"Business sure screwed up the art world universally (Interview: Robert Rauschenberg), The Art Newspaper, Sept. 1997, p. 17.

Robert Rauschenberg at 72

by Jason Edward Kaufman

It sounds like the stuff of fiction: a poor, part-Cherokee dyslexic from a grimy Gulf Coast oil port makes his way to the summit of the international art world. But such is the rags-to-riches story of Ernest Milton "Robert" Rauschenberg. Born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Academie Julian in Paris, and with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina before settling in New York where he took classes at the Art Students League and developed close relationships with Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Pitting himself against the vibrant crowd of Abstract Expressionists with whom he socialised at the Cedar Tavern, he established himself as the enfant terrible of the New York School, showing all-black paintings, all-white paintings, all-red paintings, even dirt paintings that sprouted grass, and in one symbolic gesture went so far as to erase a drawing by the vaunted Willem DeKooning. His breakthrough style was a Dada-inspired form of assemblage weaving together Abstract Expressionist brushwork with found photographs, newsprint, and objects in three-dimensional hybrids he called "Combine" paintings. Incorporating light bulbs, mirrors, clocks, ladders, license plates, and stuffed animals -- the famed Monogram (1955-59) featured an angora goat with a paint-daubed snout and a tire around its waist -- these iconoclastic exercises caught the attention of Leo Castelli, who from 1958 would guide the artist’s meteoric rise.

He next perfected a distinctive manner of photographic collage juxtaposing political and commercial themes from President Kennedy to race riots to lunar landscapes and Coca Cola ads, with images from science, art history, and his own Depression-era upbringing, melding the on-slaught of post-war media culture with autobiographical allusions in a proto-Pop visual profusion of people, places, and things. Increasingly devoted to photography and printing, he devised an arsenal of techniques for transferring pictures onto various surfaces -- paper, canvas, glass, metal, fabric, and fresco -- with which he has created the sundry species of kalaidascopic graphic poetry that have become his signature style.

At the age of 37 his reputation was consolidated by a retrospective at The Jewish Museum and expanded the following year when he was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. But he began to drift away from visual art towards interdisciplinary collaborations in modern dance, theater, and technology. He designed sets and performed with Paul Taylor, Trisha Brown, and Merce Cunningham dance companies, participated in avant-garde "happenings," and joined research scientists to form Experiments in Art and Technology.

He purchased a former orphanage on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan, but shaken by the social upheavals of the preceding decade, in 1970 he moved his workshop to Captiva Island off the coast of Florida. In that tropical refuge, with a team of apprentices that has included Brice Marden and Dorothea Rockburne, he renewed his art making and embarked on a series of working trips abroad that led to the announcement in 1984 of the Rauschenberg Overseass Cultural Interchange (R.O.C.I.). Conceived as a tool for social reform, the self-funded seven-year global oddyssey presented exhibitions in Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, the former USSR, Germany, Malaysia, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Though intended to bridge cultural rifts between nations, the idealistic project did not enjoy the publicity that might have yielded significant change. Nevertheless, two years later the artist received the National Medal of Arts Award from President Bush.

Bob Rauschenberg has been hailed as one of the major figures in twentieth-century art, but critical opinion has varied. Robert Hughes has praised him as a "protean genius" who expanded the defnintion of art, but Peter Plagens calls him a procrustean talent, "so egalitarian about pictures that one particular combination of them doesn’t seem to mean something especially different from another." Charles Stuckey finds the work "gracefully sensuous and movingly poetic," but Hilton Kramer has labeled it "academic" and "decorative...nothing more than clever exercises in the art of layout design." A review of his achievement has been long overdue.

Though myriad exhibitions have examined parts of his oeuvre 1980 touring show in Germany, Denmark, and LondonEurope. -- like The Whitney’s 1990-91 show of silkscreen paintings from the early 1960s, and The Menil Collection’s 1992 touring show of work from the early 1950s -- and scores of major galleries have offered his work (including Castelli, Knoedler, Hirschl & Adler, Sonnabend, PaceWildenstein, Blum Helman, Gagosian, and Acquavella in New York alone), the last major retrospective was the 1980 touring show in Germany, Denmark, and LondonEurope. There has not been a retrospective in the U.S. since 1977 when the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington (now the National Museum of American Art) sent a show to five cities in the U.S. Art), followed by a

From September 19 to January 7, the Guggenheim Museum in New York will fill its uptown and downtown branches with some 400 works, spanning his career from 1949 to the present with loans from museums and private collections around the world. In terms of square footage, it will be the largest one-artist show in the history of the museum, spilling over into Ace Gallery in the West Village for an installation of the (literally) 1/4 Mile Piece (1981-present). Two galleries on 57th Street have timed exhibitions to coincide with the event: PaceWildenstein will present frescoes from his 1996 series "Arcadian Retreats," and PaceWildensteinMacGill will show black-and-white photographs (until Oct. 25).

