Art with a capital "A"

The great American artist Robert Rauschenberg died the other week and while I'm sure a lot of you are probably going "Robert who?" it was a big deal to me.

When I first went to art college I knew nothing about Modern Art (or any sort of art really), like a lot of kids I went because I was "good at drawing" but I was more interested in Marvel Comics than Jackson Pollock and my secondary school art teachers had done nothing to broaden my horizons, so I was woefully unprepared for the concepts and attitudes I'd have to deal with during my first year Foundation Course. There's an old joke among art students that everyone thinks we spend all day drawing pretty pictures but they had us doing sculpture, Land Art, abstract drawing exercises, video, Performance Art, and all sorts of bizarre conceptual games of perception (like making us dress all in one colour for a day and eating nothing but food that colour too). My tutor was a burly, hard-headed Conceptual artist who was constantly criticizing my work (ie: calling it "shit" half the time) and pushing me to forget all the comic book nonsense and see and think in new ways. It was a tough, challenging environment and there were times in the first term that I felt like quitting because I just didn't "get" whatever it was I supposed to be getting.

There wasn't a single life-changing moment when the penny suddenly dropped but the college library had a thick book of work by this bloke called Rauschenberg that was a real eye-opener for me. Modern Art can be an impenetrable mystery to the novice, worrying all the time what it's "about" can be a real barrier between your brain and your eyes but here was someone who didn't seem interested in making some grand artistic statement but instead was just enjoying the process of creating, trying new ideas and techniques using whatever materials he had lying around or found in the street — he made it look like something I could actually do myself. Plus I thought his work looked terrific, especially his silkscreen collages/paintings like Retroactive (below, which I have a poster of hanging on the wall of my office).


I won't bore you with the details of Rauschenberg's importance or his place in art history (lots of work here, here, and here) but to use a musical analogy he was the Punk to the Classic Rock of serious, high-minded Abstract Expressionism and it was his restlessly inventive, try-anything, fuck-art-let's-dance attitude that made him the perfect role model for an art student who didn't have a clue what he was doing. I did several pieces of work heavily based on things he had done (a polite way of saying I ripped him off) and in the process something clicked and I started looking at art through new eyes, seeing things I hadn't seen before and unlocking my own creative potential. At the end of that first year my tutor told me he thought I'd gotten more out of the course than anyone else because I'd left a different person with a different perspective (no pun intended) and in many ways the whole experience had as important an effect on my life as hearing "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" for the first time.

Luckily for this blog Rauschenberg also designed a limited edition cover for Talking Heads' "Speaking In Tongues" album, which makes picking a tune fairly easy.

Download: This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) - Talking Heads (mp3)