Reflections and Ruminations
Robert Rauschenberg: Reflections and Ruminations
Museum of Outdoor Arts
1000 Englewood Parkway #230, Englewood, CO, 80110
Feb. 24, 2020-March 20, 2021
Admission: $10 + fees (Reserve your ticket here)
Review by Cori Anderson
The Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) in Englewood called Reflections and Ruminations showcases over 50 artworks, mostly from the later years of the artist’s career. Presenting a slightly nostalgic and sometimes sentimental version of Rauschenberg, the show focuses primarily on artwork he created in the 1990s and 2000s, when he seemed to be looking back at his own life. It’s the first major Rauschenberg solo exhibition in Colorado since 1981 and has taken five years to develop, organize, and curate. Perhaps because of this massive undertaking, the result is a show that requires a bit more sophisticated knowledge of Rauschenberg, or at least the desire to learn more about his life and career.
The director of the MOA, Cynthia Madden Leitner, met the artist in 1980—when he was in his 50s — through her parents who were friends and fans. Rauschenberg passed away in 2008. In 2015 John Madden, Leitner’s father, offered some of his Rauschenberg works to put on display and connected Leitner with another collector who eventually lent the largest number of pieces for the exhibition. For the last two years, the MOA has worked with the curatorial team of Dan Jacobs and Associates to finish assembling the show. Since Rauschenberg is known more widely for his Combines (works that combined painting and sculpture), his performance and installation work, and the rebellious attitude he possessed toward accepted artistic genres and norms—and most recently his homosexuality—the show at the MOA is something different than a career retrospective. It provides a collector’s perspective, and in some ways this is appropriate for Rauschenberg, who insisted on leaving many aspects of his art up to chance.
Although the title Reflections and Ruminations sounds like it could refer to an expansive view of the artist and his work, the terms are heavy with other meanings. The “reflections” refer to both the reflective quality of many of the surfaces that Rauschenberg used to imprint images onto—glass and metal that allow the viewer to see their own reflection amidst the art—as well as the fact that Rauschenberg was constantly inserting images and details from his life into what he created. The “ruminations” are about Rauschenberg’s recollections of his own life—a practice that he repeated at various times, but particularly in the 1990s when most of the works in the exhibition were made.
Robert Rauschenberg, In Case You Need A Hand, 1995, solvent transfer, acrylic, and collage on paper, 11 x 8.25 inches. From a private collection. Image by DARIA.
The show literally begins with Rauschenberg’s hand—a drawn outline of it, at least. It sets the scene for the exhibition with its combination of direct mark-making and a transfer image, but also with the focus on the mark of the artist himself. From the collector’s perspective, the mark of an artist is perhaps the most precious part of any work. It holds the weight of authenticity. The dichotomy here is that Rauschenberg constantly questioned the role of the artist during his career, looking instead for randomness and chance to make artistic decisions, yet the proof of this work and others in the exhibition show his use of personal touches. Rauschenberg’s working method comes across in three ways: through his use of images and material that were close to home, the labor-intensive printmaking processes he utilized and perfected, and his passion for individuation within mechanical repetition.
Robert Rauschenberg, John (Ruminations series), 1999, photolithograph, 29.5 x 38.8 inches. Edition of 46, published by Universal Limited Art Editions. The Madden Collection, University of Denver. Image by DARIA.
In a series of photographic montages in the Ruminations section, Rauschenberg uses images of himself alongside photographs of some of his closest friends from the 1950s and 60s who became quite famous themselves. These include the collector Ileana Sonnabend; the founder of Universal Limited Art Editions (a fine art print business) Tatyana Grosman; the dancer Steve Paxton; the composer John Cage; and the visual artists Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. Unfortunately, none of the accompanying texts in the exhibition explain the complicated relationships Rauschenberg had with these people.
Despite this gap of information, the Ruminations feels more intimate than other works by Rauschenberg. Made in the ‘90s, later in Rauschenberg’s life, these photolithographic prints feature scenes from the years when his career took off. John, for instance, features images of John Cage and the car he used to help Rauschenberg create his 1953 print of a tire track (Automobile Tire Print, not included in this exhibition). In this photolithograph as well as the others in the series, the way Rauschenberg brushed the developing chemicals almost haphazardly across the surface brings a gestural, painterly quality to the photographs, giving the impression they are only remembered in fragments with fading colors.
Robert Rauschenberg, Lotus II (Lotus series), 2008, framed pigmented ink-jet with photogravure, 45.75 x 60.75 inches. Edition of 50, published by and in the collection of Universal Limited Art Editions. Image by DARIA.
