Robert Rauschenberg - Pop Art Pioneer Full BBC Documentary 2016

[Music] in 1944 a young man called milton ernest rauschenberg embarked on a journey that would take him a million miles away from the sprawling oil refinery town where he'd been born to working class parents in 1925 his escape from port arthur a cultural desert on the steamy gulf coast of texas would eventually lead him to paradise by the time rauschenberg came here in 1970 and settled on this beautiful and remote island of captiva in florida he'd completely transformed his life it even changed his own name robert rauschenberg as he now called himself was by then a world famous artist with a retinue of assistants helping him create some of the most inventive and celebrated works of the 20th century [Music] today rauschenberg isn't really a household name like say jackson pollock or andy warhol but he really should be because no one else came close in working with such a bewildering array of different styles constantly experimenting with new and surprising materials during the course of a career that spanned six decades [Music] bob always was looking for the new as soon as he mastered one thing he would look for something else that would inspire him i'm not interested in doing what i know i can do or what i think i can do rauschenberg was a new type of artist one who embraced popular culture in all its trashy glory and expanded the possibilities of what an artwork could be from paintings and sculptures to paintings and sculptures combined he was able to break all these rules and dissolve all of these boundaries because he wasn't afraid of the consequences from silk screens and blueprints to works on metal and glass bob is the wind blowing through the art world for almost a century now pollinating everything from set and costume design to collaborations with musicians dancers and even scientists rauschenberg's endless curiosity saw him rewrite the artistic rulebook and anticipate every major art movement from the 50s onwards rauschenberg once said that the whole world was his canvas he was always a scavenger collecting life's flotsam and jetsam to create his wildly raucously inventive works of art anything and everything could be a material for him socks old bedspreads light bulbs fans mangled car parts metal signs even a common car tyre made a rubber made a petroleum maze from crude oil however far he traveled from his hometown of port arthur it was the product of those dirty texan oil refineries that would fuel the best of his art and keep him grounded [Music] he could make art from anything you know whether it's dirt or gold there was no such thing as low or high there was no eye hierarchy of art or material or people [Music] by talking to those who knew rauschenberg best i'm hoping to find out what drove this man in his restless quest for reinvention which saw him come from small town america to become one of the first truly global artists [Music] now there is one person who i've been really really desperate to talk to and that's rauschenberg's younger sister janet his only sibling now the only trouble is that she lives in louisiana and unfortunately she hasn't been able to fly out to meet me however i'm hoping that rauschenberg would have approved of this um my solution to the problem is to try and harness 21st century technology to talk to her via a video call so that's what i'm going to attempt to do now there we go janet hey there's so much that i want to ask you janet but the thing that i've been really trying to find out about is a little bit about port arthur and what life was like in texas port arthur is uh uh is a blue collar city for sure not that there's anything wrong with blue collar except that there was no art stuff going on yeah let me ask you about that because i wonder how easy was it for a young man who wants to be an artist to pursue his dreams in a place like that it was impossible and of course my daddy did not understand art at all not ever people did that for a hobby he had no encouragement ever but um mother was always totally behind ball she was a delightful little lady pretty and uh and silly and and and just a lot of fun and you know bob was silly i mean he was silly silly we used to have the best time because i'm silly if you couldn't have a good time then you couldn't go with him you had to just go by yourself go do something else you know but i do think that mother had a tremendous influence on bob [Music] for all he'd learned from his mother about making light of life rauschenberg was determined from the very start to forge a career in art after a stint in the navy he used his gi bill to get himself to art school in paris in 1948 [Music] but by the early 50s there was only one place to head to if he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist new york which by then had taken over from paris as the center of the world's avant-garde and the fact that he eventually managed to gain a foothold there and make a name for himself was largely down to this woman susie hello great to meet you thank you very much i'm in the right place you are so this is this is your studio right susan weil who at the age of 86 continues to paint in her new york studio met rauschenberg in the late 40s and it was she who led him to a place that would stimulate the unique way he went about making art hi aleister hello this is nice and natural now isn't it um let's start at the very beginning i mean how did you meet rauschenberg well when i graduated from high school i was a young 18 very juvenile and i was enrolled in