Robert Rauschenberg’s Graphic Alchemy - The Village Voice (original) (raw)
One might wonder what Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) would think of our ever more digitized world. Even within the realm of painters and collagists — artists who deal intimately with the tactile, physical world — the Texas-born innovator had a preternatural touch for transmuting the mundane into the magical.
“Cardbird III (1971),” in the show Robert Rauschenberg at Gemini G.E.L.: Four Decades of Innovation and Collaboration, explores the way an artist perceives, studies, observes, and determines how best to reduce our 3-D world to the two dimensions of representation. At first glance, it seems that Rauschenberg simply took that most volumetric of everyday objects, a cardboard box, and squashed it into flat planes in order to hang it on the wall.
But wait — in a conceptual sleight of hand, Rauschenberg had these beige slabs recreated using trompe l’œil printing techniques, replicating the smudges, creases, and stains of, as he once put it, “a material of waste and softness.” Hung in this exhibit on a rough brick wall, these editioned simulacra, based on original cardboard collages, offer Rauschenberg’s usual visual wit — a red-striped plastic shipping envelope performs a pas-de-deux with a vermillion paint can lid — and deliver blunt humor. A taped box flank in “Cardbird III” hangs from the main body like a broken wing, all the more sardonic for the label: “READY • TO • COOK TURKEYS.” Another printed flap implies flight of a different sort: “7 DRAM / CRYSTAL PLASTIC VIALS.”
Well, we all have different strategies for getting through those Thanksgiving meals with family.
Rauschenberg always offered a battered optimism, an awareness of civilization’s wary coexistence with primordial nature.
Rauschenberg poked, prodded, folded, mashed, caressed, and otherwise treated the physical world as if it were taffy. In more traditional ink-on-paper prints, he mixed and matched imagery like a card sharp with multiple decks. At six feet high, 1967’s litho and screenprint “Booster” incorporates reproductions of Rauschenberg’s own X-rays, stacked foot to skull to form a complete, if segmented, skeleton. Red graph lines and measurements imply the vast scientific undertaking then underway to test space capsules, rocket boosters, and other gargantuan hardware — as well as the psyches of that first U.S. astronaut class — as NASA planned for the inaugural moonshot two years later. In the lower right, an athlete — perhaps in mid-long-jump — calls to mind the physical grace that flesh and bones combined can achieve, while images of a wooden chair, one printed in blue at the upper left, another, darker, tumbling out of the frame near the bottom, provide a succinct reminder that pride always goeth before a fall.
Rauschenberg’s “Booster,” 1967, and “Sky Garden,” 1969.
Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl
Eventually, Rauschenberg — who had helped define the post–abstract expressionist downtown art scene by gathering street detritus as art materials in his five-story studio building on Lafayette Street — would move to Captiva Island, off the Florida coast, which in 1970 he described as the “foundation of my life and my work; it is the source and reserve of my energies.” As the many prints on display in this exhibition attest, Rauschenberg always offered a battered optimism, an awareness of civilization’s wary coexistence with primordial nature, as when he has a shorebird, overprinted with technical terms such as “INSTRUMENT UNIT UMBILICAL,” seemingly cavorting with a towering rocket gantry, in 1969’s 89-inch-tall “Sky Garden” print.
These works were part of a series Rauschenberg dubbed (as the Apollo program straddled the world’s imagination) “Stoned Moon.” Which was a great destination for an artist whose restless — and often spectacular — visions routinely cast off any bounds of conceptual gravity. ❖
Robert Rauschenberg at Gemini G.E.L.: Celebrating Four Decades of Innovation and Collaboration
Joni Moisant Weyl
535 West 24th Street
Through December 20, 2025
Originally published: November 13, 2017
Originally published: October 25, 1973
