I think that the first time I saw this was when I was a teenager in the '80s, and I think
it is the first Rauschenberg that I ever saw.
And as a sculptor, I'm a sculptor, but I'm very interested in always talking about the
edge between sculpture and architecture, the edge between sculpture and painting, the edge
between sculpture and the moving image.
So this was actually a really, really important painting/sculpture for me, because it really
showed me what that discussion is.
It's so precise, it does so many things at once.
This painting for me is so much about gravity, the fact that everything in it is being pulled
down in real time and real space, that the paint is dripping, that the pillow is sagging.
If you look at the bottom half of it, it's really almost all the quilt.
It was just these drips, and then as you go sort of through, it's almost like a horizon
line, as very much like a landscape too, in that you see the paint, you see the painting hand.
But then you think about knitting, you think about scraps, you think about the brush, that
kind of touch, you think about it tucking, you think about the hand, of course the drawing,
and this is very important.
You think about all of these different ways of touch and creation and in very, very different
ways, in very diverse ways, all knitted together.
One of the very fundamentally important things about Rauschenberg, and he talked about
this a lot, was how he played with the intersection of art and everyday life, and he would always
play in that sort of space in between.
And one of the things that's nice about this piece is that its identity as a painting,
or as a very familiar object that we know is something you immediately are caught in between, right.
And so you start to think about things that you probably should be thinking about or could
be thinking about in any artwork, like the height that it's hung, right.
Because you have this sense of trying to wanna move into it.
So you start thinking, "Well, why is it hung that high?
Why is it on the floor?
Why doesn't it rest?
Why shouldn't we put it horizontal?"
These are just fundamental questions that you can ask about any artwork, but this simplicity
of the proposal, of making a painting into a bed or a bed into a painting, that flipping,
is so sort of very, very simple, fundamental idea I think in Rauschenberg.
This idea of, I don't know where in the process it is, and that process is completely flipping.
"Is it something I found in everyday art that I made art, or was it art that then became everyday?"
This is about a bed, it's how a bed acts in real space.
Where you have sex, where you die, where you give birth.
It has this incredible intimacy of a site that is then sort of revealed.
the greatest gift of being an artist is that you can actually have a conversation through
work without being there.
That when you leave work behind, you're actually having a conversation way beyond yourself.
And I think that, for him, he loved, and he wanted people to see that he was doing that
in real time.
And there's a kind of privacy of the conversation that becomes public when you see it.
And I do think that kind of intimacy is very specific to Rauschenberg, a willingness to
be tender, to be intimate, to share kind of a very interior urgency, an urgency to share
a kind of interior self publicly,
so I actually made a piece that was completely an homage to this piece, which is a piece
that was also a painting, but that you'd turn the volume up on sculpture So, what would
be the formal properties that you would turn up?
You would turn up gravity, you would turn up sculpture in the round.
You'd do everything that you can do in a sculpture that you can't do in a painting.
You would make it portable.
You would make it site-specific wherever it went.
You would make it always in conversation with the architecture, and not just with the wall.
You would kill the frame.
So, "Hammock" was really a direct homage to "Bed,"
So, it was in many ways, in my mind, it was, it did things like the bed, it had things
about it, the intimacy of a location where one sleeps, where someone rests.
It had the figurative nature of it feeling like a place that was somewhere you could
sit, somewhere you could lie down.
But also was, really harnessed this idea of negative space and of the air around it, so
that, you know, it was almost as there as it wasn't there, that it could almost disappear
in a way, that the frame of it spilled out in many ways into the space around it, in
a way that you can't do with a painting.
I think that Rauschenberg, very much his persona was as a diplomat, as a poet, as a friend to artists.
But I think most importantly, he was rebellious.
And while he brought people in, he was constantly undermining the authority of the system he worked in