the academy julian in paris and in the poncian where i was living there was a very huge laugh that boomed out now and then and it was bob he had the biggest booming laugh you could imagine do you remember what would you found so attractive about bob to begin with well he was so easy and friendly and wonderful and i loved his enthusiasm about art and his wonder at it because he grew up with people who were horrified about art and we kind of explored about art together in paris [Music] in late 1948 when susan returned to america to continue her studies at black mountain college rauschenberg followed her [Music] nestling in the remote hills of north carolina black mountain was a haven for progressive mines offering interdisciplinary classes to those who wish to experiment and expand the boundaries of art it had that feeling at what mountain that you could do anything you wanted to do you just try to do it in your own way so i'm so glad you found black mountain because bob grew up so fast about art he really did i think that was the first place he'd ever been where his non-conformism was echoed in almost everybody else he was in a nest of non-conformers and i think he loved the place he absolutely was was felt supremely happy there but while rauschenberg took to black mountain immediately his stern art teacher joseph albers a former member of the bauhaus didn't think much of his new student [Music] rob always said that ours was the most important teacher he ever had and he was sure that alberts felt he was the worst student that he'd ever had he started every class was saying i don't want to know who did that and everybody would turn and look at me joseph alberts was recognized ego when he saw it and he didn't think we had any right to an ego as we were young students so he had to wrestle with bob in the best way he could which was to put down his work and so on but he was also a very powerful teacher albers was incredibly expansive in what he thought could be included in a work of art so his students at black mountain would run out and gather natural materials they would gather cigarette butts they would gather trash from the dump heap and all of these things would become a work of art in fact in albert's classes the word combination was a mantra so it was a kind of tutoring in collage procedures [Music] along with alba's rauschenberg met two men at black mountain choreographer merce cunningham and composer john cage who'd become instrumental in helping him forge a collaborative approach to art with the help of cage and his model a ford whose wheels were inked black before being driven over 20 sheets of paper laid on the road rauschenberg created a piece of conceptual art that marked him out as a pioneer and together the three friends would go on to produce some of the most groundbreaking performances of the 50s and 60s with rauschenberg providing the sets and costumes cage the music and cunningham the choreography but it was an earlier collaboration with susan who rauschenberg had married in the summer of 1950 that first got him press attention this is the life magazine with an article about our blueprints so this is the collaboration that you did together yeah and it got featured in life i mean that's quite a big deal to begin with no we were still students i mean it was crazy to get that attention well maybe you could just describe how it worked so this is one of the big blueprints and the thing whether it's a person or a flower is covering a sensitive paper and when she gets up you put it under the shower and it turns blue and what about these photographs this is you and him yeah and this is your bathroom basically yeah and we had to share the bath and share the kitchen it wasn't easy so when we did blueprints our neighbor was fuming around because he couldn't go to the bathroom and of course 60 or plus years on these are major masterpieces do you feel proud well i mean what i feel is the wonder of finding a new way to work it was exciting you know and when you were making them you were so anxious to see how they came out it was just very exciting [Music] the editors of life magazine weren't the only ones to spot the originality of these works one was bought by the museum of modern art and included in their abstraction in photography exhibition in 1951 providing both the money and recognition the young rauschenberg craved but just as his career seemed to be taking off his relationship with susan who'd by then given birth to their son christopher was coming to an end after christopher was born bob went back to black mountain to do some teaching and so on and i went there that summer with chris he was a newborn baby and then i left black mountain was on my own after that while teaching at black mountain rauschenberg had fallen in love with a young painter called psy twombly bob and sai were gorgeous looking they were just you know dropped in beautiful both of them was black mountain the kind of place where if you were two young gay men in a relationship you could be fairly open about it well you know homosexuality during the 50s was different than it is now it was so hidden and i think it was hidden by homosexuals to themselves bob evidently didn't realize the degree to which he was a homosexual until then were you aware when you got married of rauschenberg's openness in terms of sexuality i didn't really understand it because i was a dopey teenager and the most he ever said about it was i find men attractive so the marriage fell apart but forever we were very dear friends we cared about each other