Robert Rauschenberg The Early 1950s

Ceiling & Lightbulb, 1950, gelatin silver photograph
38.0 x 37.9cm image; 50.4 x 40.4cm sheet 

No 5 New York City, 1980, gelatin silver photograph
48.0 x 32.5cm image; 50.5 x 40.0cm sheet

Known largely as a pop artist and painter, Robert Rauschenberg was originally a photographer, an art form he would later return to, capturing in his unique way the oddities of everyday life. Stimulated by a commission to design a stage set for the dancer Trisha Brown, he returned to photography to capture new images as source material for the work. Using similar collage techniques to his paintings, Rauschenberg forms his compositions through the lens rather than in the darkroom, preferring the adventure of waiting until the photographic frame is full of the right ingredients; light, shadow, form and truth.1 Believing that perfection is death, Rauschenberg re-creates a sensation, an instant in which the photograph can comprise moments and things unseen by the naked eye, resulting in truth with a little chance thrown in.
‘No 4 Los Angeles’ 1981 (AGNSW collection) and ‘No 5 New York City’ reflect Rauschenberg’s anomalous approach to the image that acquires ‘a presence due to a lack of literal reference and in some cases the aggressive absence of internal information’.2 Like moments from a Jacques Tati film, these images are reflections of Rauschenberg’s meanderings through the streets of Los Angeles and New York, shooting whatever captures his imagination and eye. Shot in the middle of the day, the bicycle, a vehicle of speed and high manoeuvrability, is instead at rest. He has chosen to photograph the bike as fractured; its front half missing with no means to direct itself, the only hint of its desire for speed being in the sharp angle of its shadow. The close shot of a water fountain in ‘No 4 Los Angeles’ reveals the chance of redemption in the drinking of the chilled holy water. The interplay of shapes and strange objects reveals his interest in the odd juxtapositions of life, such as the sign ‘Holy Water’ and the sign ‘Free’ offering religious tracts to the lost, and the bell from which the call for salvation can be made. Each component forms a collage of information so familiar in his paintings.
1. Sayag A 1981, ‘Interview with Robert Rauschenberg, January 9 at Captiva Island, Florida’, ‘Robert Rauschenberg photographs’, Pantheon Books, New York
2. ibid
© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

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.

Bob: Irresistible Possibilities

Rebus, 1955 Robert Rauschenberg

"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore. Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it, and I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

Robert Rauschenberg interviewed on Captiva in 2000.