Reader: Week 4

          I love Robert Rauschenberg.  I was lucky enough to see/smell/experience his work at MOCA.  I really appreciate that he wants the viewers of his work to really understand the meanings he is trying to illustrate.  His work may seem arbitrary, but there is definitely a method to his madness.  I find his ability to successfully move on from one area to another really refreshing as an artist.  Yeah, it's great to recognize an artist's style, but if they are just reproducing the same idea in, say, a different set of colors, well, that work gets kind of boring.  He not only manipulates and uses found objects in his work, but justifies them as legitimate art making material.  "If it was all right to make pictures with bits of pasted paper or metal or wood, he asked, then why couldn't you use a bed, or even a goat with a tire?" (193).

There is so much texture on this piece, it's insane.

          Many art critics did not take Rauschenberg seriously as an artist, and some of his contemporaries did not see him as a competitive threat.  Whether or not Rauschenberg would agree with such criticism, I think that his reasoning for creating art and using unconventional materials has made a mark in the history of art making.  An artist can't go to a contemporary art museum and not hear an utterance about Robert Rauschenberg.  His interest in reality, in portraying a subject as it was, instead of trying to create a false reality with the illusion of depth, is what makes Rauschenberg so interesting to me.  I can appreciate his perspective on our world, and attempting to understand all perspectives can only propel me in a positive direction.