a great deal and he adored christopher so that was all very positive [Music] by the mid-50s rauschenberg's relationship with twombly had ended can he return to new york intent on making a name for himself [Music] but he wouldn't find it easy to fit in the contemporary art scene was then dominated by the abstract expressionists and compared to their non-figurative paintings full of brooding introspection rauschenberg's exuberant works brimming with references to real life seem totally left field in a pioneering film by emil de antonio rauschenberg explained his approach to art that marked him out as a renegade you have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good abstract expressionist and i think i always considered that a waste it wasn't that he rejected them he didn't he didn't reject what they were doing he just wanted to open it up and most of them were very contemptuous of him because they felt he wasn't serious he felt he was doing things that were just silly childish antics no wonder perhaps when he was creating works like this in his a raised de kooning drawing made rather unmade in 53 rauschenberg acquired a drawing from the high priest of abstract expressionism willem de kooning and then proceeded to rub it out but de kooning captured here on film by robert snyder didn't make it easy for him he said i want to give you something really difficult to erase and he gave me something that had charcoal oil paint uh pencil crayon i spent a month erasing that that little drawing that's this big [Music] i think that that's one of the greatest conceptual documents in the history of art it was the first time that somebody created a work of art by subtraction an amazing thing to have done [Music] in his rebellion against the old guard rauschenberg soon found a willing accomplice jasper johns another young hopeful hailing from the south who'd become the most important person in his life i think at the beginning it was primarily love at first sight there was a poetic quality to john's that was very appealing to him it's amazing to me they ever had a relationship because bob is so opposite to jasper bob is so flamboyant and jasper is more contained [Music] despite their different temperaments rauschenberg and john's united in rejecting abstract expressionist angst their playful works which instead celebrated popular culture paved the way for pop art and eventually turned them into top selling artists but when rauschenberg and john's got together in the mid 50s they were still penniless and hungry rauschenberg was surviving on this minuscule food budget of just 15 cents a day he said that he couldn't even afford the ticket for a ride on the subway and they were living together in this condemned building in downtown manhattan without even hot water so rauschenberg began to scour the streets for discarded junk that he felt certain could be the raw and crucially free materials for his art [Music] during the 50s some american artists realized what the dad is in europe had known about 30 years before [Music] namely that societies reveal themselves in what they threw away street junk was to these men what the flea market had been to the surrealists and among them there was one hunting master a man in his twenties from texas named robert rauschenberg actually i had a kind of a house rule if i walked completely around the block and i didn't find enough to work with i could pick one other block in any direction to walk around but that was it he once described it he said i have a peculiar kind of focus i tend to see everything in sight [Music] he could look at the world around him uh uncritically he could see that as subject matter a torn comic strip lying on the street could be as usable as a runner sounds panic all of these things could be a source of imagery [Music] rauschenberg came up with a new term for these pioneering strange hybrid works of art he started creating in the 50s out of things he'd scavenged and that term was the combines and that's because they're part painting part sculpture and this is one of the very first combines of all it's called bed and there's a brilliant story attached to it about its creation here he is spring 1955 a destitute penniless artist and he runs out of canvas yet he still feels compelled to paint so what does he do he looks around him and he finds this old quilt and thinks aha i can use that i can paint on it but the thing he kept coming up against was that it always looked like a quilt so his light bulb moment if you like was to say well why don't i just create a painting of a bed so he added the pillow he added the sheet and he was very happy with the results but when it was first exhibited in the late 50s people were utterly shocked some of the reviews thought it looked violent disgusting one critic compared it to a police photo of a murder scene but that's not how rauschenberg saw this work at all he later said that this is one of the friendliest works of art that he ever created he said his biggest fear was that people might actually crawl in and want to have a little sleep and i think that's key it tells us exactly what rauschenberg was all about as an artist he was about inclusiveness welcoming in the world welcoming in reality to bridge that gap between art and life and make this something that we ordinary people can understand and relate to it's part of our world rather than some elite zone of high art at a very young age he was clear in what he didn't want to be which was a you know wishy-washy second generation abstract expressionist painter he just