A quintessentially American artist, Robert Rauschenberg was, nevertheless, a citizen of the world. Throughout his longcareer, he traveled extensively—from his time as costume, set, and lighting designer for the Merce CunninghamCompany, with whom he toured to thirty cities in Europe and Asia in 1964, to his global arts initiative, the RauschenbergOverseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), which spanned eleven host countries between 1984 and 1991. There were alsomyriad international exhibitions and residencies over the years.
Rauschenberg was indeed peripatetic, seemingly alwayson the move. While travel necessitated time away from the studio, it never prevented him from producing new artworks.On the contrary, he took inspiration from local customs and materials, often collaborating with resident artisans andborrowing from indigenous practices to create entirely new bodies of work. This ethos may have found early form duringthe Cunningham world tour, during which Rauschenberg designed an entirely new set for each performanceof Story (1963), using found local objects and building materials in response to each existing site. And while in Tokyowith the company, he produced the Combine, Gold Standard (1964), which he created in front of a live audience, addingquotidian items and paint to a gold folding Japanese screen. Rauschenberg's stints in Asia proved particularly fruitful forhis art. A residency in Ahmadabad, India, in 1975, where he became fascinated with brilliantly hued, silk fabrics,occasioned the Hoarfrost and Jammer series. In 1982, Rauschenberg travelled extensively in China, culminating in acollaboration with the world's oldest paper mill in Jingxian. The same year he experimented with ceramics for the secondtime in his career at the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company; combining in Japanese Clayworks his signature imagery withpictures culled from ancient and modern Japanese culture.
The stage was, therefore, set for the creation of three suites of sumptuous works on paper produced sequentially inresponse to Rauschenberg's extended journeys through Japan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand in 1983. The first two sets,the Kyoto and Sri Lanka drawings were made on site in each location utilizing paint and solvent transfer imagery—atechnique the artist inaugurated in 1958 in order to quickly and efficiently reproduce and layer photos culled from massmedia sources at 1:1 scale. For the Sri Lanka drawings, he used local ceremonial mat boards for his surfaces,incorporating their embellished borders and richly hued floral patterns. Their readymade designs lent a mandala-likeformat to the elaborate compositions, which fused images from local publications with passages of translucentwatercolors. In Kyoto, Rauschenberg discovered Japanese dedication boards, or Shikishi boards comprising handmadepaper laminated to a thick support and edged with strips of gold paper. Traditionally used for sumi paintings, haikupoems, and calligraphy, Shikishi were often hung on fabric hanging scrolls. The Thai drawings were, unlike the seriesbefore them, completed when Rauschenberg returned to his studio in Captiva, Florida. Using the gold-trimmed Japanesededication boards, he absorbed and combined the imagery he discovered abroad, but this time integrating colorphotographs that he had taken while in Sri Lanka—one of the first occasions in which he used his own pictures in thesolvent transfer process.
In their composition, the_Thai_drawingsrecall the all-over, nonhierarchical surfaces of Rauschenberg's celebratedIllustrations for Dante's Inferno (1958), which also prominently features solvent transfers. But the 1983 palette isbrilliantly prismatic with purple, orange, green, yellow, and rose-colored washes of watercolor. Some images weregleaned from Thai magazines, including culturally specific views of pagodas, statues of the Buddha, and saffron-cladmonks. But mostly notably, they provide a sense of the artist's own photographic eye with examples of Sri Lankan streetscenes, hand-painted signage, overflowing market stalls, and plantings. Researchers at the Rauschenberg Foundationhave diligently identified the actual photographs from the artist's archives that he used for the transfers. The sensibility ofthese pictures evidence Rauschenberg's affection for the peripheral, the overlooked, and the commonplace wherever hemight encounter it. The juxtaposition between the Thai drawings' gilded edges and, in some cases, richly-hued mattingboards, with the dynamic energy of the compositions and their subject matter is a defining feature of the series.Rauschenberg's abiding respect for world cultures and a deep desire to learn from and contribute to them are perfectlyembodied in this work—a fact that would be further manifested in his subsequent ROCI initiative, during which thesedrawings were significantly featured.
Date
10–14 May 2024
Location
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue
NY 10065 New York
United States