Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work (1997)

Documentary about the life and work of American sculptor Robert Rauschenberg, who specialized in 3-D imagery constructed of found objects, particularly those of industrial origin (1997)

[Music] [Music] oh [Music] you don’t choose to be an [Music] artist and I don’t think you learn to be an artist either [Music] it was not acceptable in Port Arthur Texas to be anything other than everybody else and uh I didn’t know how so that gave me a head [Music] start [Music] it was just a smelly Refinery town and uh you could tell which way the wind was blowing because on one side you had a paper mill on the other side you had uh a rubber Factory and then you had uh the refineries from um all sides [Music] to me uh they look like traps and uh I didn’t want to be [Music] trapped [Music] [Music] at the age of 72 Robert renberg is widely acclaimed as America’s most prolific and original living [Applause] artist over five decades he has broken ground for contemporary artists all over the world pioneering new approaches to painting and sculpture performance and Technology photography and print [Music] making Bob is an epic artist he’s one of our very last epic artists he’s 100% there he’s not hiding anything he is not holding anything back that is what he has to give and he gives it all it seems hard to believe that pop art would have developed in the way it developed without um uh Bob’s example Bob began using common objects things from the street in these works that he called combines which are part painting and part sculpture it sort of made everything [Music] possible he was able to make these very credible very powerful works with images at a time when all serious art was abstract you’re getting something that’s like perhaps film Montage these images are emerging in your mind and they’re meaning something else to you having to do with your own personal associations [Music] since 1970 renberg has lived on Captiva an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida with a group of assistants including the artist Daryl poof he continues his prolific output Jo I think you’re going to have to help me put this big one down in much of his current work renberg uses his own photographs which are printed with vegetable dyes before being transferred to paper with water I’m going hit it at the bottom okay down boy this going to be juicy the working process is ideally uh freeing my mind I consider uh at a uh onetoone collaboration with the materials that I’m using I want my paintings to look look like what’s going on outside my window rather than what’s inside my studio okay [Music] [Laughter] [Music] good [Music] [Music] some of the recent work in in particular almost look as though they’ve been breathed on onto the canvas there’s this tremendous range from from harshness to extreme delicacy that’s um that’s characteristic of the work sometimes within the same work you’ll have these uh these [Music] extremes Robert rushenberg was born in Port Arthur Texas in 1925 his father worked for the local power company and his mother was a deeply religious member of the fundamentalist Church of Christ in his simple small town childhood there were few signs that he was destined to become one of the great artists of the 20th [Music] century my job in Port Arthur Texas was to take care of my father’s hunting dog dogs and he raised uh dogs only for hunting and uh I guess I started doing that when I was about five and he didn’t care about them for pets or anything fact no dogs were allowed in the house they were just uh tools for him and he had absolutely no use for them if they were gun shy or uh when they developed any new ideas about what they would rather be doing did you go hunting no I never did that was not my father’s favorite son just his only [Music] one school was horrible for me I am seriously disected and it was uh like uh uh collectively uh there was more every day that that I didn’t know and so uh it got to be a real nightmare just living in [Music] fear I was shy but energetic I never learned uh how to play baseball or any of those games that had rules well in the system of education and popularity and socially uh someone who is uh doesn’t understand the plan has a very hard time I was just more or less unacceptable without being a [Music] criminal if you think about you come from this place and it’s nowhere and you’ve survived this place and uh you’ve got this enormous talent and I think if you have lost everything to begin with before you started you can do anything you have no fear you have uh you know you’re not playing for the same Stakes as everybody else you’ve got a whole other um kind of mental physical equipment and So you you’re you’re willing to take these enormous risks and you’re willing to fail and fall flat on your face and that I admire about Bob everybody said no to him and he went ahead and he did it anyway and I think that’s an incredible lesson throughout his career renberg has explored the power of the everyday object he latest sculptural work involves the transformation of such ordinary objects by casting them in crystal and glass the first ones were the uh uh rubber tires like good year or something and uh I didn’t know what to do with them because I didn’t want it to be like just a treasure just a a glass tire and so we designed a Tire Rack just like they have in filling stations and all of a sudden the tire became very special being glass then and uh I went one step further and that is that I want all the uh the hand work silver coated I thought uh Crystal broom would work any place in the exhibition uh just standing in the corner but it just so happens I’m showing in a round Museum so it hasn’t been easy here’s the original Brom which came from uh David White and he’s been uh cleaning the street in front of his house for 15 years with it because we didn’t we didn’t want a an ignorant broom we wanted a broom that knew its