dispensed with this whole idea that paint served as a marker for someone's psychic state i mean he always insisted that things were just things and that was a key distinction between him and an older generation i'll tell you something that i find slightly puzzling about the 50s work you know you've characterized the way rauschenberg went about trying to dismantle abstract expressionism at the same time these combines are intensely personal autobiographical works here's his son there's the reading of the homoerotic content of one of the most famous combines monogram you know there's that famous robert hughes line that this is almost one of the most witty and compelling images of homosexual love of the goat penetrating the tyre oh i guess i haven't thought about that i'm sorry aleister really amazing um do you think it's got some credibility i'm sure it does i mean rashenberg is an artist creating works of art and his interests and the things in his life come in and therefore sexuality is part of it he is a young gay man in a pre-stonewall world and he's signaling his relationships in various ways through his work by the early 60s rauschenberg's combines had earned him a reputation as the bad boy of the new york art world but by then his relationship with jasper johns was over [Music] it ended because of a very trite lover's quarrel to be specific one day jasper came back and found bargainer compromising position with a dancer from the cunningham company i think it was very painful for them and and for their close friends for quite a long time afterwards because it had been an extraordinarily electrifying relationship some consolation for the mess in his personal life came in the form of the most prestigious professional recognition that any artist could hope for in 1964 rauschenberg became the first american to win the grand prize for painting at the venice biennale and in that same year he was given his first british retrospective at london's white chapel gallery an event important enough to be covered by the bbc yes did you check the bulbs well the belts are all right and i know it'll work at the moment the fantastically inventive scope of his work was quickly picked up by the british press this is a piece from the observer and it's headlined rauschenberg new pace setter in art here's another piece not just a joker an artist who solemnly presents us with a stuffed and grubby chicken perched on a box is a sitting target for mockery yet he says i'd warn against dismissing him as a pretentious joker in my view this 38 year old texan is the most important artist america has produced since jackson pollock in the 1940s rauschenberg has lived and worked in new york since 1951 but even now he's painting more he still likes mixed techniques on dodge he's used silk screen quite a lot his latest idea a printed transfer process which imposes a real photographic image on the canvas but has an unreal printed texture to offset the oil paint around it it was for his early silk screen paintings started around the same time that andy warhol seized on the technique that rauschenberg had won the prize in venice but rather than cash in on his success he did something most people would find incomprehensible his response to winning was to make a call to home to tell a friend to destroy all of his sex all of his silk screens so he was determined that once he was celebrated with a certain kind of work that he wasn't going to repeat it anymore and he pushed himself to reinvent himself wholly again perhaps not surprising then that just as rauschenberg was attracting international praise as a painter he decided to head off in a completely different direction [Music] there's a biographical fact about rauschenberg that i find particularly fascinating and that is he was a superb dancer despite the fact that growing up as a boy his parents were fundamentalist christians they'd been part of a very austere sect that banned drinking and gambling and dancing as well but in the 50s he started collaborating regularly with merce cunningham who had experimental dance company but it wasn't until the 60s that his passion for dancing for performing really took flight [Music] he's always worked at lots of different things likes to get away from painting for periods mostly into the theater in pelican his own role escape ballet rauschenberg reassured the other dancers by trying out the movements himself even the music is his own sound combine some of the performances that he did were stunning the dance on roller skates every time it just had you your heart was in your throat you were scared that something bad was going to happen because it looked so dangerous and it was and oh my god they would move around this roller skating rink and pick up a ballerina and the contrast between her delicacy and grace and these two guys on roller skates with their parachute wings gloaming around it was hilarious [Music] it was always a lot of fun to be in bob's pieces they were playful imagistic what was he doing in terms of designing costumes and designing sets and one piece of his i had a a harness that had a screen over my head preposterous yeah in terms of a costume and bob was shooting images of the empire state building onto the screen and i was holding a watermelon covered with a small cloth and i'd pull the cloth back and expose the head of the watermelon to the audience and then drop it over again so it had a kind of pornographic quality to it sounds exactly outrageous it seems very natural to me when i think about the kind the way he saw everything