I don't think I actually liked Rauschenberg's work when I first saw it.
Rauschenberg seemed too anarchic for me, it was too much about the world.
But I think Rauschenberg is really interesting in that sense of being able to pull so much
of the world into the work.
And the world is a anarchic, you know, so it is a kind of reflection of what the world is.
But he also knows how to compose a picture, so there is that sort of odd tension between
like there is lace and there's red paint and there's newspapers and there's an eagle and
there's, you know, whatever.
But it all works somehow.
And that's kind of his challenge to other artists, is like how do you make all that work
He has an incredible eye but also it's a challenge in terms of an approach to the world in artwork,
you know?
Like what is an artwork?
What does it reflect?
How does it sit in the world?
And does the newspaper stop there or does it...?
Yeah, it stops there.
Right, okay.
Because I think you would see it through the black.
Yeah, all right.
And this is definitely asphalt, tar.
Oh, it's tar?
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of abstraction is about not having markers of time, a kind of timelessness.
And Rauschenberg's abstraction has these markers of time in it because "Ashville Citizen,"
"Untitled (Ashville Citizen)," has newspaper in it.
So you're looking at that newspaper and you realize it's from a specific date and has
a specific content in it.
So you're always aware that it's made at a particular moment.
I think it's interesting in this painting that the newspaper is so legible, because
most of the other paintings that I've seen, black paintings, red paintings, which
use newspaper or use paper in them, the paper is just paper.
It's not really meant to be read as such.
But in "Asheville Citizen," you're very aware because it takes up so much of the canvas
that it is a newspaper.
And it's quite legible.
And it's actually quite interesting because it's 1951, it's North Carolina.
It's the segregated south.
So you see ads for employment or real estate.
And then in the middle of the page, you know, where are those wants ads are, is the colored section
And it's interesting to me that the paper just happens to be called "Asheville Citizen"
because that implies a wide range of citizens.
But clearly, in the segregated south in the '50s, "citizenship" needs to be said in quotes.
So whether he is aware that or was thinking about that, I don't know.
I don't know the scholarship well enough but I think it reads to us now in very interesting ways.
This painting has these want ads in it, has a colored section, and the structure of the
painting is this newspaper that at one point was, you know, newspaper color—
white—and then has these borders of black, you know?
And so the structure of what you're seeing in the newspaper on the physical page is somewhat
echoed for me in the structure of the painting itself, these dividing lines between these
different colors.
You know, Rauschenberg is an artist that likes to put a lot of different
things together.
And so he becomes a model a way to do that.
He sort of models that behavior
And in some ways, I always feel like he's one of those artists that I'm constantly trying to catch up with
He's always kind of the future, you know?
Even though these paintings are from the 50s, they're all still kind of the future, you know?
When I'm switching from say, painting to a photo project or a film project,
it's about a kind of necessity.
The things that I wanna say in that photo project or in that film project are not possible
to say in painting.
And maybe that's my failing as an artist is I haven't, you know, kind of dived in deep
enough into painting to figure out how to say certain kinds of things.
But I think it's also interesting to work in a medium you don't know much about, partially
because you just, you learn things.
And what's the point of making art if not to learn things?
I admire that ability to constantly embrace the new.
Or not even embrace the new within the genre that one might know him for but decide I'm
going to do sets or I'm going to, you know, work with dancers and choreograph something.
Or I'm gonna make a giant bubbling pool of mud as a sculpture.
I kind of like that he just embraced these new technologies and new ways of working and
that they kind of free up, you know, his practice to all these other avenues.
It's really interesting to me but also a bit unnerving, you know?
My bubbling mud paintings are coming.