The retrospective is curated by Walter Hopps, who organised the 1977 show. In February it goes to Houston where it will be jointly presented by the Menil Collection, the Contemporary Arts Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts (Feb. 12-May 17, 1998). "I am from Texas," says the artist, "They ought to roll back something for me. Except the clock!" Then it will travel to the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, and on to other venues, yet-to-be-determined, in Europe and the Far East. A 600-page catalogue will be distributed by Harry N. Abrams.

We spoke with Mr. Rauschenberg on the occasion of this landmark exhibition.

JEK: First, I want to ask about some of your latest work. Can you describe the piece you are doing for Renzo Piano’s cathedral near Rome?

RR: It’s in the assymetrical arch that is 45-feet high and 150-feet wide. The subject matter is supposed to be the Apocalypse, which is certainly a very rich abstraction. But the church is a little bit confused. Because it is a place of healing, they want the artwork to be uplifting. I had to question the Franciscan leader, Are you reading the same book I am? That is the major problem now: how to paint a positive Apocalypse. I find the whole thing quite horrifying.

And technically it has to be able to appear and disappear depending on the quantity of people and the particular kind of services. The church is now considering maybe it should just be there all the time. Renzo thinks that it would be much more dramatic for it just to appear. We’ve figured out the hardware to make this possible.

According to some accounts, as an adolescent you wanted to be a minister. Are you still a religious person?

I gave that up because of the assumption that the world was evil, and I didn’t think that it was a good investment to give up your life on the earth for something quite as vague as Paradise. Just in case! Also, I don’t like the idea of any spiritual activity being controlled by fear.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell disavowed Christianity for the same reason. Any religion that has a notion of Hell as cruel as Christianity’s was not for him. I undertand you are completing a commission from Mercedes Benz for Potsdammer Platz in Berlin. It’s going to be a lifesize bicycle with applied neon lights hovering over a reflecting pool, part of the series you showed at Knoedler’s last year. What inspired that series?

I like bikes and use them often in compositions, and I enjoy the visual wonders of neon with it’s unapologetic aggresion. I most often think of theWright brothers when I work with bicycles. I like thinking that the airplane was invented by two bicycle mechanics. That is one of the wonders of the world.

And you’re working on a mural for the new music hall in Seattle, related to the "Anagrams" you recently showed at Pace.

It’s going to be about 10 feet high and 60 feet long, in the lobby, but visible from the street through the glass. I thought I would make the theme as musically as possible about Seattle itself. I was just up there photographing profusely both on-site and all over Seattle. It will be the latest variation of the "Anagrams" I started working on when I discovered a computer which creates photographic enlargements and prints them in vegtetable dyes. That way I could use water as a solvent. I’ve exhausted all other poisons and I’m still alive, so I thought I’d try water. That might kill me! It’s fun to use actual photographic images so abstractly and lyrically, where you’re not bound to the dogmatic factualness of, say, silkscreen images. I really like the lyrical softness to the realism.

So while I’m busy putting the Guggenheim [show] together, I’m dealing with all these side projects.

Are you doing anything special for the retrospective? Walter Hopps tells me you’ve been thinking about making a sound piece.

I still am. It was going to be the piece for the atrium of the [Guggenheim] show. But I haven’t evolved it yet. In fact, I got it completely finished but I realised there wasn’t anything to see. Talk about painting yourself in the corner, I painted myself out of the dome! By the time I had completed the technology for the audience to trigger the piece by their actions, it was so small there was nothing to see. And I refused to build an idol to stare at when it wasn’t part of the work’s functioning.

What kind of sounds were you thinking of using?

I had lots of ideas about the sounds, mostly from real life. Like what people don’t say and do say in elevators in different parts of the country. It was going to be totally candid. Another idea was a minute and a half or two minutes of the voices of the most important people in the world globally. I was going to work with the U.N. to get those sounds. But the historical elements and the physical problems organising the Guggenheim show have taken so much of my time that I really haven’t had any time-space to do the piece that I wanted to do for the atrium. I will do something, or I won’t do something. One or the other.