way around and you can’t make one overnight you know so there she [Music] is renberg left Texas in 1944 when he was drafted into the Navy in his first week away from home he sent a letter to his school friend Fenwick watts and enclosed a self-portrait one of the earliest surviving works by the artist letter is dated Wednesday February the 9th 1944 says High T that was my nickname boy this Navy is hell I got my uniform and all the rest of my GI junk gosh you should see my haircut I wouldn’t let anybody from home see me for a million dollars it looks kind of like this uh this place is about 30 mil from Canada I’m high as heaven and cold as hell it’s it’s right in the middle of the Rocky Mountains I think I’ll finally like this place it’s hard now but I’ll get used to it t you write me often very often during the months that followed he developed his sketching skills drawing portraits of his fellow recruits when he was posted to California in late 1944 he came across the Huntington Library where he made a discovery that changed his life I checked out uh The Gardens and went into the museum and that was the first uh conscious uh occasion for me to see that the painting was a painting that that things were not just photographs or decorations for place mats or or decks of cards part of their collection was the blue boy and Pinky which I had seen on millions of decks of cards so that’s what it is and so that was my first realization that that there was a world out there that that was completely different and I somehow just spite the the first recognition of that felt [Music] bonded inspired by his discovery of the art World rushenberg bought himself some paints and began to EXP [Music] Experiment 2 years later he enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute and in 1948 went in search of the classical art training in Europe I rushed off to Paris knowing that that if you were going to be an artist you had to go to Paris and uh it didn’t take me long it took me about maybe two weeks to figure out that that what was wrong was that I was about 45 years too late it wasn’t my French it was just I was in the wrong place at the wrong time I was painting with my hands I didn’t want a brush even to come you know interfere or come separate me from the activity and so my limited wardrobe became more and more un un unwearable and I thought you know this is this is this is a this is an obsession it’s not going to lead anywhere you’re not going to be open-minded you have just built a trap for yourself seeking a new dire ction he returned to the United States and enrolled at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina he was later married to fellow student Susan W they had a son Christopher before their divorce in 1952 at Black Mountain he was taught by Joseph Alber a German immigrant from the bous school Alber was a demanding authoritarian teacher and his ideas about art were fundamental different from [Music] renberg’s a day didn’t go by that he didn’t insist that and say it art is a sendle it’s a it’s a trick and you play the tricks there always has to be the magician that fools people he started every class with saying I don’t want to know who did that and everybody would turn and look at me my last works there were the uh allh paintings I wanted to see how far one can push a truth like that I came into the art World absolutely nude with us I was doing blacks All Blacks at the same time that did that that did have uh structure or Texture and I wasn’t doing them to play off of each other it was just that uh my appetite has always been do istic when I’m uh painting the most flatly is when I start feeling the hunger for [Music] [Music] sculpture [Music] I had to start again and I decided that red was the most difficult color for me to work with so I started the red series and then red LED to uh little orange and and and then yellow and then finally I had worked myself naturally organically into being able to use [Music] color renberg arrived on the New York art scene at a time when it was dominated by the work of a group of artists known as the abstract expressionists including Jackson Pollock France kleene and William cooning together they had reinvented American art with their introspective non-figurative [Music] painting at first renberg’s brush work was clearly influenced by their free and Abstract style but he soon began breaking the rules I figured that if uh if I just uh pull the paintings away from the wall that there would be a whole new Surface there that I could enjoy and so that’s how what is called combines uh started and they were called combines because if I call them paintings people would say that’s sculpture and if I call them sculpture they would say that’s not sculpture that’s painting it was very clear to me from the very beginning that this man had an astonishing imagination visual imagination uh not only for for painting and for visual work that way but also for theater and so I I asked him if he would do something for us so a few days later I came back and there was this astonishing object not only the shape but these extraordinary materials there were comic strips and pieces of plastic and it all made out of um wood he’d found from the street one of the legs was a bed leg bedstead leg about this tall marvelous painted yellows I remember that colors were wonderful they were brilliant Reds and glowing and I said it’s marvelous I was married at Black Mountain and my daughter was born there and when she was born one of the old B House people uh gave me a very beautiful quilt and I took it to the area where I was living and Christine was nursed on it and it was you know part of my belongings and one day I left it in the laundry room to be washed and when I came back to the dryer it was gone and the next time I saw it was in Leo Castelli’s gallery and it was a great joy to me he didn’t have money for canvas and it was the only thing around that he could find for painting