Rosetta Brooks Interviews Robert Rauschenberg

From the December/January issue of MODERN PAINTERS

By Rosetta Brooks

Gossip is serious business. Whenever Bob Rauschenberg and I get together we gossip about his work. Here are the results of my most recent visit.

ROSETTA BROOKS: For some reason, Ive always thought that your Combines came about because you had a habit of walking round the block before the trash was picked up in the city, collecting what interested you and taking it back to the studio. Is that true?

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: Yes. That's right. I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.

RB: Why a surprise?

RR: To feed my curiosity. The objects uniqueness were what fed my curiosity. They didn't have a choice but to become something new. Then you put them in juxtaposition with something else and you very quickly get a world of surprises.

RB: So by combining junk objects, you were making connections between objects and images that were normally enclosed in different private spaces and you were making new connections. When objects are thrown out as trash, they are also closed down spatially. Your juxtapositions and contrapositions in the Combines opened the space up again to reveal hidden connections in peoples lives, possessions, objects and spirits that had previously remained separate. By the same token, the process you used to create the Combines opened us up to what the street really is and what the city really is. Our perception of both street and city changed. And by extension, the Combines also opened up the studio to its spatial surroundings. Like the street and the city, the studio then became a social gathering point. And your studio has continued to be that way ever since. The idea of the social is a significant factor in all your work, isn't it? Throughout your career, you go through periods where you both surround yourself with junk, and you surround yourself with people.

RR: Its the same thing really, isn't it? They're both full of surprises.

The rest of this article appears in the December/January 2005 issue of MODERN PAINTERS.

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All Art © Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Images Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Images (top to bottom): Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson; Private Collection Switzerland; Sonnabend Collection, New York.