Robert Rauschenberg: Art pioneer and inspiration (bbc.co.uk).
“Robert Rauschenberg produced some of the most distinctive American art of the second half of the 20th Century. Yet he was the most restless of artists—moving from traditional painting to print-making and sculpture. He was one of the first people to explore the relationship between art and technology. Tate Modern is staging the first major retrospective since Rauschenberg died in 2008.
Years before Damien Hirst first successfully split the cow, Rauschenberg used a full-sized angora goat in his 1955 work Monogram. The goat had once graced a textile company in New York which specialised in mohair. Yet Rauschenberg spotted its artistic possibilities.”
And ushering in what has been the grotesquery norm in contemporary, Conceptualist art ever since, proving as it did for P.T Barnum, people’s curiosity for the odd, unsettling and damn right “unnatural” knows no end.
“Also in 1955 the artist created Bed, a characteristic Rauschenberg ‘combine’. Taking a pillow, a sheet and a quilt he merged them with a traditional oil-painting. Years later Tracey Emin would go a stage further with My Bed, throwing in her mattress—but not until 1998. Walking around Tate Modern’s retrospective of the work of Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008) these are not the only cases where you think: ‘He got there first.’”
Or, indeed, that there is no originality, that ancient cave man did artistic things with goat and cave bed with decorative, perhaps instructional, perhaps just tale telling murals too and will be repeated adinfinitum, there truly being nothing new except a new audience under the same ol’ sun.
Robert Rauschenberg, Tate Modern retrospective (tate.org.uk). Until 2nd April 2017.
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