SFMOMA Gallery Talk : Response to Robert Rauschenberg’s Scanning

Robert Rauschenberg and the Agility of Images

Responses : Gallery Talks (starts at 14:18)

Saturday, February 10, 2018

What aspect of Robert Rauschenberg’s use of photographic images is most relevant for you, or for artists working today?

When I told my partner that I was going to be doing a response piece to Rauschenberg for the SFMOMA, their reaction was “Wait, don’t you hate his work?” 

Well, it’s complicated.

SO my relationship with Rauschenberg is indeed complicated. Or at least it was complicated, but less so now. Long before this exhibit and the colloquium, what I knew about Rauschenberg was very much all textbook. It was all about White Paintings, Tire Tracks, and “A Very Important Goat”.

It was because of this exhibit, and being able to spend many hours with so many varied pieces of his work, that I got to come to appreciate his work. It was because of the colloquium, and those many meetings and conversations at the annex, that i feel like Bob and I would have been friends.

I imagine that I would call him Bobby and he would call me Murphy and we would laugh at me being shouldered with an nickname based on a Cursed Law, an Epigram of perpetual doom. He would phone me from time to time to come and Kinkaju sit when he would need to travel. He didn’t have a cat you see, he had a Kinkaju, which is like a nocturnal marsupial cat monkey thing. Whose foot prints you can see here in this work.  Her name was Sweetie. Adorable right?

Anyhow, when I was originally approached about the colloquium my reaction was “Wait, he’s a photographer?” But I have seen some of his actual photographs, I mean the the actual prints, and I can tell you, that man had some pretty fine photographic chops.  Quite admirable. Very nice silver gelatin work. Remember how I said we would be friends? …  He was a photographer, with mad technical skills, who also painted, did performance pieces, and assembled things. An artist who created his own ways of making, new techniques, new processes, and highly experimental forms of making work.

He had drive to not let things fade away. He was a bit of an artistic resurrectionist. He made a statement in an interview about how he came across a 2nd hand goat in a used office supply store, how he found it a little bit sad, and he wanted to give it a second life. A little bit of paint.. A little bit of tire, and you have the Assemblage “Monogram” . He did the same thing with photographs, not just his, but ones that he would collect. He would recycle, reuse, and remix the same images over and over. 

You see the same photographic screens and transfers showing up again and again, not as a theme, but as a through line connecting these paintings; not only to a specific moment in time, but to one another, as a narrative and perhaps a puzzle that we get to sort out. 

He is taking photographs, which in our brains act as a direct window into the past of a very particular moment, and he is melting away that specificity. He is manipulating that experience we have with photos and making into something far more fluid. He was taking the images from media (newspaper, magazines, etc) and flipping them, painting them out, and sometimes literally dissolving them to make new works, new narratives.He is inviting us to tell our own stories with this work.

Through all of this the impact of the image isn’t diminished at all in the process of de-rezzing that photo. And frankly, he is enhancing the impact of the images by removing some of the specificity we expect in photographs. He is elevating vernacular images (east hampton beach or water towers of nyc) by combining, flipping, mashing, and remixing them. That process he used is eyeopening to me as a photographer. He is showing me the power of the photograph isn’t bound solely in the formalistic darkroom print, but can be and is able to thrive in other dynamic environments.

I think we are at an interesting point in the history of the photographic image. More and more images are being made that are meant to be consumed, double tapped, and then immediately forgotten. We are at a point where the fundamental idea of what a photograph actually is, has been and is being called into question. That can be very scary for many people, but it can also be a very exciting time. Something new is going to happen. Something we can’t predict. I think Rauschenberg would have been like “ALL RIGHT! Lets do this!” 

I don’t know if he was actually technophile, but I do know he was always pressing the boundaries of what current technologies could do. He would take something, like a new digital printer, and turn it on it’s head to create a new transfer technique. I think today he would be printing 3D goats with a spray plastic printer, than he would have hacked another ink jet pritner that would be printing news images and instagram photos over the goat again and again. Once the first image was printed, it would be splashed with acetate and then a new image would be printed on top of it. He didn't like the static form. Look at the other paintings, prints and assemblages around the exhibit, a lot of them have “variable installation methods”... he wanted the work to change and not be stuck. 

