Word: rauschenberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rauschenberg was living in the middle of a junk-crammed environment?Manhattan?a place that every week threw away more artifacts than were made in a year in 18th century Paris. An afternoon's stroll could furnish him with a complete "palette" of things to make art with: cardboard cartons, striped police barriers, sea tar, a stuffed bird, a broken umbrella, a shaving mirror, grimy postcards. These relics were sorted out in his studio, glued to surfaces, punctuated with slathers of paint. They emerged as large-scale collages, to which Rauschenberg gave the name combines. At first they were relatively...
...Cage: at once the most avant-garde and the most transparent of composers, the Marcel Duchamp of music, the man who erected combinations of silence and random sound into an aesthetic strategy in order to give art the inclusive density of life. It was Cage's example that prompted Rauschenberg to formulate his much-quoted remark that "painting relates to both art and life... I try to act in the gap between...
...painter could not compete with the saintly and difficult presences of Cage and Cunningham, but one could collaborate, and Rauschenberg did. Through the '50s and early '60s he designed sets and costumes for Cunningham's dance troupe. To a remarkable degree, Rauschenberg eventually made himself the conduit through which some of the big money made in the '60s by new art, including his own, was siphoned to the "profitless" avantgarde, that of dance and music. In doing so, he felt he was only paying his dues, for when Rauschenberg moved to New York in the fall of 1949 he joined...
There was seldom enough money to buy proper materials, so Rauschenberg used improper ones. Blueprint paper in wide sheets cost $1.75 a roll; he and Susan Weil (they were married in 1950, and their son Christopher was born the following year) spread the stuff out on the floor of their apartment, strewed it with pattern-objects like fishnets and doilies, and one lay down naked on it while the other went over the paper with a portable sun lamp, making giant prints. Only one of the works survives: the blue roentgen ghost of a nude, eerily transparent. Later, Rauschenberg...
...second, equally important, was the idea that a painting's surface was an impartial collector of images. Anything could be dropped on the blueprints and leave its mark. Soon afterward, Rauschenberg made grass paintings?bundles of soil and plant matter held together with chicken wire, from which seedlings sprouted. (The last of these modest forerunners of earth art perished of cold and thirst in his loft down by the Fulton Street docks in 1954.) The results of this clownish exercise, as it looked then, would be of capital importance to modern...