Robert Rauschenberg
A Print Survey in Themes, 1952-1992
Leo Castelli Gallery
with related performance videos
Leo Castelli Gallery
578 Broadway
New York
1991
The following essay was originally published in Robert Rauschenberg: A Print Survey in Themes, 1952-1992 for the circulating exhibition when it appeared at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia, from October 7-December 4, 1992. The exhibition that it accompanied originated at the Leo Castelli Gallery, 578 Broadway, New York. Readers who would like to view the cited prints may open a new browser and cut and paste the urls provided below after each paragraph.
Introduction
This exhibition surveys 40 years of Robert Rauschenberg's printmaking activities, on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Leo Castelli Gallery. Works on view are drawn largely from Leo Castelli's private collection. Among the numerous artists introduced at the Castelli Gallery, Rauschenberg is one of the most adventurous in his approach to art mediums and subjects. The prints in this exhibition are organized into five themes that suggest how topics and innovations have emerged in his graphic work.
For the exhibition, we removed the conventional office door leading to my desk and mounted Robert Rauschenberg's Cardbird Door in its place, leaving it ajar as you see, and the exhibition flowed throughout the offices, showroom and two galleries, allowing viewers to experience his work in their thematic groups, but determining their own interaction with those works, better conveying and catalyzing the spirit to how themes do interconnect within his oeuvre at large.
Ephemera in Material Culture
Rauschenberg has, from his earliest artistic career, explored phenomena that are ephemeral in nature. The earliest print in this exhibition, an untitled woodcut of 1952, is a blend of rudimentary materials and imagery. This unique image was executed with a few strokes in a simple printing medium on fragile paper. It is among a group of early unique prints in which Rauschenberg experimented with basic markings to explore motion, direction and the passage of time. In 1962, Rauschenberg was invited to experiment with printmaking at the new studio of Universal Limited Art Editions. There he introduced the everyday world into his prints, as he was doing in painting and sculpture, rather than restricting himself to his earlier simple markings or to the drawing techniques of more traditional printmaking. He gathered photoengraved plates that The New York Times had discarded after publication, arranging these random journal images into a collage format. Rauschenberg then transfered his compositions into lithography, adding painterly gestures when creating prints such as Accident. When the stone that carried this image broke during printing, he recreated the scheme on a new stone that also broke. Embracing these incidents as a fleeting adventure rather than a setback -- even a durable material such as limestone could be fragile -- he decided to print the broken picture regardless, including fragments at the bottom of its diagonal split.
http://www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/RobertRauschenberg_1963_Accident.aspx
Two other modes of material culture whose ephemeral aspects Rauschenberg has explored in printmaking are the newspaper medium, and disposable packages such as cardboard containers and paper bags. In 1970, in the Surface Series from Currents he alluded to the transient dynamics of both water and current events by composing imagery with clippings from six American newspapers. His ambition was to alter our mundane responses to life as filtered through journalism, by reading and then transforming for audience consideration the repetitious effects of mass print mediums. http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/524/w500h420/CRI_212524.jpg
Another such active protest project was Rauschenberg's Cardbird Series of 1971. Wedding his interest in the soft, malleable medium of cardboard packaging with a desire to reinvent new uses for it, he used cardboard and photo-based printing to make objects that give the illusion of having been collaged from mass-produced, disposable containers. These cardbirds are so-named because their shapes suggest his desire to create whimsical uses for discards. Their collaged shapes echo the fanciful forms that Rauschenberg gave to the news images used in Currents. In one special case, the artist also gave a more functional role to one of his birds, creating a Cardbird Door. http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/834/w500h420/CRI_152834.jpg
Art History and Cultural Interchange
In this exhibition, Shirtboards — Italy and Morocco, is a retrospective portfolio that simulates unique collages of 1952, which were derived from the cardboard used to package shirts. Rauschenberg's interest in other societies has included existing material culture, images that we inherit as art history and the processes of living cultural collaboration. In Breakthrough I and Breakthrough II of 1964 and 1965, he introduced in a dramatic horizontal sweep the female odalisque from Diego Velasquez's Venus and Cupid, surrounded by numerous contemporary images. Many years later, in Bellini IV of 1988, Rauschenberg unveiled a grander orchestration of another art historical source, a female nude, now attended by her cupids, quoted from a painting by Giovanni Bellini. The earlier lithographs and the later etching show the artist's daring for arranging cultural documents with personally photographed scenes and hand-drawn gestures into theatrical scenarios. In Bellini IV, the artist's photographs and Bellini's figures inhabit diversely-shaped, overlapped etching plates forming a contemporary hybrid of the altarpiece polyptych.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/rauschenberg/zoomify/244-080.shtm