In a separate gallery space where the walls are painted in dark tones and termed “Meditations” by the MOA, four pigmented ink-jet photogravure prints are on display. Made in 2008, right before the artist’s death, these four works are part of a larger collection of 12 originals called Lotus which was created for an exhibition at Da Feng Gallery in Beijing. The images come from photographs taken by Rauschenberg during his travels in China between 1982 and 1985. Although Rauschenberg could not have known when he was taking the photos, he brought back hundreds of images that documented China before modernization and Westernization changed the landscape forever. His initial trip in 1982 sparked his desire to return there a few years later with the internationally touring exhibition called Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI). Ultimately though, the room is a somber space to reflect on the end of Rauschenberg’s life.
Another focus of the exhibition is Rauschenberg’s manual process, which betrays something peculiar about his work: everything was made horizontally but is displayed vertically. When a printmaker etches, draws, chisels, or cuts a design into a plate or other surface, it’s often placed flat on a table. With lithography, for instance, the stone weighs far too much to prop up or place on an easel. Because Rauschenberg worked on horizontal surfaces, every corner of the piece was treated the same. It gives his work the sensation of being horizon-less, of existing in zero gravity. And it forces the viewer to consider Rauschenberg’s decision-making while making each piece.
The labor-intensive processes Rauschenberg undertook in the creation of his work are as highly emphasized in this exhibition as his own unique techniques. Sienna Brown, PhD, wrote in an essay included in the exhibition catalog that Rauschenberg used a “personal logic of printmaking” to elevate and innovate in the field. [1] And indeed, whether he used a broken stone tablet for a lithographic print (Accident, 1963), painted the tire tread marks of an actual car that drove onto sewn-together pieces of paper (Automobile Tire Print, 1953), or worked with photo developing chemicals and etchings (Ruminations series, 1999), Rauschenberg followed his own rules of printmaking. [2]
The back room of the main gallery features several works from the years when Rauschenberg toured the world and the U.S. for ROCI (pronounced “rocky”). In Narcissus (1990) and other pieces in the room, Rauschenberg used a fire wax technique to bring texture to the two-dimensional images. In his travels, he borrowed and learned from other cultures, adding images and processes that he had never used before. The resulting pieces of artwork are even more unique because of these influences and show a different side of Rauschenberg than most viewers would normally see.
Robert Rauschenberg, Pegasits (ROCI USA/Wax Fire Works series), 1990, acrylic, fire wax, and gilt silver leaf chair on stainless steel, 72.75 x 96.75 x 17.5 inches. Edition of 22, produced in collaboration with Saff Tech Arts. The Madden Collection, University of Denver. Image by DARIA.
In Pegasits (1990), a painted chair sticks out of the top left of the artwork, the artist’s fingerprints smear across the bottom left of the composition, and yet next to the signature there is the sign of a numbered print: 9/22. That’s because Rauschenberg made editions, even of sculptural work like Pegasits which required a painted chair to complete it. Rauschenberg had a particular assurance that repetition begat individuality, even if that individuality was not reflective of him but of the process itself. Rather than make 22 prints with as much precision as possible, Rauschenberg made 22 originals that happen to share the same basic elements. As he made each additional print, something changed, and thus each work is part of a small collection of originals rather than a series of copies of an original.
In the exhibition catalog, a quote from Rauschenberg distills this idea in the context of his printmaking loyalties. He said “the image that is made by a printer’s mat, a metal plate, a wet glass or a leaf plastically incorporated into a composition and applied to the stone stops functioning literally with its previous limitations. They are an artistic recording of an action as realistic and poetic as a brushstroke.” [2] Rauschenberg proved that something as mechanical as printmaking could also be intuitive, imperfect, and infinitely changeable.
For the last five years, Cori Anderson has written about art and culture for publications around Denver such as 303 Magazine, Westword, and 5280. While much of her focus has been geared toward creating more accessibility to art from the streets to the gallery, she writes for DARIA with a renewed motivation of catering to an art-loving audience. Cori's heavy focus on street art has resulted in the formation of her own business, The Street Art Network, which curates murals across the city and county of Denver. But her passion and curiosity range from the classics to the contemporaries in all mediums of artistic expression.
[1] Rupert Jenkins and Dan Jacobs, ed., Rauschenberg: Reflections and Ruminations (Englewood, CO: Museum of Outdoor Arts, 2020), 18.
[2] What the show does not explain, however, is how Rauschenberg’s rules sometimes infuriated others, like when Morton Beebe sued him for copyright infringement for a photograph used in the print Pull (1974) from the Hoarfrost series. See: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-richard-prince-first-artist-face-copyright-battles-warhol-rauschenberg.
[3] Jenkins and Jacobs, 42.
