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Artist or Maker: Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925)
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Exhibited: Turin, Gian Enzo Sperone Arte Moderna,
Rauschenberg
, June 1964 (illustrated).
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art,
Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-64
, December 1990-March 1991, p. 163, no. 75 (illustrated).
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Notes: Property from a Distinguished Collection
Beginning in 1958, Rauschenberg experimented with a transfer process that allowed him to further integrate printed media directly onto the surface of his work. Using a chemical solvent that was made from either turpentine or lighter fluid, Rauschenberg was able to transfer printed images, either from newspapers, magazines or comic books, to his work by rubbing the back of an image face-down, often using a ball-point pen to do the rubbing. A reversal of the image would appear-- flipped-- often still displaying the highly gestural rubbings of the artist's hand.
The bulk of these musings resulted in transfer drawings which Roberta Smith has recently described as "part core sample of an era and part personal diary" (R. Smith, "A Rarely Seen Side of a Rauschenberg Shift," The New York Times, March 8, 2007). But in the Fall of 1962, Rauschenberg embarked on a limited series of silkscreen paintings, from which the present work is an important example, of which only seventy-nine remain. In 1964, when he was awarded the first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, Rauschenberg phoned a friend and asked him to destroy the screens that were used to make the silkscreen paintings, thereby increasing their rarity and cementing their importance within the canon for future generations.
The present work is rare indeed, one of only three known silkscreen paintings completed in such an intimate format-- 30 x 40 inches. Executed on a pre-primed "readymade" canvas, which still retains the thin, silver frame that Rauschenberg initially created for it, Stunt displays the essential techniques that developed in the transfer drawings but on a new conceptual and formal level. Instead of using a transfer process or lithography as he had once done at ULAE, Rauschenberg employs a silkscreen process, culling photographs from the mass media and his own personal archives which were then commercially transferred onto a photo-sensitized screen. Clearly Rauschenberg favored some images to others, since many of the same photographic images reappear throughout the series. Most notable, of course, are those most recognizably American images: the lunar landing, the bald eagle, JFK, the Statue of Liberty, etc. But within Rauschenberg's visual lexicon one finds some of his favorites, many of which appear within Stunt.
The "breakdown" of a photographic image into an abstraction of itself is perhaps nowhere more brilliantly illustrated than in the crate of Sunkist oranges in Stunt. The image reappears throughout the silkscreen paintings time and again. In Stunt, the text of the Sunkist display is retained-- juxtaposed to the right of the image of the oranges-- a technique that prefigures Rauschenberg's frequent incorporation of language in the works of the late '60s-- and it shares affinities with both Marcel Duchamp and Ed Ruscha. The silkscreen process used in depicting the crate of oranges itself is multi-layered and off-set, again calling to mind the hand of the artist and the primacy of the process itself, which Roberta Smith recently described as "a flickering, almost strobelike effect, [in which] images seem to rise to the surface like memories through a scrim-or through the static of a television set." (R. Smith, Ibid).
Rauschenberg included three other important images in Stunt: a view from the cockpit of a space craft taken from the NASA archives, a picture of the sea, painted blue by the artist, and the familiar diagram of a box which Rauschenberg has repeatedly used since he began the series of Silkscreen Paintings in the fall of 1962. It is this blend of high and low, of mass media imagery (such as the NASA image) with personal investigation (in the recurring geometric shapes) that is the hallmark of Rauschenberg's style- one in which images have no essential hierarchy on a very leveled playing field. This notion appealed to Rauschenberg, and he elaborated on its importance, saying:
"The logical or illogical relationship between one thing and another is no longer a gratifying subject to the artist as the awareness grows that even in his most devastating or heroic moment he is part of the density of an uncensored continuum that neither begins nor ends with any decision of his. The use of the familiar is obscure, the use of the exotic is familiar. Neither sacrifices completely its origin, but the mind has to follow just as the eye has to change to focus. In the end a viewed painting has been an invitation, not a command."
Though Stunt, and the other works in the series would come to define Pop, there are holdovers from Abstract Expressionism that exert their importance time and again, which is especially evident in the highly expressive gestural brushstrokes and the insistant incorporation of color and geometric shape to "compose" the finished piece. Circles, for instance, reappear like totems time and again in Rauschenberg's works, a fact that perhaps alludes to his training at Black Mountain College with the penultimate colorist, Josef Albers. In contrast to Warhol, Rauschenberg repeatedly insists on the importance of the role of the artist, employing a wide variety of painterly touches in terms of drips, brushstrokes and rubbings, always pointing out the jarring contrast between the commercially-produced image and the handicraft of the artist's work.