http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/158/w500h420/CRI_235158.jpghttp://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/581/w500h420/CRI_110581.jpg http://www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/RobertRauschenberg_1988_Bellini4.aspx
In 1974, under the auspices of Gemini Graphic Editions Limited, Rauschenberg collaborated with papermakers in France and India. These projects were the precursors of his venture called Rauschenberg's Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI). In France he created the series Pages and Fuses, fusing printed images onto multi-colored handmade paper. In India, where he worked in the city of Amedhabad that is known for Ghandi's papermill and its textile industry, he created the series Bones and Unions, sandwiching local cloths between paper layers onto bamboo strips. For a 1988 ROCI project sponsored by Gemini workshop, he created a series of fabric editions called Samarkand Stitches. Combining native Ikat textiles from Uzbekistan with American cloths in a process akin to patchwork quilting, he then overprinted photographs referring to his experiences in this area of the former Soviet Union.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/rauschenberg/zoomify/244-080.shtm
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/rauschenberg/interchange.shtm
Text, Image and Folio
Early in his printmaking career, Rauschenberg began to mix word and image in print, exploring this tradition in single and multiple folios, or sheets of paper, and in illustrated books. In most cases he chose to stretch existing concepts about what these modes for literacy and communication may embody. In the 1970 lithograph Centennial Certificate, MMA, he created a ceremonial image from reproductions of the diverse collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with his own hand-written testament to its first 100 years. Joining this text-and-image anniversary poster, other folio-based projects in this exhibition include: the kite-like paper sheets linked by cord or twine, Page 4 and Page 5 from the series Pages and Fuses of 1974; the 1970 lithograph Seagull—Bikini of God in which Andrei Vosznesensky's Russian text appears in the form of a bird-like bikini bottom; and the 1981-82 lithograph with embossing, American Pewter with Burroughs I, wherein William Burroughs' embossed text "The sky is thin as paper here" floats between images of a clouded landscape horizon.
www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1970_UntitledCentennialMMAPoster.aspx?enlarge=truewww.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1978_SeagullBikiniOfGod.aspx?enlarge=true
www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/617/w155h170/CRI_156617.jpg
Rauschenberg's earliest illustrated book in this exhibition is the 1964 volume of reproductions, XXXIV Drawings for Dante's Inferno. Without having read the literary classic to which the title refers, the artist created textless illustrations from media images of persons from different walks of life. He arranged these characters in loose registers like the levels of the inferno, intending them as stand-ins for human souls. In two other volumes he created overlays of text and image, printing his own photographs over the text of Andrew Forge's 1969 monograph on him, making it challenging but richer to read and, in the 1972 project Opal Gospel, screenprinting nature images and Native American poetry on vertical plexiglas panels that can be placed in any order to create different readings. Another book genre found in this exhibition is the self-designed artist book, a mode which he has explored on special occasions such as his visit in 1974 to create a project for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Transportation, Performance and Collaboration
Gathered under this theme are prints and performance-related videos that show Rauschenberg's involvement with ideas about dance movement as performance, and about how collaborative performance is integral to the print workshop. In 1968 he produced a monumental vertical triptych called Autobiography, in which each panel shows personal images: his full x-ray and astrological chart, an early childhood photograph, and himself performing in his first dance collaboration. The middle panel also bears a text biography spiraled into an oval resembling a fingerprint, mentioning many collaborations during the mid-1960s. Video footage of his costumes, set designs, choreography and performance bring related dramatic themes in Rauschenberg's prints off the wall and into the three-dimensional realm. Two prints from the Glacial Decoy Series, for instance, show images gathered for his sets for Trisha Brown Dance Company's Glacial Decoy performance, while the images of his first performance roller skating with a parachute on his back in Pelican appears in the lower panel of Autobiography and on video.
