Robert Rauschenberg Research Paper

Robert Rauschenberg
Artist-

Robert Rauschenberg was born 22 October 1925, born in Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in the small refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas. His father, Ernest, was a strict and serious man who worked for the Gulf State Utilities power company. His mother, Dora, was a devout Christian and a frugal woman. She made the family's clothes from scraps, a practice that embarrassed her son, but possibly influenced his later work with assemblages and collage. Rauschenberg drew frequently and copied images from comics. Following his parents' wishes, Rauschenberg attended the University of Texas in Austin to study pharmacology, but was expelled in his freshman year after refusing to dissect a frog. The draft letter that arrived in
1943 saved him from breaking the news to his parents. Refusing to kill on the battlefield, he was assigned as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps and stationed at a hospital caring for combat survivors in San Diego. While on leave, he saw oil paintings in person for the first time at the Huntington Art Gallery in California. After the war ended, Rauschenberg drifted, eventually using the G.I. Bill to pay for art classes at Kansas State University in 1947. After being discharged he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Academia Julian in Paris, France. In 1948 Rauschenberg decided to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Later after Traveling widely, he was based in New York City from 1950, where he and Jasper Johns paved the way for pop art of the 1960s. He worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York, as costume and stage designer (1955–64).

Artwork-

Robert Rauschenberg was a prolific innovator of techniques and mediums, he used unconventional art materials ranging from dirt and house paint to umbrellas and car tires. In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg was already gaining a reputation as the art world’s enfant terrible with works such as ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’ (1953), and proceeded to rub away the image until only ghostly marks remained on the paper. By 1954, Rauschenberg completed his first three-dimensional collage paintings, he called them Combines—in which he incorporated discarded materials and mundane objects to explore the intersection of art and life. “I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world,” he had said. The 1/4 Mile or Two Furlong Piece (1981–98), a cumulative artwork, embodies his spirit of eclecticism, comprising a retrospective overview of his many discrete periods, including painting, fabric collage, sculptural components made from cardboard and scrap metal, as well as a variety of image transfer and printing methods. Bed (oil and pencil) is one of Rauschenberg’s first “combines’, the artist’s term for his technique of attaching found objects, such as tires or old furniture, to a traditional canvas support. In this work, he took a well-worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, scribbled on them with pencil, and splashed them with oil paint.

Many had said that these are Rauschenberg’s own pillow and blanket, which he used when he could not afford to buy a new canvas. Hung on the wall like a traditional painting, his bed, still made, becomes a sort of intimate self- portrait consistent with Rauschenberg’s assertion that “painting relates to both art and life…I try to act in that gap between the two.” Monogram (1959) includes a stuffed goat wedged inside a car tire – he also made tire print paintings by running paint-covered tires across paper with oil paints and painting the goats face. He said he felt sorry for people who considered junk ugly, "because they're surrounded by things like that and it must make them miserable"

World-

Rauschenberg shifted from a conceptual outlook where the authentic mark of the brushstroke described the artist's inner world towards a reflection on the contemporary world, where his interaction with popular media and mass-produced goods reflected his unique artistic vision.
He had visions by looking at found objects and finding inspiration from these objects and turning them into art like what he did in Monogram. Rauschenberg believed that painting related to "both art and life. Neither can be made." Following from this belief, he created artworks that move between these states in constant dialogue with the viewers and the surrounding world, as well as with art history. He allowed the chance to determine the placement and combination of the different found images and objects in his artwork such that there were no predetermined arrangements or meanings embedded within the works. This idea is demonstrated in one of his pieces called ‘Canyon’ where its upper half is a mass of materials that include bits of a shirt, printed paper, a squashed tube of paint, and photographs all seemingly held in place by broad slashes of house paint, while its lower half consists of a stuffed bald eagle with outstretched wings about to lift off from an opened box. The box seems to balance precariously upon a beam that tilts downward to the right; its end point meets the frame. As if that were not enough, that beams suspend a pillow dangling below the frame and squeezed in half by the cloth
string that holds it. Rauschenberg took inspiration from Andy Warhol borrowing the silk-screen stencil technique for applying photographic images to large expanses of canvas, reinforcing the images and unifying them compositionally with broad strokes of paint reminiscent of Abstract professions brushwork. These works draw on themes from modern American history and popular culture and are notable for their sophisticated composition and the spatial relations of the objects depicted in them. Rauschenberg states in an interview, “The past and the future don’t interest me,” Rauschenberg once declared. “I am in the present. I try to extol the present with my limits, but by using all my resources.” Some of his works were influenced by visits with artists in such countries as China, Japan, and Mexico. In 1998 he received the Japan Art Association’s Premium Imperial prize for painting.

Audience-

Rauschenberg was one of the best generation of artists, writers and musicians who attacked the barrier between art and life. Rauschenberg was known to capture the audience through his work through bright colour’s and strange realistic pieces of art. Rauschenberg’s artwork ‘Reservoir’, focuses more on the picture then the colour, he was trying to capture the audience. It Combines oil, pencil, fabric, wood, and metal on canvas with two electric clocks, rubber tread wheel, and spoked wheel rim.
The reservoir was referring to the passage of time, that’s why the clocks are painted in the painting.
In some of his work Rauschenberg tries to get people’s attention with little paintings by making them unusual and extraordinary. Rauschenberg’s main goal with his art was to purposely play with people minds daring them to fill in the blanks of his work and creativity. In ‘Reservoir’, it’s not just a normal painting. It includes, fabric, wood, glass, graphite, paint and rubber. These elements do not ass up to a single meaning. Instead they convey both the randomness and order that Rauschenberg saw in everyday life and what he wanted his audience to see in his artwork making their own mind on what they see. Rauschenberg held an exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou DECEMBER 20, 2005–APRIL 2, 2006. This exhibition was a comprehensive survey of the highly inventive body of work that Robert Rauschenberg (American, b. 1925) terms "combines." Among the sixty-seven works on view are several that have never before been shown publicly. With these mixed-media works of art, Rauschenberg reinvented collage, changing it from a medium that presses commonplace materials to serve illusion into something very different: a process that undermines both illusion and the idea that a work of art has a unitary meaning. Appearing as either wall-hung works or as freestanding objects, the combines are composed as syncopated grids that draw on materials from everyday life and the history of
art.

Frames-
Rauschenberg worked under subjective framework and the structural frame. In Rauschenberg’s work distinctively works in the subjective because his work allows people to imagine what they see within the work that he has created. Rauschenberg’s works do not have a meaning behind them he always aimed for his audience to come up with their own concept for the piece. He works in the structural frame through using everyday objects that are found. He believes the rubbish is not junk and so he used these things throughout both sculpture making and to add textures in his canvas paintings, he also adds symbols within such as clocks.