Robert Rauschenberg: Gluts
€ 50.00
Objects + materials occupy real space very much the way ideas have elbows.
— Robert Rauschenberg
— Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) revolutionised the picture plane through the inclusion of everyday objects, which he termed ‘gifts from the street’, redefining and expanding the boundaries of what could be considered an artwork. It was in this spirit that he created his Glut series of sculptural assemblages at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.
Watch Thaddaeus Ropac and Courtney J. Martin discuss the exhibition
Thaddaeus Ropac and Courtney J. Martin, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, discuss Rauschenberg’s Glut series (1986–94) from the kitchen of the artist’s New York studio.
The Gluts represent one of Rauschenberg’s earliest forays into a new material – metal – in the form of found objects assembled and riveted together to create wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures. Unlike in the artist’s earlier Combines, however, the found elements in the Gluts are no longer affixed to canvas supports. Instead, they become entirely autonomous, placed directly on the wall or the ground in a wholehearted engagement with the poetics of recycling and reclamation.
No Wake Glut, 1986
Assembled metal
156.2 x 226.7 x 40.6 cm (61.5 x 89.25 x 16 in)
The series was inspired by the artist’s 1985 visit to his native Texas, which was in the midst of a recession due to a surplus, or ‘glut’, in the oil market, turning its landscape into a wasteland of abandoned vehicles and the rusting signs of failed petrol stations. Returning to his studio in Captiva Island, Florida, Rauschenberg, marked by what he had seen in Texas, sought out similar objects in the local scrapyard, salvaging discarded signs and automotive and industrial parts to create the first Gluts: a gesture that anticipated the environmental concerns that, decades later, have taken a central position in artistic thought and production.
Bumper Slip Late Summer Glut, 1987
Assembled metal
132.5 x 178.7 x 55.7 cm (52.17 x 70.35 x 21.93 in)
Robert Rauschenberg’s set design for Trisha Brown’s Lateral Pass (1985), Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, Italy, January 1987. Photo: Luciano Romano.
Rauschenberg’s work throughout the decades embodied his lifelong commitment to collaboration with performers, artists and engineers. As well as choreographing his own performances, he designed lighting, sets and costumes for avant-garde productions by Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Paul Taylor, among others. In 1987, when the set for a performance of Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Lateral Pass (1985) at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Italy was stuck in a dock strike and would not make it to the theatre by opening night, Rauschenberg scoured the streets and scrap heaps of Naples to collect materials to make a replacement set.
As Brown recalled: ‘Bob and his team dumped a truckload of junk backstage and proceeded to sort, stack, drill, and grommet into the night.’ He later incorporated pieces from this stage set into the Glut series, referring to them as the Neapolitan Gluts. This exhibition presents several examples of the Neapolitan Glut series alongside the Gluts made in Captiva Island.
Balcone Glut (Neapolitan), 1987
Assembled metal and insulated wire
241 x 140 x 42 cm (94.88 x 55.12 x 16.54 in)
Robert Rauschenberg, Villa Volpicelli, Naples, Italy, April 1987. Photo: Peppe Avallone.
At first glance the viewer finds in the Gluts an elegant formal abstraction; with a second look, what Mark Alizart calls ‘the appearance of function’ in his essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Rauschenberg enjoyed wordplay, and his titles often simultaneously indicate potential readings of his works and wittily exploit the ambiguities of the terms he uses. In Balcone Glut (Neapolitan) (1987), a ladder projects through the opening in a ventilation duct to imply the titular ‘balcony’; the alternating joist-like metal strands and transparences of Greenhouse Glut (Neapolitan) (1987) suggest the botanical structure.
Greenhouse Glut (Neapolitan), 1987
Assembled metal
165.1 x 194.3 x 54.6 cm (65 x 76.5 x 21.5 in)
But more than this, there is a sense of anthropomorphism across the Gluts, where the coldest, hardest of materials is animated with details that play on our pareidolia to suggest dangling legs or eyes. ‘The most striking thing’ writes Alizart of the Gluts, ‘is that they all seem to swarm with life. Rauschenberg doesn’t merely give his detritus a ‘second life’ in the sense of a ‘second chance’; he genuinely transforms it into an organism.’ For Alizart, Greek Toy Glut (Neopolitan), becomes a shield-wielding hero from The Iliad; it might also be read as a constructed Trojan horse with a bowed head.