could be included as part of his art making you know from bob everything was acceptable always it never felt too radical because it was him and he just kept opening doors [Music] well julie i just it's so big i know it's amazing isn't it i mean you can really imagine this is a great city in 1966 the 69th regiment armory in new york became the venue for one of rauschenberg's most ambitious ventures [Music] a multimedia event held over the course of nine evenings that would blow the minds of the 10 000 curious visitors assembled there [Music] in january 1966 10 artists from new york and 30 engineers from bell telephone laboratories began a collaboration that resulted in a series of dance music and theater works the events began with a piece choreographed by rauschenberg called open score it started with a tennis game frank stella and his tennis partner came out and she measured the niche and totally serious and then they started playing [Music] the racquets were fixed in such a way that in the handle of the racket was a fm transmitter so every time the the racket hit a ball the sound was transmitted to an fm radio and then to the sound system so every time the ball was hit you heard this very loud bomb one of the things about the armory which we discovered very quickly was that there was a five second echo it's a very it is acoustic mayhem isn't it he knew about how this sound was going to reverberate this natural beautiful sound and so he took full advantage of it each time the ball was hit one of the lights around the armory went out what happened towards the end were they they kept playing did they they did and once it was dark completely the second part started 500 people came onto the floor in the darkness and as they came in they each said my name is my name is i am walter siegel i am barbara walt and then as the crowd's part finished a spotlight went on to a figure in a sack and you began to hear this voice singing and bob would pick her up and put her down at a certain point let her sing a little bit longer pick her up and put her down somewhere else there's pure performance art it's very very simple very human gestures [Music] helping rauschenberg bring his performance to life was a visionary scientist from bell laboratories called billy clover through the organization they formed experiments in art and technology the pair would go on to produce inventive interactive work that married art with cutting edge technology [Music] you know looking back eat and the collaborations with bob it really was part of of the utopian enterprises of the 60s certainly with the election of jfk and then with the moon travel there's incredible optimism for america so the promise of technology was quite strong and the promise that the individual working with the technology could make a difference and i think bob was supremely committed to that idea okay friends it's time for the fat pack ban [Music] wiki wacky [Music] by the mid-60s rauschenberg had enough money to buy himself a large studio in a converted catholic orphanage on lafayette street in downtown manhattan and it quickly became a favorite hangout for all the people rauschenberg was collaborating with at the time [Music] it was like every day was a party it was always you know hilarious i mean i just remembered that we just laughed a lot you know you felt you were part of a family when you're sitting around the table lafayette street you were part of bob's family i think a lot of people felt that another regular visitor to rauschenberg's lafayette studio was his teenage son christopher so this is the kitchen this is the part of the house where really everything happened i mean yes the work was made in the studio but basically everything this is the conviviality in here so you i mean as a boy you must remember this really well you'd come in here this is where you'd see your dad and yeah and this is within walking distance of my mom's house in chinatown so i would just get off the subway at astra place and come in and hang out he always had haagen-dazs ice cream in there so that was was this the original range that was yeah from the orphanage what noise there you go i know john cage wouldn't want me to turn that sound off but maybe maybe we'll uh maybe we'll need some hot holder here and who would you i mean if you walked up the stairs and came as the kitchen as we have just done who typically might you run into pretty much anybody so you must have felt very glamorous to be coming over here because here was this space center of parties this charismatic man who was always at the center of attention also dating other men sure yeah they had great boyfriends you would meet them interact with oh yeah sure yeah they were terrific friends and wonderful grown-ups for me to be around when i was a young adult or teenager so yeah it was all good so i get impression but your memories of your dad sound remarkably positive yeah but you know there is one other element about him that's very well known which i imagine could have been quite disruptive in a dad which is that he was an alcoholic what are your memories of that it it depended i mean there were periods of his life where he drank a lot and that was okay there was a period later in his life where it was really a problem and he was really struggling and and not and you know you witnessed this oh absolutely yeah as in he couldn't work well he always could work but he was really sort of tortured by it i don't think he made much of his art while he was drunk i mean i think if he was drunk he was drunk you know he was