I think that the first time I saw this was
when I was a teenager in the '80s, and I think it is the first Rauschenberg that I ever saw. And as a sculptor, I'm a sculptor, but I'm
very interested in always talking about the edge between sculpture and architecture, the
edge between sculpture and painting, the edge between sculpture and the moving image. So this was actually a really, really important
painting/sculpture for me, because it really showed me what that discussion is. It's so precise, it does so many things at
once. This painting for me is so much about gravity,
the fact that everything in it is being pulled down in real time and real space, that the
paint is dripping, that the pillow is sagging. If you look at the bottom half of it, it's
really almost all the quilt. It was just these drips, and then as you go
sort of through, it's almost like a horizon line, as very much like a landscape too, in
that you see the paint, you see the painting hand. But then you think about knitting, you think
about scraps, you think about the brush, that kind of touch, you think about it tucking,
you think about the hand, of course the drawing, and this is very important. You think about all of these different ways
of touch and creation and in very, very different ways, in very diverse ways, all knitted together. One of the very fundamentally important
things about Rauschenberg, and he talked about this a lot, was how he played with the intersection
of art and everyday life, and he would always play in that sort of space in between. And one of the things that's nice about this
piece is that its identity as a painting, or as a very familiar object that we know
is something you immediately are caught in between, right. And so you start to think about things that
you probably should be thinking about or could be thinking about in any artwork, like the
height that it's hung, right. Because you have this sense of trying to wanna
move into it. So you start thinking, "Well, why is it hung
that high? Why is it on the floor? Why doesn't it rest? Why shouldn't we put it horizontal?" These are just fundamental questions that
you can ask about any artwork, but this simplicity of the proposal, of making a painting into
a bed or a bed into a painting, that flipping, is so sort of very, very simple, fundamental
idea I think in Rauschenberg. This idea of, I don't know where in the process
it is, and that process is completely flipping. "Is it something I found in everyday art that
I made art, or was it art that then became everyday?" This is about a bed, it's how a bed acts in
real space. Where you have sex, where you die, where you
give birth. It has this incredible intimacy of a site
that is then sort of revealed. the greatest gift of being an artist is that
you can actually have a conversation through work without being there. That when you leave work behind, you're actually
having a conversation way beyond yourself. And I think that, for him, he loved, and he
wanted people to see that he was doing that in real time. And there's a kind of privacy of the conversation
that becomes public when you see it. And I do think that kind of intimacy is very
specific to Rauschenberg, a willingness to be tender, to be intimate, to share kind of
a very interior urgency, an urgency to share a kind of interior self publicly, so I actually made a piece that was completely
an homage to this piece, which is a piece that was also a painting, but that you'd turn
the volume up on sculpture So, what would be the formal properties that you would turn
up? You would turn up gravity, you would turn
up sculpture in the round. You'd do everything that you can do in a sculpture
that you can't do in a painting. You would make it portable. You would make it site-specific wherever it
went. You would make it always in conversation with
the architecture, and not just with the wall. You would kill the frame. So, "Hammock" was really a direct homage to
"Bed," So, it was in many ways, in my mind, it was,
it did things like the bed, it had things about it, the intimacy of a location where
one sleeps, where someone rests. It had the figurative nature of it feeling
like a place that was somewhere you could sit, somewhere you could lie down. But also was, really harnessed this idea of
negative space and of the air around it, so that, you know, it was almost as there as
it wasn't there, that it could almost disappear in a way, that the frame of it spilled out
in many ways into the space around it, in a way that you can't do with a painting. I think that Rauschenberg, very much his persona
was as a diplomat, as a poet, as a friend to artists. But I think most importantly, he was rebellious. And while he brought people in, he was constantly
undermining the authority of the system he worked in
