Tuesday 13 April 2010

Rauschenberg | Cardbird

 Cardbird VI 1971 
 from 'Cardbird' series, 1971, print, stencil, planographic, collage

Technique: colour photolithograph, screenprint, tape, polyethylene, coated with acrylic polymer on paper laminated to corrugated cardboard

Rauschenberg has suggested that his choice of cardboard as a material was the result of his wish ‘to work in a material of waste and softness’. The Cardbird series is a tongue-in-cheek visual joke. It is in fact a printed mimic of cardboard constructions. The labour intensive process remains invisible to the viewer – the artist created a prototype cardboard construction which was then photographed and the image transferred to a lithographic press and printed before a final lamination onto cardboard backing. By choosing the most mundane of materials, Rauschenberg once again succeeds in a glamorous make-over of the most ordinary. The Cardbird series is an exploration of a new order of materials, a radical scrambling of the material hierarchy of Modernism.

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