not in a position to make art i mean bob had an enormous ability to drink i've never seen anybody drink like that in my life i think he became dependent on it did you see a change in his personality as well the way he interacted with other people he became less considerate of others when he was struck he was never nasty to me he could be cutting to people when he was drunk but what was it that was driving him to drink that much i don't i don't know i only know that bob was a perceptual machine everything that was happening in the world was being loaded through every pore of his skin that's a very heavy burden to carry [Music] in 1970 with his drinking out of hand and his creativity at a low end rauschenberg decided it was time to clean himself up get out of new york and make a fresh start elsewhere [Music] [Music] sunday morning brings the dawn in the beautiful island of captiva off the coast of florida where rauschenberg lived for the next 40 years would provide the haven he'd need to start working again [Music] not a bad place in the world is it can we just stay here yeah i think we're done right where's the towels and the cocktails yeah so i mean and this is the place where they're all of these i can see them already like oh absolutely people this is famous for people collecting shells that's one of the best showing places in the world and the fishing's amazing likes bob you know every day well he'd be like this man absolutely that there's pictures of him just that that pose is perfect when did he first come here well someone had told him about this island and so he said i'm going down there to check it out and what he told me was he got on the island they had to stop the car for a turtle to cross the road he just loved that that was it sonny bought this house [Music] come on into the beach house this place is great these walls could talk i'll tell you what i love about it it's not grass it's not huge it's humble living absolutely and that's clearly part of the thing just keep it relaxed right he had no furniture because he wanted a very minimal and and he actually added this wall because everything was about hanging out right so you need more wall space so that was built and added if i was staying here matt i'd get nothing done exactly i'd sleep i'd swim i'd snooze i'd read yeah well he what was he doing his routine was you know he's worked late so it wasn't exactly an early riser but it would always get up take care of any of the business that was going on um correspondence those kinds of things kind of lunchtime something yeah right around ten young and the restless had to see the soap opera that was that was a definite well it's just wonderful yeah you know there he is it's one of my favorite photos and that smile if you look at all the pictures throughout his life that's what you see is that smile so this was like the center of his universe for a long time right yeah from 1970 he made 99 of his art if not a little bit higher here on this island so this i think might have saved his life i think that coming here just giving him that license to just stop worrying about business and things that make art i went to an astrologer once i was having some kind of the serious psychological dilemmas and he said i'll tell you one thing don't go to the mountains hit the sun and the water i was sort of worried about how i would uh adjust to it i thought i'm gonna miss new york so much and it turned out that i love it today thanks to a scheme run by the foundation set up in his name rauschenberg's multi-faceted approach to art is kept alive by a new generation of artists [Music] bob had envisioned a residency in captiva being used for artists he was really about creative exploration and i think that the foundation has this natural tendency to try different things to keep it very creative and test some of those boundaries the fact that we are able to have his studio full of these really interesting artists in all fields from all over we're able to continue doing the things he would do yeah he's gone but he's still in conversation with millions of people and they all come away like deeply moved by this spirit and the sort of generosity and let's all work together [Music] i already knew that captiva was a really special place but coming here to the fish house is so surprising because rauschenberg made art that was frenetic it was urban he had this restless spirit and this place its magic is all about stillness and tranquility and i find it really moving thinking of this mercurial man whose soul was in perpetual motion if you like who needed to come here seeking peace craving peace and it was this place that provided him with that solace that he clearly always craved i think that captiva really was a parting of the seas of the noise of urban life and allowing him to be a part of nature it was a place where he could find his own ideas and look at the natural environment in a new way [Music] with his drinking now under control rauschenberg started creating new works that even on the tropical island of captiva were inspired by the everyday materials he'd always been drawn to a desire built up in me to work in a material of waste and softness something yielding with its only message a collection of lines imprinted like a friendly joke a silent discussion of their history exposed by their new shapes labored commonly with happiness boxes so the any kind of imagery on the cardboard series is what was on the boxes when he found them this side up or handled with care or whatever it's not like he commissioned them these