Collage has been one of your predominant modes. Can you discuss this aspect of your work?

Well, I’ve done just as many things without it. But I think collage itself, and the activity of making collage, is the most direct way that you can relate diverse elements rather than their going through the transition of a translation. That’s what I like about using real objects, as opposed to something like them -- like a painted image or a photograph. I like the directness, and the fact that it’s not being soiled or diluted by my interpretation of it.

I imagine that’s one reason you’ve worked with found objects. That’s something very much associated with Dada and with Duchamp. What do you recall of your meetings with him?

I was in an exhibit of "the object in art" ["Art and the Found Object" organised by the American Federation of Arts in 1960] and he was in the same show. He had the Bottle Rack there. His sister had thrown the original out, so he called his friend Man Ray to get another. Man Ray couldn’t remember which bottle rack was the original so he sent him six or eight, and they figured out which one it was because it was well recorded. I was having dinner with the guy who was putting the show together, and he just happened to remark that all the pieces in the exhibition were for sale. So I jumped to it and said, What about the Bottle Rack? And he said, Yeah, that’s for sale. And I said, How much is it? And he said, That’s three dollars. So I bought it of course.

[In 1960] Marcel and Teeny came to deliver a Green Box [Box-in-a -Valise] to Jasper Johns, who was living in the same building as I was. Jasper and I were the first artists he went out to see when he was in that semi-retirement legend. When he gave the box to Jasper, he said, Don’t you want me to autograph it? And Jasper said, Well, of course, if you would. And so he did. I understood the influence of the readymade on art history probably more than Duchamp, so I had been confused about whether to ask about the Bottle Rack. So I turned to Teeny and I said, I have the Bottle Rack, and I’ve been staying up at night knowing that you were coming trying to decide whether it would be ethical or an insult to ask him to sign it. And Teeny said, Oh, don’t be silly Bob. He’ll sign anything. And he signed it, in French. So I have the most original Bottle Rack -- the one next to the one that was thrown out by his sister.

What do you mean you understood the influence of the readymade better than Duchamp?

He didn’t have to understand all the repercussions. It’s only with a historical evaluation that one measures what the repurcussions were after the event has taken place. But his job was a lot purer than that. He just did it.

What was the art world like back then?

Most of my best friends were American painters. Franz [Kline] and Barney Newman were my favorite ones. And Bill [DeKooning] I always loved. I knew [Jack] Tworkov very well personally. And I knew [Ad] Reinhardt. And I met [Jackson] Pollock. It was an amazing time, a kind of education and possibility that doesn’t exist anymore. There were only five galleries in those days, and the artists really depended on each other socially, psychologically, and even critically. It’s impossible now. Business sure screwed up the art world universally, didn’t it? It made paying the rent easier, but the rent was cheaper then, too.

You’ve said that during that period you and Jasper Johns were each other’s best audience.

Well, we were the only ones interested in each other’s work. So we didn’t have to stand in line! When he lost his job in Marboro’s book store and moved downtown, I was living on Front Street and he moved over to Water Street. We were the only two artist’s in the neighborhood. I really liked what he was trying to do, and he liked my work -- he didn’t approve of it, but he liked it. We were both isolated intense personalities. Actually, we were very good for each other because we came from such totally different aesthetics. I mean I couldn’t get enough of everything, and he had too much of nothing. That made us naturally objective. We influenced one another, maybe by disagreement. But we had a mutual respect.

DeKooning was the preeminent figure at that time. Do you think of your paint-slathered 1955 Bed in relation to him or Abstract Expressionism? I’m tempted to see it as a metaphor for the aesthetic situation at the time: artists were obliged to lie in the Abstract Expressionist’s bed.

DeKooning and [Hans] Hoffmann were the two big forces at that time. People were either painting like DeKooning, or people were painting like Hoffmann. If there’s an element of DeKooning in my handling of paint it’s because it’s a physicality that is direct. DeKooning was really a leader in utilising and admitting the physicality of paint.

