RE:Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg's death on May 12th was a profound event. Since hearing the news, countless people in the arts communities of the world (and by this I mean the visual arts, dance, theatre, film, music, literature) found themselves thinking about his contribution to creative practice: inclusiveness, flow, overlay, collaboration, chance.

I found myself thinking about Rasuchenberg's working in "the gap between art and life" while I opened The New Yorker magazine to find several contemporary artists (Cai Guo-Qiang, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Sze, Chuck Close, etc) posing in their editioned T-shirts for the GAP.

I thought about Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Albers and John Cage and Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham. I thought about Bed and Monogram and Canyon and Rebus and DeKooning giving him a drawing that would be hard to erase.

And then I received an email and photos from my friend Marcel Sitcoske in LA, fondly recalling the exhibition we made together at her San Francisco gallery in 1999.
Called RE:Rauschenberg, it featured artists including Jessica Stockholder, Nancy Chunn, James Hyde, Joe Sola, Jack Pierson, David Clarkson, and others. Each sculpture, photograph, video, drawing, and painting in the gallery had its own unique sensibility, and yet they all seemed to offer a wink of tribute to this American master of serious play.

Rauschenberg was in town for his own exhibition of classic works that had been recently purchased by the San Francisco Museum of Art, and when he walked into our opening, you could feel his legendary generosity and humor immediately. He was all smiles and so were we.









Photo: (Left to right) Robert Rauschenberg, me, David Clarkson.
Courtesy Marcel Sitcoske

posted by the Contemporary