Artist: Robert Rauschenberg
Truthful Fictions
From his first bourbon to his last sake, I saw a baby Macaque sipping elixirs through a straw with unimaginable pleasure.
I photographed Robert Rauschenberg four times. Between Captiva, Florida and New York City, Each time he opened the door for me, he would ask, “Again? What was wrong with the last shots?” I would tell him each one was for a different source, that a fresh look was needed.
He had the skin of a child. Burrowing into Bob’s eyes, was like watching a grounded featherless Ribbon-tailed astrapia: The beauty and trappings of an adorned human being. He was a man from space who embraced the entirety of the known and unknown universe. It was both literal and imagined. He dreamed of being a bird in constant flight. His mind sat atop a child’s Radio Flyer wagon, as if he was the logo racing among the universes’ planets. Until the day he passed, he remained an intoxicating, purposeful Shakespearean Puck, a living Child-Man.
The most important sliver of Robert Rauschenberg’s legacy that you or any need to know, is he was a preternatural, extra-human being. His laugh remains. He was the carpe diem ambassador to this planet; “seize the day” was his calling card: He bellowed in front of any mirror that allowed a shy man to announce, “I am him, he is I,” His presence can still be heard in every room he graced.
Five-hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was the master of just about everything. Robert Rauschenberg, was not. But he did engage in as much as time would allow. He Imagined the origins of flight, the entire vocabulary of creative possibilities. He was an artist bound in constant stimulus for entertaining any and all ideas on the table.
It is easy to imagine that in mind and view, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, Rudyard Kiplings’s The Jungle Book, Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey’s The Star Child all clustered and wafted near Rauschenberg’s mind- with hope driving the wish for possibilities to come true.
Do I exaggerate? Yes, I do. I have had many inspirational moments with art world luminaries of another era: Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Clement Greenberg, Louise Nevelson and Leo Castelli all come to mind. The real deals are illuminating and intoxicating. During my portrait sessions, witnessing a single person exposing his anticipations and reflecting on accomplishments can sound like grandiose fiction. To see clearly what needed to be exposed, I would flex my reflex cameras, alternating between my 35mm and 6x7 formats.
The world Bob voiced in articulated slur was profound on levels I had not yet experienced. The hours and days I spent with him were not enough, yet my camera effortlessly shuttered. These portraits of people in stratospheres far above mine, remind me of a gaze in recline from one and any planetarium. The facts lie naked in the skies.
On the morning of the Robert Rauschenberg Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, I stood in the rotunda. The renowned art curator Walter Hopps placed his arm around me and whispered,
“Catch Robert before he flies away.” The memory holds a touch of the sublime. In that moment a flood a memories danced.
Whatever hindsight is worth, I thought Bob was past the age of expiration in art history: Who knew he was then and everyday following embarking on new flights for the mind? His creative forces just wouldn’t die. For someone like him the gates were opened each and every day. It was an amazing coming-of-age lesson. To see, in real-time, four episodes of my own career captured in single frames, all taking place in a bit more than a decade and a half. Each session challenged my eyes elevated the cameras’ needs.
Looking back today and every day, I see it like a piano student repeating the keys of “Chopsticks” against the sky: lessons to understand, and grasp the basics of the camera and move on.
Robert Rauschenberg, the shy, prodigious boy who could have been born in a pollinator garden on any planet and still found a canvas to make his mark shared with me hours across days, and days throughout the years.