so he he mounted it and um and began painting on it but uh it felt it needed something and so he put a pillow on it and that provided a nice expansive white to paint [Music] on some people felt it looked like a bed in which an Axe Murder had just been committed and and uh there was a sense of violence about it that I think uh surprised Bob he said that to him it had always been an immensely friendly picture and the thing he had worried about was that somebody would want to curl up in [Music] it it’s the scene of a drama that he put on the wall and it’s everybody’s drama and the concept of hang it on the wall triggers a response for all the things that a bed can [Music] mean the abstraction was dominant then and uh he just interrupted that that kind of uh Trend so his uh appearance was really very important he liberated uh the art world and the artist to do again something else not just obey slavishly the rules of that had been set up by abstract expressionists the abstract expressionists were aggressively competitive they lived out their rivalries in intense discussions and drunken RS and were almost as famous for their Rowdy drinking bouts as for their work renberg often joined them in their favorite greinwich Village bar the cedar Tavern I saw him like one of the crowd but very polite you know never a speech maker never demanding or never getting in anyone’s way very polite and courteous in fact I used to think he was a poet it was a regular bar room activity you know sloppy mean loud ridiculous but profound there was a fever at night you never know what to expect well you did know what to expect you expected rough house I’ve seen people walk up to the cooning and say Hey you know like these would be tourists out of town or students they Mr the I love your work I think it’s fantastic and they they’d be so full of praise and he’d be able to Dr now what do you call what do you know come up with that kind of attitude what do you know you know you haven’t suffered or things like that expression William duning was the most successful and inspirational of the abstract expressionist Circle many young artists of the period were in awe of his Mastery of painting and drawing everybody was working working like tuni and I already wasn’t painting like them in fact they didn’t take my work seriously which made me even friendlier as far as they were concerned because I no way could be considered a competitor so I was no threat you rais the cor now what does he mean but what is that do you know well I love to draw and is as ridiculous as this may seem I was trying to figure out a way to bring drawing into the all whs I kept making drawings myself and erasing them and that just looked like an erased uh uh uh renberg or you know I mean it was nothing and uh so I figured out that it had to be began as art so I uh thought it’s got to be a duning then if it’s going to be an important piece you see how ridiculously you have to think in order to make this work and so I uh I bought a bottle of uh of uh of Jack Daniels and uh went up and knocked on his door and praying the whole time that he wouldn’t be home and then that would be the work but he was home and after a few awkward moments I told him what I had in mind and he said that uh he he understood me but that that he wasn’t for it and I was hoping then he would refuse and that would be the work I’m shocked you know I would I would I would expect the coning to turn on his ugly side he couldn’t have made me more uncomfortable he took the painting that he was working on off the easel I don’t even know if he was doing this consciously and he went over and put it against the already closed door but I was noticing things like that and he said okay I want it to be something I’ll miss I said please doesn’t have to be that good you know I didn’t say that but that’s way I’m feeling I kept my mouth shut and uh I want to give you something really difficult to erase I thank God and he gave me something that had charcoal oil paint uh pencil crayon and I spent a month erasing that that little drawing that’s this big and on the other side is one that isn’t erased the documentation is built in I think it was psychological in the sense of what was there for him to do but challenge the reigning Master even though he loved auning and thought you know he was the greatest living artist um and then of course it created this immense Scandal how could you erase this masterpiece and not only did you presumably take something out of the history of art but you also def Face Property they think it was a gesture uh protest against abstract expressionism because see it’s a very complicated story and I don’t think most people would think this way and so it is hard for them to think of that or just a pure Act of Destruction vandalism is the other alternative do and for you it’s poetry in the same year renberg met a young man called Jasper JNS who was working in a bookstore JNS who was to become one of the most successful artists of the postwar period had not yet committed himself to an artistic career renberg encouraged him to become a full-time artist and in 1955 moved into the Loft above his in Pearl Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side I remember that the big difference between their Lofts was Japs was always Immaculate nothing out of place not a you know not a thing that wasn’t exactly where it should be and it was always white whereas Bob’s Loft was multicolored and it was always just strewn over with objects and things you [Music] see [Music] [Music] nobody cared about his work and nobody cared about my work so you know we had a very exclusive club and some of the best critics for that kind of work sseh we were the only ones and uh amazing things happened at at that time and it wasn’t uh there was no chance that that we would influence each other or become a school except by differences uh but the the main difference that we had in common is that we were not doing