A lot of people have said things about Rauschenberg, but the one I first listened to was a little girl who ran up to “Untitled,” 1955, and threw her arm into the air, pointing.
“Look mommy,” she said with a grin, “This one’s made of things!” I have never heard better arts criticism in my life. Rauschenberg was a man of things, but so many different things that five separate Rauschenberg exhibits might not have a single object in common.
“Untitled,” 1995, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
In my art history lectures, he was taxidermy animals attached to Americana-esque paintings. In New York he was silkscreen collages of astronauts in NASA photos; Kennedy reproduced in orange and blue, streaks of red, streaks of white; a mysterious glass tank of bubbling mud hooked up to a blinking machine. In Wichita he was the “Samarkand Stitches,” collages of fabric he created all over the world: tapestries of pink florals and polka dots, traditional African prints, writing in Arabic, architectural diagrams on silk and his name always stitched, not signed, at the bottom. He worked with garbage cans and Coke bottles, embedded clocks and AM radios, tires and umbrellas, paint and ventilation ducts.
A Rauschenberg can be anything, but the objects he picks are quintessentially him.
In 1995 the World Cultural Council awarded him the Leonardo da Vinci Award of Arts, and what a match. Of course he received an award named after an artist associated not just with paint, but wheels, and screws, and strange machines. Rauschenberg loved things, materials themselves, possibly more than any artist ever has, and certainly more widely. He disqualified nothing. No wrapper or nail was beneath him, nor the garbage he took off the streets. I have no proof he buried time capsules as a child, but I believe it.
By the time I read, in an obituary, Rauschenberg believed artists must witness their time in history, I had already sensed this undercurrent in his work. Nobody could ever mistake Rauschenberg’s love of things with consumerism, but he reached beyond turning junk to beauty; he knew things reflect their makers, reflect an era. A Rauschenberg is a new way of using things, and a documentary, a time capsule and standing in a room of them gives me a feeling of awe both secular and holy. A Rauschenberg is the chaotic fade of human history, the mass of life emanating from altered photographs and pieces of metal; a sense of humility as I am told, by things, to bear witness.
Written by Elle Friedle.
Elle Friedle is a writing major and sequential minor at SCAD. She denies ever crying in MoMA.