are boxes that have genuinely been used so when you see the writing on them what does this say phillips plated it's just totally commercial things which he's turned into art right what are these at the far end of the road this this is a series that's called early egyptians and um those are cardboard boxes that he then took out to the beach in front of the studio and he covered them with an adhesive and then put sand on them and then he painted the backs with day glow paint um which then reflects some color against the wall you see a little hints of red or other colors on that that's really hiding the light under a bushel i mean this is bright orange here i would never have known that if you haven't told me can we look at some of the other work i mean this is an incredible sculpture what's this this specific work is called global shoot and obviously with a globe in the top and what looks like a shoot from a rooftop or whatever well this must be i mean it genuinely looks like a piece of um architecture that he salvaged it's fallen off the top of a building it's almost as though the earth is heading this direction towards the garbage how much was he thinking about from the 70s on real ecological environmental issues he was very concerned with environmental issues there's a captiva conservation organization so he he was both concerned locally with what's just around his house in his studio and then globally if he could support a major cause worldwide you would do that as well [Music] in the early eighties the social and environmental concerns underpinning all of his art saw rauschenberg shift his focus beyond captiva's calm shawls he now embarked on an ambitious humanitarian project crisscrossing the globe to promote world peace through his art rocky the rauschenberg overseas culture interchange would take into 11 countries and consume all his energies for the best part of a decade bob said i know what i want to do i want to go to you know various countries countries that are challenged and look at the art of that country meet with the indigenous people speak to students sense the political situation and gather information and objects to produce work as a an offering to the people of the country okay important distinction yes to the people of the country so was this more about art or perhaps more about the kind of activism well i think it's both many of the countries were oppressive and he wanted to offer to tradition-bound people an alternative way of seeing a feeling of thinking it's a peace mission without a missionary through information about each other around the world we might be able to stop some of the stupidity that are controlling us because i'm being controlled by probably an equal amount of stupidity as you are [Music] these paintings were off from his exhibition in cuba oh so you can see for instance i mean there are some of the stars over there but this is this old cuban classic car right and what this looks like a skull bob felt that the work wasn't finished until the viewer finishes the work by by coming to it and bringing his reaction so to show that in a physical way you put a mirror in it and then there's the viewer in the picture well and particularly disconcerting that here my head is almost directly parallel with the skull if you stand in the right place that seems to be rauschenberg's funny joke they're always incredibly serious but very lighthearted and humorous often and just pretty much everything caught his eye these are some negatives from when bob was in moscow so this is an example of what he did in rocky he'd go to a country walk around take pictures pick up debris pick up whatever seemed to him to speak of the place so what's caught his eye here i mean there's sort of architecture of the city just an is that an old woman on a bus yes i think this is the driver that's the driver maybe oh yeah so it is yeah and this is just a sort of broken fencing or something but there's a great sense just looking at this it gives you that idea of he's there presumably with a camera the whole time click click click now i may be biased because i'm a photographer but to me his whole way of looking at the world is the way a photographer looks at the world they look at things that other people just walk by and say oh that's nothing i think photography really was very very central i mean you've i guess you've pulled this out because is this him writing about it yes yes uh what does he say about that my preoccupation with photography in the beginning 1949 was first supported by a personal conflict between shyness and curiosity the camera functioned as a social shield in 1981 i think of the camera as my permission to walk into every shadow or watch while any light changes my concern is to move at a speed within which to act photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts [Music] bob was not naive he certainly didn't think that he was going to produce peace in our time through the rocky exhibition but i listened and watched the dialogue between rauschenberg and people on the street he made a difference if you were on the street with him and you realize how he physically and literally touched people with his humanity i mean he exuded humanity he exuded caring it's rauschenberg almost says one man united nation absolutely he wanted a purity to this and in the end there was a decision on bob's behalf that he could not be seen as taking funding from any organization or government and so he funded himself he sold his tumblies and his jasper johns all to fund rocky it's a testament to the