abstract expressionism so that’s what made our group of two people a threat to the abstract expression is oh we had to great times we were both mesmerized by [ __ ] because he he personified the uh the Feminine Mystique the mysterious female in a way you know and uh and uh Bob and I were sort of like the boys and we were kind of hoping you know to bring him out and and when he did come out it was always a very uh surprising and poetic and uh very deep kind of thing that emerged from him but it was always work getting it out you see it was a a very intense friendship and um I was I was always impressed by by its effect on the people around them uh John Cage for instance who was um a little older than both of them and and a great influence on them both uh he um he used to talk about about the the sort of the incandescent uh nature of that friendship how um how when you were around them that everything just became electric that conversations would would would go in amazing directions and and you know they would just they would set off Sparks not only in each other but in everybody in the room to begin with of course rushenberg was the teacher he taught the Jasper but well painting well his his concept of painting pass about but then uh working together as they did in the same building uh the one then the pupil let’s say inspired the master I I was so envious of his working materials it smells so great it’s in costic and beeswax and the color is uh is opalescent and dries immediately and every stroke is so perfect because it’s natural and and uh at my place smelled like the street I begged him and he reluctantly I said just let me put one stroke with that in costic I just want to feel it and uh and he said all right and he was painting like and I only had one stroke and I swear I was not being mischievous I did the red and I did one stroke and I put it in a white how did he react he thought I was doing it deliberately you know but it just looked like had needed some red there to me I mean my subconscious drove me to it you know it was a reflex action if I only get one stroke it’s going to show did he sulk or hit you he got busy trying to clean it off or or paint it out and uh he wasn’t happy nice stroke [Music] look [Music] John Cage explained Bob’s work by saying he opens the window and the work flies in which I like very much and I witnessed because when we used to come home from from uh launches and things he would look on the pavement and and he would pick up pieces of metal that I thought were absolutely uninteresting and maybe even a little disgusting but then um sometime later I would find these pieces incorporate in the work and I must say [Music] transfigured [Music] everything starts out on the street and uh New York was I thought is so incredibly rich in materials that uh whenever I started working instead of going to the paint store or or any place else I would just walk around the block and if I didn’t have enough to start work if I walked around one block I’d walk around another [Music] block I was working with uh uh stuffed animals and it was more to like like continue their life cuz I always thought it’s too bad they’re dead and uh so I thought I can do something about that but there again I’m on the street all my stor start I was on the street and I passed this shop that was a secondhand office supply place yeah and I saw this magnificent goat there just you know like uh almost invisible with the dirt and he said well I couldn’t let you have it for less than $35 so I said I have 15 on me and would you take that and I’ll come back with the rest cuz I had to make the rest and uh he said yes by the time time which was months and months later that I had an extra amount to finish my debt the store was closed he probably needed that goat it was probably the goat that was keeping him open anyway I’ve done very well with it too first I tried to put it on a on a flat plane and uh it was obviously uh too um massive it had too much character it looked too much like itself that I couldn’t compete with my paintings and I tried a couple of devices like light bulbs underneath to lighten it and that didn’t work so then the second version was uh I took it off the wall put it out in in the in the room and uh built an upright panel but then it looked like he was a beast of burden he kept looking as though he was supposed to pull [Music] it he still uh refused to be abstracted into art it looked like art with a goat and so I put the tire uh there and and uh then everything went to rest and they lived happily ever after on this side we’re coming out of a period where painting is looked upon as almost a Godlike activity and here all of a sudden you have something which is not painting which is not sculpture which uh cannot be explained uh uh people in the early 60s looking at at that image I thought it was a terrible joke that it was not to be taken seriously that was an affront the whole image it was just so powerful that there’s no sort of symbolism involved you couldn’t relate it to anything else it just hits you right in the [Music] eye in 1957 one of New York’s most influential new art dealers Leo castelli came to look at renberg’s work to discuss the possibility of giving him an important one-man Show when he heard that Jasper Johns was working in the studio below castelli immediately insisted on going to see his work as well actually I did it in a slightly offensive manner because I lost interest in the rberg and I was curious to see what jper Johns was was doing so we we went down and there I was confronted with the Fantastic array of targets flags and all the things that just what johnes was uh doing at the time and um well there’s no hesitation on my part uh I just asked him right there and then would he like to exhibit in my gallery and so he said yes and that was the the story Jasper’s first chard Leo made history and the Museum of Modern Art bought three paintings and from from then on his his