But what things become is part of the distortion that carries them down through the ages. That distortion also stops them from being what they really were. It’s like what I was saying about Duchamp. What the Bed has become to the world is probably a much more complex thing than it was to me. I came to it from such an unartistic direction. I was painting on everything. It was summertime and I had run out of surfaces to work on, and I had this quilt that had been Dorothea Rockburne’s radiator protector at Black Mountain College. I somehow ended up with it. So I thought, That’s interesting, it’s already half finished. I’ll paint on that. But I never could lose that quality of it being a quilt. So I thought, I’ll just make it into a bed. So I got a pillow.

It’s a lot of things. One, it’s a discipline. It’s an excuse to look deliberately, contemplatively, at every shadow or every crack on the wall, or everthing that’s too Baroque and confusing to see at once. I guess the closest I come to anything like notebook sketches, to making studies, is taking photographs.

Do you watch much t.v.?

I keep it on all the time. It’s just another window with an unknown subject. I think of it as a piece of nature. No, I don’t think it has an impact on society any more detrimental than life itself. Any window you look out can. It depends on the view. It’s your attitude about it.

You’ve also used found photography from newspapers and magasines.

Well, that’s what I had to rely on. The reason that I started using found photographs early on was because I couldn’t go everywhere. And now I’ve worked my life in such a way that I’ve already nearly been everywhere, so I don’t have to have a secondhand viewpoint. R.O.C.I. was part of that. For the last thirty years or so I’ve mostly depended on my own personal observation and trusted it to be general enough to expose the obvious.

But photographic images function in my work as every other material. I respond to the materials. Like if I’m working with mirrors, it’s my job to investigate the properties of mirrors and their possibilities and their shortcomings. The same thing when I’m working on steel or tin, or in fabric, or with photographs. I’m not the kind of artist who has an idea before I have something in hand. I’m already touching something before there’s an idea.

Do you always compose ex tempore, never from preparatory drawings?

The only time that I have drawings that are before-the-piece is when I have some architectural or physical construction that is necessary to be able to complete the piece. I mean if I can imagine something before I do it, then imagining it is enough. To "execute a preconceived image" would ruin my pleasure and excitement. It would spoil the adventure, because then I’m just a laborer.

Are you a realist? That is, do you feel that your work is representative of something that is collectively seen by people, or is it more of a personal internal vision?

I think it’s totally outside of me and I’m just the collector of information, the artist making the presentation. I think the biggest surprise is "the fact." I’m anti-interpretive.

Do you mean you want viewers to interpret your as they would any other part of the world, or is your style intended to elicit a particular state of looking?

Not a particular state of looking at all. I think of it as an invitation to draw upon your own unique personal differences. I think it should be done as personally as possible. I mean nothing means something per se as a limitation. That’s one of the quarrels I have with most criticism, that it enforces in black and white a restriction on the experiences that one should be having open-mindedly. It fixes it. It stops it from having any psychological or philosophical dimension.

Once it gets in writing, that’s what it is. It becomes a static work.

Yet in selecting and juxtaposing your imagery -- as in selecting a composition with a camera -- you’re directing people to think about certain things.

But always I have in mind more a sense of inclusion rather than eliminating things. In most cases what I’m directing them to be concerned about is right in front of them anyway. I’m just underlining it.

Some critics say that your collage effect suggests overabundance. Do you wish to convey that there’s an overwhelming amount of information out there?

I like to draw attention to it. And that the world is a lot richer than we can comprehend, and a lot more varied and surprising than could be believed.

But do you feel, nevertheless, that through your life you’ve found a way of looking at the world, a way of approaching the world, that you’d like to teach other people?

Probably openmindedly, if that’s possible. And with as much pleasure as you can tolerate.

Do you see yourself as already occupying a place in art history?

Oh, I think so. I think in the international influence that my work has had on other people. Seventy-two years haven’t been wasted! But I’m not finished with it. I’m still busy, Baby!

Do you believe artists today have much impact on the world at large? Politicians certainly do. The mass media do. What about visual artists?

Probably moreso now than for a long time. In the good old days the artists were next to the kings, and they were the politicians. I think that I have been a big influence on the way that people see things. Roy [Lichtenstein] certainly has.

But artists like you and Jasper, who have a certain quiet introspective quality to your work -- do you think that too has a dramatic impact on the way people see the world?

I think so. My work has a kind of vulgarity to it that Jasper’s lacks. Roy’s work happens immediately because of the familiarity of the concept. Warhol certainly has. That was his subject and his object -- the people. And he did a very good job of it. We’ll have to see. That question may be a bit early.

Interview by Jason Edward Kaufman

Jason Edward Kaufman ©