ART-PRESENTATION: Robert Rauschenberg
While too much of an individualist ever to be fully a part of any Art Movement, Robert Rauschenberg acted as an important bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and can be credited as one of the major influences in the return to favour of representational art in the USA. As iconoclastic in his invention of new techniques as in his wide-ranging iconography of modern life, he suggested new possibilities that continued to be exploited by younger artists throughout the latter decades of the 20th Century.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Tate Modern Archive
The exhibition “Robert Rauschenberg” at Tate Modern in London covers each chapter of Rauschenberg’s six-decade career and presents major works that rarely travel. Among these is a selection of his iconic “Combines”, hybrids between painting and sculpture, which include “Monogram” (1955-59), travelling to the UK form Moderna Museet in Stockholm, for the first time in over 50 years, and “Bed” (1955) from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tate Modern also present the signature silkscreen paintings which signalled Rauschenberg’s early commitment to political activism, including “Retroactive II” (1964), which portrays John F. Kennedy, who had recently been assassinated. The exhibition begins by considering Rauschenberg’s early experiments at Black Mountain College where he embarked on his first collaborations with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, David Tudor, Cy Twombly and Susan Weil. This time lead to his seminal “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953), through the erasure of De Kooning’s drawing, Rauschenberg acknowledged his admiration for his predecessor, but also signaled a movement away from Abstract Expressionism. He framed the erased drawing within a simple, gilded frame, with a mat bearing an inscription typed by Jasper Johns that identified the significance of the seemingly empty paper. The absent drawing is presented as an art object, designating the act of erasure as belonging to the realm of fine art – a typically Neo-Dada act of questioning the definition and import of the art object. The artist’s worked with Experiments in Art and Technology, an organisation of which he was a founder and which developed collaborations between artists and engineers in the ‘60s. In the early ‘70s Rauschenberg moved his studio and primary residence to Captiva in Florida and began to travel extensively across Europe, the Americas and Asia. His “Cardboards” (1971-2) are a wry comment on the forces of globalisation, and his sumptuous fabric works such as “The Jammers” (1975-6) had been inspired by his visit to the Indian textile centre of Ahmedabad, – demonstrate his skillful play with unconventional materials. The epic project Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), a travelling exhibition which took place between 1984 and 1991 taking in Chile, China, Cuba and Tibet, will also feature. Performance and dance remained key interests for Rauschenberg and form a central strand of the exhibition, as will his interest in pushing the limits of image-making with new materials. A group of late inkjet paintings, combining dozens of images taken at home and abroad through the use of digital technology, reveal how he continued to innovate right into the 21st Century.
Info: Curators: Achim Borchardt-Hume & Leah Dickerman, Assistant Curators: Catherine Wood, Fiontán Moran & Juliette Rizzi, Tate Modern, Millbank, London, Duration: 1/12/16-2/4/17, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.tate.org.uk