integrity of robert absolutely for rauschenberg rocky was a labor of love and one that cost him a personal fortune of up to 10 million dollars but to others it seemed a naively idealistic project i lost most of my dealers they thought this was a sort of an extravagant waste of time and and talent but that was its function how best i could worldwidely waste my time and talent and money [Laughter] we did all three very well didn't we done that's a really good one with his professional fortunes at an all-time low rauschenberg retreated to his vast studio in captiva and regardless made new work based on imagery from his travels for rocky [Music] this is essentially the fabrication studio downstairs and the upstairs you know where he would create the works if you imagine if you will this is a wall of racks of silk screens and there was probably 500 silk screens and they were all lined up vertically but it was unique because bob would be upstairs and he would have this large book and he would say bring me chile 203 or japan 506 or whatever and we were bringing the screens up and then he would work on him but though rauschenberg continued to be inspired by his global adventure by the early 90s new york's art world felt he'd lost his way there was a pretty general wave of turning against bob and um the same thing happened to picasso in the later stages of his career critics began saying he hadn't done anything good since 1938 but with bob i think what happened was that um he's such a producer and in captiva with a team around him and a lot of assistance the production got larger and larger and in that situation you can't possibly expect everything to be at the highest level but there was always three or four or five that were absolutely dead on top flight rashenberg [Music] in the last decade of his life the rest of the art world seemed to catch up with his thinking and the man who'd become something of an unsung prophet in his own land was rewarded with a major retrospective at new york's guggenheim museum recognition for an artist who'd consistently broken new ground over six decades [Music] but in 2002 age 76 america's arguably most prolific and original artist suffered a stroke that left his right arm paralyzed it was the beginning of the end for a man who'd lived for his art [Music] i remember being in the studio one day with him and we were looking at i think the last set of paintings that he made and it became kind of um still and sweet and he began to cry [Music] and he said to me arnie i have lost so much what did you say to him [Music] i told him that he had given us so much and that it was would always be with us and that for a man who had lost so much it was a pretty fabulous set of paintings but what can you say to someone you love and but be realistic i mean bob knew that his life was soon to be over that he couldn't continue to live like that [Music] by 2008 rauschenberg's health had dramatically declined and following heart disease he was put on a life support machine bob had been really almost sick to death three other times in the intensive care unit whatever and he got well so i always felt that he could make it through this one but then um he was so sick and he wanted to go back to captiva he did not want to die in a hospital what happened at the very end janet because as i understand it he he took a conscious decision to to end things didn't he he had a trachea thing and he they would not be able to to ever get him back breathing on his own and so um he didn't want that's not that was not the way he wanted to live and um i was just kind of mortified by you know and i told him i said let's just wait maybe you'll get better and so um he kind of he just kind of squeezed my hand and he said let me go please so um we had to do that but i still miss him so much i think the best job in the whole world was being bob's little sister it was so much fun it was entertaining but it was meaningful too i learned a lot from him a lot he was such an amazing person his sense of humor his he was such a giver and everybody would say that you know there was just something one of a kind broke the mold all those cliches if you will as bob i would think from time to time as an art student that i wish i could have been around the likes of leonardo or cezanne or picasso then i realized you know especially towards the end that i had been in the presence of that kind of genius he was profound simply profound and we were all the beneficiaries because of it so much of the work we see today has its roots in things that rauschenberg did every corner of his work can be mined and used by younger artists as a starting point or as an opening point he opened everything up he opened the world up and it's still going on if you'd like to see more of robert rauschenberg's art a major retrospective featuring many of his greatest works is currently showing at london's tate modern before transferring to the museum of modern art in new york next spring [Music] is [Music] you

Channel: petservice

Views: 536,143

Keywords:

Id: yELmPbQNx9M

Length: 59min 8sec (3548 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 11 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/lerba]

I tried to submit a meta post about the state of this subreddit. What is going on with all the downvoting here? I noticed all of the new submissions hover around 50-60%, no matter what the subject of the posts. Are there users systematically downvoting new posts or what is that about? No wonder there's rarely quality popular posts if that's the case...