his career was was meteorically launched Bobs took a lot longer Bob is a little paranoic sometimes so he decided that that was a slight that he should have been the first to show so he came into the gall and Leo was away and I was alone and Bob was quite upset and we started talking and then I confirmed that we were going to have a show office he didn’t want to be um envious but you know these things you can’t control so once he was reassured that he was going to have a show it was okay I think it was crushing to Bob I think he was really crushed but he was a genly happy for Jasper that this had happened for Jasper and he felt extreme extremely extremely good that that he had been able to uh make this possible for Jasper I don’t think there was ever competition uh the [Music] problem got to be uh the comparison of the works so that that you couldn’t think John’s without thinking renberg and I think that’s what drove us apart it was the pressure that that that was sort of drowning both of us that was that was really very unhappy about when it stopped how did that manifest itself I just didn’t feel happy I mean you you know how it is to miss somebody now let’s turn it all the way around and see where we [Applause] [Music] are ouch [Music] called uh Party Crasher I uh had a lot of tougher names but I I don’t like tough titles they should be open enough to be no pun intended inviting and then I thought of how many parties I’d been to where the party crashers made the dull party and so I celebrated that throughout the 60s renberg worked on a variety of groundbreaking collaborations he co-founded experiments in art and Technology an organization which encouraged artists and Engineers to work together when the that element of surprise or uh worry or fright is no longer there but then I make you know radical changes in what I’m doing it’s my guarantee that that the work at least is fresh to me I mean if I know how to do it there’s no point in doing it in the’ 60s he also developed his interest in in dance choreographing and Performing himself and touring the world with the m Cunningham dance company as stage and costume designer I think he’s one of the very great um stage designers of our Century he was remarkable his uh not only his gifts for for visual of things of any kind but he also had the kind of spirit which sometimes was abrasive but but more often than that was wonderful the kind of humor about it aviation weather summary for a 50 nautical mile radius of buffalo in Rochester New York valed until 6:00 p.m. Sunday evening local time adverse conditions for scattered embedded thunderstorms and rain showers think [Music] selfish now you can divide patients with essentialy attention into three gr according to their low normal re and high form [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] see back in the studio he took up screen printing a process which has become a Hallmark of his career he began a series of images celebrating the new optimism of the Kennedy [Music] era you know I’d go to the studio and he’d have I don’t know three TVs on andd be looking through life magazines and he just you know he permitted himself to be the wall on which the moving finger writes in a sense he had I guess a conception of himself like um you know filming a camera and uh it was all going to be recorded on [Music] him I was touring the the the country with M Cunningham dance company in Texas and uh we heard the news that he’d been shot and I got back after the tour and I had all of these enormous images of Kennedy and it was very tough to use them and it was tough not to use them because I didn’t want to get on the band wagon like a bunch of artists did when Marilyn Monroe passed away and you know it was I didn’t I want to risk that but I decided s how the truth was that that this was a concept that was born before he died uh that I had to in all honesty say continue and I [Music] did you better check that okay here screen printing has continued to be a central process in renberg’s work it’s okay but his interests have ranged far beyond the United States most notably in his ambitious Rocky project the renberg overseas culture interchange this was an extended 7-year tour beginning in 1984 of 11 countries including Chile Germany and Tibet where he worked with local artists and materials all of us to find new energy in the familiar I’m kind of an archaeologist of the present we have to all of us start thinking globally because it’s much too late to think territorially cuz we also enter dependent and uh uh have to realize that that this is a defined space with its [Laughter] limitations idealistically it would be a positive influence if people started realizing that that that the only thing that they had in common were their [Music] differences he’s probably one of the very a few artists alive uh today who feels that art can have an effect on something like World Peace but he’s become in a way he’s he’s become a citizen of the world more than than just an American [Music] [Music] Artist throughout the rocky years and to the present rasenberg has been engaged in another characteristically expansive project perfect called the quarter mile or two furong piece it was conceived as the longest artwork in the world it combines the many techniques and materials that he has worked with throughout his long [Music] career I wanted to do something that had no purpose it didn’t have to fit with anything else that I was doing yeah something without rules and I just recently added uh over 20 ft to it work that in and people ask me exactly how long it is well I don’t know how exactly long it is it was very close to a quar a mile and I’ve still been working on it and uh it’s hard to measure because there’s sculpture involved too it’s not quite oh B’s not quite in this will be the first time that it’s ever been shown in its entirety got it okay too big too heavy too small [Music] that [Music] don’t [Music] he [Music] [Music] m