Greek Toy Glut (Neapolitan), 1987
Assembled metal
207 x 254 x 39.4 cm (81.5 x 100 x 15.5 in)
In some Gluts, the source objects are easily distinguishable through identifying markings, in particular painted lettering: truncated business signs; instructions on industrial pieces; road signs. Such identifiable markings serve to ground the materials, which have been removed from their original contexts, in their previous uses and past lives.
When making the Gluts, Rauschenberg almost always left the painted finishes of his found metals untouched in the final work, instead giving prominence to each metal component’s inherent dents, markings, and colouration. Carnival (Glut) (1986) is a rare exception to this: he painted its inner face a shadowy pale pink, marking an unusual apparition of the artist’s own paintbrush in the Gluts.
Carnival (Glut), 1986
Assembled metal with acrylic and mirror
127 x 185.4 x 109.2 cm (50 x 73 x 43 in)
As curator and art historian Susan Davidson wrote in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the Gluts at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in 2009: ‘Directionals have been a visual trope in Rauschenberg’s work as he sought to directly engage the viewer by speaking in the imperatives of the everyday landscape’. Interested in the dynamic process of meaning-making, Rauschenberg often placed road signs and other such imperatives in juxtaposition within enigmatic compositions that complicate our reading of them.
The Gluts, Davidson adds, represent ‘an extremely mature and confident body of work, personal exercises or amusements for Rauschenberg, where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.’ These futuristic constructions made from the detritus of a society in which industrialisation has begun to eat itself alive, unexpectedly, call for ‘a more human world, not less’; ‘ultimately’, as Alizart continues, ‘the logical consequence of a philosophy that associates art and life’.
Late Summer Glut Clef, 1987
Assembled metal
101.6 x 109.2 x 25.4 cm (40 x 43 x 10 in)
I think of the Gluts as souvenirs without nostalgia. What they are really meant to do is give people an experience of looking at everything in terms of what its many possibilities might be. — Robert Rauschenberg
Interior Vine Summer Glut, 1988
Assembled metal
128.3 x 134.6 x 27.9 cm (50.5 x 53 x 11 in)
The Gluts would be the artist’s final series of sculptures, as well as his most enduring: the usually restless Rauschenberg continued returning to the series over the span of almost a decade. They are rarely seen together: this exhibition is the first in 15 years dedicated to the series.
Photography lies at the heart of Rauschenberg’s artistic practice. For curator Walter Hopps, ‘The use of photography has long been an essential device for Rauschenberg’s melding of imagery. While photography is an inadequate metaphor for the complexity of retinal reception, it remains a vital means for Rauschenberg’s aesthetic investigations of how humans perceive, select, and combine visual information. Without photography, much of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre would scarcely exist.’
Rauschenberg’s photographs not only provided source material for his experimental multimedia works, but also constituted artworks per se. The photographs in the exhibition exemplify the ‘vernacular glance’ that art critic Brian O’Doherty discerned in Rauschenberg’s photographic oeuvre. The half-dismantled vehicles and industrial landscapes pictured, meanwhile, foretell the content of the sculptural Gluts.
Mexico, 1984, 1984
Gelatin silver print
33 x 48.3 cm (13 x 19 in)
![As Rosalind Krauss describes, Rauschenberg’s ‘fascination with two-dimensional “fronts” (billboards, torn posters, shop windows) stan[d] in for the deep space...](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1400,h_1400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:good/ws-ropac/usr/images/feature_panels/image/8699/rr_d.jpg)
As Rosalind Krauss describes, Rauschenberg’s ‘fascination with two-dimensional “fronts” (billboards, torn posters, shop windows) stan[d] in for the deep space of the “real”, which they effectively block.’ This same fascination is carried across into the artist’s painterly and sculptural work.
Los Angeles, California, 1981, 1981
Gelatin silver print
33 x 48.3 cm (13 x 19 in)
In the year of the centenary of the American artist's birth, this exhibition runs in parallel to an extensive programme of exhibitions in Rauschenberg's honour taking place at museums and institutions around the world. Organised by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the programme of exhibitions, which is accompanied by dozens of Centennial grants encouraging the activation of Rauschenberg's works in public collections, aims to build on the artist's legacy of promoting cross-disciplinary explorations and driving social change.
