting the poets journey into hell) using a newly discovered solvent-transfer method for applying newspaper images directly onto almost any porous surface. He went on to win the Venice Biennale in the Summer of 1964 with silkscreened photomontages, with images such as 1964’s Retroactive, produced around the same time as Warhol’s masterpieces. But unlike Warhol, he instructed his studio assistant to destroy all the screens, determined to start afresh for fear of falling foul to routine in the face of art stardom and commercial success.
Although Robert Rauschenberg is probably best known for his multi-media work, he was perhaps at his best when specialising for periods of time with distinct materials, be it metal offcuts salvaged from local scrap yards (leading to his series Gluts), cardboard (the by-product of industrial packaging boxes) or fabric, after his journeys across India (and inspiring his Jammers series). The gluts are political in that they made reference to the recession in his home town after the price of oil fell suddenly and dramatically in the 1980’s. The combination of scrapped cars (the car-crash as a symbol of economic disaster) and old road signs (signalling a loss of direction and destination) make for a potent and very poignant mix.
This was all followed by the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI) project, with visits to various communist countries (China, Russia and even Cuba). These self-funded artistic pursuits that occupied him for most the 1980’s were controversial at the time but allowed him to gather more visual resource materials with his trusty camera and further explore diverse techniques, such as paper-making. The tour began with a visit to the world’s oldest paper mill, and involved an exhibition in each host country across the decade.
By this time, he had escaped the high-octane art world of New York and settled on the Florida island of Captiva, away from the temptation of alcohol that had plagued him previously, but also to enjoy a quieter more contemplative environment by the sea, in a coastal location that was free of the connotations and physical associations of his port birth place. Working in this isolated waterfront studio complex he could work undisturbed and on ever-greater scales – in size and sophistication.
During his final years, after suffering strokes that left him paralysed in his right hand, he became more modest and gentle in his outlook, though not particularly in energy or complexity. He pioneered the use of water-soluble vegetable dyes in transfer printing, and worked with a large team of assistants during the early years of digital photography. Colleagues would take their own photographs and bring them back to the studio where he would work with them to create one-man retrospectives, juxtaposing their pictures with others from his back catalogue and art history more broadly. Mirthday Man, made in 1997, on his 72nd birthday, re-incorporates the full-size, full-body x-ray used in his Booster silk-screen from 30 years before.
These last works, closing the Tate show, interestingly anticipate contemporary trends for multi-faceted and layered photographic abundance that social networking and the Internet have given rise to.
The scope and intensity here is dizzying and electrifying. We leave the show overwhelmed by the energy and imagination of the man. But we are also left with the feeling that it is the breadth and speed of his creative mind that stopped him becoming better known like Warhol and Pollock. Rauschenberg was too often seen as whimsical and increasingly international, rather serious and distinctly American. Other careers were inward facing, short-lived or conceptual. His was all the better for not being.
IMAGE ABOVE: Monogram; 1955-59; Combine: oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform mounted on four casters; 106.7 x 135.2 x 163.8 cm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Purchase with contribution from Moderna Museets Vänner/The Friends of Moderna Museet
© Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York