As an artist today I quite often feel the pressure to be making new things all the time, sort of this insatiable push from outside forces to always be moving forward, or more specifically moving on from the last thing, that one thing you just started to figure out. Raushechenburg is using a lot of his old material, previous photos and screens, in years of work. His way of making art makes me feel its ok to recycle yourself. That as a technician its ok to master a technique, just so that you can break it to make it do what you want… those take aways are priceless.

I don’t have to be a painter, or a photographer or a writer, I can do all of those things, and just be an artist, and that is ok. I mean I am not saying that I am going to design costumes or sets for a dance troop, but I am not going to say NO should the opportunity arise.  (Call me...)

In the spirit of being free from the confines of artistic boxes, I want to read you something. While I am reading it I am going to wander about the room a little, but ignore me. I mean ignore my pacing, but keep your eyes on this work here. Ok? It will be less than five minutes, I promise. Keep your eyes on this...

.oOo.

Sink in and take a deep breath, I’m going to tell you a story. 

The whole thing started in the after hours, while we were already three drinks in. The night had just slipped past that point, that feeling of “oh, its far too late” and was just starting to to push out of it’s dark alley chrysalis, slowly beating its newborn wings in the air of “it is far too early”. 

Embracing the timeless rituals of smoke, fire, tobacco. Kinshi Golden Bat cigarettes dangling from fingers and chapped lips, smoldering effigies soon to be bent and snuffed out among its fellow fallen soldiers in glass, ceramic, and tin can coffins.

Bobby standing there in perfect greek contrapasto, not a right angle to be found anywhere in his body, backlit and framed in three perfectly indexical white walls, segmented into a mute jazz tempo, he silently gestured as if he were winding back the hands of a clock to a previous time when the thought began.

Stumbling more than maneuvering through piles of tare sheets, monochromatic, and four color athenaeums, cataloging the short but impactful lives of this starlet or that leading man, smiling faces buried under sheets of grainy rockets, risographs of experimental military machines, and contact sheets of dance recitals. All fodder, all equal game to be transformed and combined, not on a lost distant island at sea, but in this new york walkup. 

We would talk of men, trapped in roles, stuck in titles and lofted into positions, somehow being ordained exalted, and, untouchable. Literally being stuck below those who live above you. A place where desperate men, those who do care and respect those who came before them but struggle in those lingering shadows. Humoring frustration fueled plans of collecting and breeding mosquitoes as pets, high above a city, so large now that they no longer suck blood alone, but proboscis drain the culture from every pore of a city. Constantly hungry. 

Captives in a cathedral of cages, hobbling the creatures who are truly free, a vain attempt to salve our envy of those things that fly. Dancing, jumping, speeding, finally strapping our fragile bodies onto and into pillars of dedicated and precisely directed explosions, launching ourselves towards heavenly bodies, congratulating ourselves about our own brilliance and the oh so temporary defeat of gravity. All the time snow white doves shake their heads, giggling themselves sillly and coo’ing something that sounds like the word “amateurs”. 

Skylines and horizons push and pull, as if the 1906 shimmy was simply a warm up song. Unbalanced unstable tripping into a motion of dance. Turning, bending, twisting in pairs, with grace and matador poise caught in a exaggerated tug of war with the three graces and their younger sister Peitho. 

Radio dishes and umbrellas modified for better reception, listening to the breath of static. Scanning, turning, and tuning, attempting to connect to something far off, something distant and different, trying to make a connection that is beyond the common, one where we don’t need to talk, but maybe we can just understand one another. Loss, Lies, and Love alike. Transmitting and receiving to a truly different place, where these feeling, these alien feelings, are actually more common than not.

In the impatient knock of the morning light, water towers become lighthouses in the distant fading night. Dissolving exactitude to meld and transform, combining distant walls between layers to loosen the preconceived and invite the unexpected. Spaces, empty spaces, left so we have room to exhale, we have room to tell our own story, a sandbox beach were all the play is deadly serious, where everything and I do mean ev-er-re-thing can be reimagined, recontextualized and nothing is sacrosanct.