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Artists & Works
Robert Rauschenberg
American (b. 1925)
Atlas Colonnade (1979)
Mixed Media
96" x 117.5" x 41"

STYLE: POP ART

  

Robert Rauschenberg is considered to be the forerunner for a host of twentieth century trends. Elements in his fifties work became the subject matter for the Pop artists of the sixties. His use of media images and found objects was considered revolutionary for its time, but now these elements are as natural to contemporary art-making as canvas and pigment. Rauschenberg studied art at the Academie Julien in Paris, Black Mountain College, and the Art Students League, and had his first solo show in New York at Betty Parsons in 1950. From that time on, the artist has been at the forefront of contemporary art, traveling and exhibiting continually. His last major retrospective was at the Guggenheim in 1997.

Throughout his long career, Robert Rauschenberg has always been fascinated by images which reflect our political, social, and cultural environment. Atlas Colonnade was constructed during the seventies, at a time when Rauschenberg decided to make the images fainter, highlighting the aesthetic presentation rather than information. They are still visible, but more integrated than in Rauschenberg's earlier collages.
The silk-screened facade of Atlas Colonnade Jr. is covered with familiar icons from the mass media and everyday life. Among them are the Shroud of Turin, a computer keyboard, a pressure cooker and a Burger King Whopper.

Rauschenberg does not seem to be presenting any commentary on these images. Rather, he lays out a fragmented and elusive map of contemporary existence.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Benjamin Forgey, An Artist for All Decades, 1/77, ARTnews
"...Rauschenberg seems the epitome of the new tolerance and new eclecticism of the 1970s: an artist into almost everything...he is the great post-war figurative painter everybody's been looking all over for, never thinking to look in the most obvious place. ..Rauschenberg's development has been a steady, organic process of flows and ebbs; it does not fit the linear, breakthrough pattern...Rauschenberg's non-stop prolificacy; the prodigiousness of invention; the willingness to experiment with non-art things and new processes, the openness, the wittiness and happy embracing of paradox; the infectious impatience with Art that spells itself with a capital A; the extraordinary sensitivity to textures and materials; the profoundly metaphorical sensibility; the idiosyncratic, wide-ranging iconography...Rauschenberg's work...encompasses a range of human experience that no other artist of our time has dared to take on."
Billy Kluver with Julie Martin, Art in America, 7/91
"Robert Rauschenberg has always seen his work as an active participant in its own environment and the viewer as an essential participant in the work itself."

Charles F. Stuckey. Art in America book review Rauschenberg: Art and Life, 7/91
"To his enormous credit, Rauschenberg alone of that group [Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Frank Stella] has tried to be something else besides a professional solo artist creating works for contemplation and consumption by a would-be sophisticated audience...What sets Rauschenberg apart, however, is his absence since 1976 from nearly every major survey...no artist has been more active or pioneering in the name of global art consciousness for the last two decades...Symbols pervade Rauschenberg's works, which ought to be compared not only to the beat novels of Jack Kerouac, but to the encyclopedic political murals of Benton and Rivera, among others...Of course, Rauschenberg's bulletin-board, collage style brings its own dimension to the traditional mural format mastered by artists of Benton's generation. Obliging the viewer to shuttle back and forth in space in order to observe them carefully, Rauschenberg's works nearly always contain scraps of small-scale information embedded into large, sculptural ensembles. Typically, the focus of these works is constantly shifting, moving from one part to another; as a result, Rauschenberg's art defies standard reproduction...Both Rauschenberg and Johns made their best art between 1954 and 1962...He has extended his notion that two heads are better than one into a global crusade for art made (in theory) by the people, for the people and of the people."
Edward Ball, The Journal of Art, "Robert Rauschenberg's Processed World," 1/91
"During 40 years of making art from secondhand images and flotsam picked out of the streams of the culture industry, Rauschenberg has become one of the world's great salvage engineers...In the early 60s, Rauschenberg stopped taking found objects from the street and started using silkscreen technology to lift his material from the image bank of the mass media. The photosensitive silkscreen process allows an image to be pilfered and transferred onto any other surface, including steel, canvas, and rocks (all of which he employed)....Rauschenberg's silkscreens suggest a world where the ubiquity of processed images and masticated information creates a state of fascinated passivity. The pieces simultaneously participate and represent the thing we have come to call "media culture." It feels wrong to look at a single Rauschenberg silkscreen, and more apt to read them together as so many interchangeable parts in the giant combinatory of information...The reproduced images appear in a decrepit third- or fourth- generation state, as though they had been intentionally decayed by multiple relay back and forth across satellite transponders..."I recognize the individuality of all objects, which is what I think my art is all about," Rauschenberg remarked a few years ago in an interview with Barbara Rose...In a consumer society, images are no longer messages or bearers of information, but things. To confront a Rauschenberg collage is a bit like coming across a natural phenomenon, like a boulder or a felled tree...From another perspective, Rauschenberg appears to have spent a career creating fetishes, in the sense given to that word by Marx--an image or object from which all traces of production have been erased. Paradigmatically, this would mean a commodity torn out of its historical context so as to produce a kind of empty screen for the production of fantasy...'I would add that he has a gift for looking at things, for seeing them, says Cage...It's almost as though Bob himself is a camera.'...over the years he has given away huge sums...To some, Rauschenberg appears to behave like an angel of mercy...Rauschenberg's gargantuan appetite for recirculation is best expressed in the project called Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, or R.O.C.I. ("Rocky"). ROCI is a caravansary consisting of Rauschenberg, his assistants, and a wealth of video and photographic equipment...has been crisscrossing the globe like some burlesque rolling thunder review, vacuuming up regional cultures and transforming these encounters into art...hopes to increase international dialogue by introducing people to cultures other than their own. It was on a R.O.C.I. trip that he met Castro and spoke of appliances on the Florida reefs...Rauschenberg as an artist appears to be an avatar of the global village; as an ambassador, he practices a statecraft that puts human experience through a mixer."