greg.org/archive/rr_broadside_ladder.jpgwww.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1980_GlacialDecoySeriesLithographIV.aspx?enlarge=true
Rauschenberg has redefined transportation into a seemingly limitless series of actions. Early performances show ambulation as a man lying in a human 'chicken' coop on wheels, eating chicken in order to fuel his energy before moving, or as a figure walking with the prop of a bedspring frame on wheels. Then there are more recognizable forms such as canoeing and rollerskating. Twin references to walking and rocketing in his x-ray (for which he posed naked in his boots) appear with different emphases in Autobiography and Booster. Rocket imagery derived from his attendance at the NASA Apollo 11 launching appears in Sky Garden from the Stoned Moon Series, while the vertical bicycle imagery in Kitty Hawk suggests the ascension of the Wright brothers' airplane, the first vehicle for human flight. A swimmer demonstrates water conveyance in the fabric piece Pull from the Hoarfroast Editions. Preview from the same series shows arrested and suggested motion in two driverless classic cars flanking an ancient Greek kouros figure, ready to drive and stride.
mmoca.org/exhibitions/exhibitdetails/signsofthetimes/images/RAUSCHENBERG-Sky-Garden_001.jpgwww.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1974_KittyHawk.aspx?enlarge=truecs.nga.gov.au/IMAGES/MED/48065.JPG
Rauschenberg also has provided for viewer participation in his work. His 1971 series of four screenprints on mirrored plexiglas, Star Quarters, show natural, cultural and constellation imagery. To examine these closely the viewer must enter into the image, and is able to observe his or her performance by mirror reflection.
Urban, Suburban and Rural Scene
Rauschenberg's American culture frequently has emerged as a theme in images that convey a dominant sense of place. In the 1968 lithograph Landmark he transferred photographs that appeared in the August 2, 1968 issue of Life magazine, doubling some of them such as a portrait of Malcolm X and a scene of a couple standing by railroad tracks. In Carillon of 1981 he laid veil-like star and stripe patterns from the American flag over outdoor scenes, while in Passport of 1967 he printed three plexiglas discs with the same images, which could be turned so that one image at a time lines up clearly while the others stand as a more complex group or crowd, suggesting identification and passage. A sense of urban poesy informs three photoetchings of 1982, L.A. Flakes—400', and Rising, 11,000' and Rising and 19,000', Still. Their small etching plates form crystalline patterns that recall either snow, or Los Angeles' more ominous environmental flakes, smog.
www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1968_Landmark.aspx?enlarge=truewww.a-r-t.com/gemini/checklist/thumbnails28%20L.A.%20Flakes%20-%20400',%20and%20Falling.jpg
In 1969, when Rauschenberg witnessed the Apollo 11 launching from the control room at Cape Canaveral, he was creating his Stoned Moon Series, which is populated by numerous references to the space mission. But he also took time to prepare prints that focused more on the local natural environment, for instance in the 1970 lithograph that concluded the series Local Means. This print reinvented the upper portion of the composition from Sky Garden of 1969, where the ground-level marsh life outscales the rocket imagery. In the same year he created three photolithographs that combined human anatomy with marine imagery: Tides, Drifts and Gulf. During the early 1980s Rauschenberg became interested in the idea of photographing every inch of the North American continent. Editions such as The Razorback Bunch: Etching II and III incorporated his photographs of poor rural areas.
cs.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG.cfm?View=LRG&IRN=80675
cs.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG.cfm?View=LRG&IRN=102706
www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1969_Tides.aspx?enlarge=true
www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1969_Drifts.aspx?enlarge=true
www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1969_Gulf.aspx?enlarge=true
www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1980_RazorbackBunchEtchingI.aspx?enlarge=true
www.ulae.com/robertrauschenberg/Robert_Rauschenberg_1980_RazorbackBunchEtchingII.aspx?enlarge=true
Themes emerge and recede in Rauschenberg's graphic work much like actors staging a performance, taking different roles in different scenarios. A symphonic effect is achieved when these subjects overlap within a single scenario. While these may tease or confound our grasp of Rauschenberg's activities, it also points to those qualities for which he is honored as one of our most important contemporary artists—his embrace of life as an open adventure and his fluency in extending this odyssey to his public.
Kathleen Slavin
Curator
Leo Castelli Collection
This essay was originally published in Robert Rauschenberg: A Print Survey in Themes, 1952-1992 for the circulating exhibition when it appeared at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia, from October 7-December 4, 1992. The exhibition that it accompanied originated at the Leo Castelli Gallery, 578 Broadway, New York, NY 10012, a year earlier, to honor the 35th Anniversary of the Leo Castelli Gallery, and 40 years of Robert Rauschenberg's printmaking career.
