To Journey with Fabric: Textiles in Robert Rauschenberg’s Work (1954-76)

Roe (Jammer), Robert Rauschenberg

1976; sewn fabric and fabric-covered rattan pole; 94 x 59 x 22 inches (238.8 x 149.9 x 55.9 cm)

Source: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. RRF, 76.021

Textiles are a ubiquitous cultural technology operating through modern ideologies, material and symbolic production and consumption, collective and personal memory. Using textiles extensively in his groundbreaking and now iconic art practice, Robert Rauschenberg recognized this.

Supported by a Rauschenberg Foundation Archives Research Residency in 1/2023, I studied his correspondence, interviews and studio documentation, endeavoring to develop a microhistory of his engagement with textiles and trace its evolution from their appearances in the 1950s to the work produced after the Ahmedabad fellowship in India.  The research informed my review of textile use in Rauschenberg’s important series: Combines, Hoarfrost, and Jammers, led by open dialogue with materials.

Combines (1954-64): mixed media works juxtaposing  painting with everyday materials. Described as “flatbeds”, they acted as depositories of material culture of ordinary life in an artist's studio. Ubiquitous commodities, they comprise the material precept for interchanges of personal and collective memory in artworks.

Hoarfrost (1974-76): transfer prints with newspapers’ images on unstretched fabric, hands-on reflections on information transfer. Cloths here are  subjectiles, the works’ substrate and culturally saturated mechanisms of projection and presentation: screens. Unstretched, defying  a disciplined painting canvas, they are unleashed, “shimmering information”.

Jammers (1975-76): transient, draped works with Indian silks hung directly on the wall. Here, textiles are the main actors, neither stratum for images, nor fragments on a “flatbed.'' Liberating them from the  limitations of modern Western art took a trip to the textile land, India.