I see something of myself in the late Robert Rauschenberg’s found object sculptures that are showcased in a new exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York City, which closes a few hours after I’m beginning to (re)write this.
The materials themselves are wide-ranging: bicycle pedals, multiple chairs, half of a shovel, a broken window, sheet metal, flowery metal latticework, and a lot more.
The sculptures create an expansive space to experience sight and dive into the contemplation of it around their logistical specifics, as they’re quite open and welcoming as visual systems. The process of that invoked visual perception begins to feel wrenching and subconscious, as these artworks visually drape over themselves.
Not only do the physical forms within these pieces seem to improbably merge, but so truly do those forms’ moments of accompanying perception, which become more of a space than an answer. You’re grounded by the cascading sights, which resist parallel or explanation and instead keep themselves in their marvelous totalities right in front of you. Looking brings a sensation of relationship, and the sprawl of one-on-one visual connections brings a feeling of embodied, felt place.
You look at the artworks, and though unpredictable in shape, they feel so decisive in purpose and direction that you end up looking back at yourself, too — or at least, I do. Everything here is just so bare and unadorned, though still visually held together and overflowing with a surprisingly urgent communication. Honesty becomes material, and reachable. Here, it’s a need to express, even on the part of forms and places with which we wouldn’t normally associate that.
I start thinking of real-world environments in which this kind of weighted but moving, slight and sudden linkage of form also appears, and I start to get the sense the same kind of urgency also emanates from these spaces, even if we’re the ones who put it there.
In other words, in the way that our household goods sit around, or that options on the shelf of a grocery store linger before they’re purchased, or that what’s left behind in an abandoned building slowly decays — who or what is there, too? What of ourselves did we give them? What do they retain? The gentle touch of personhood starts appearing well outside of us, as individuals. My stride through an airport terminal creates, for a moment and then another, a new, lived, visual system in which I’m linked with a square of flooring. And then another. And then…
Pointing towards all of that, the creative power feels recognizable at basically every point across these exhibited artworks by Rauschenberg. In their earnestness, I feel like I saw each visual juncture creating itself anew.
Stuck before in my own yearning, I saw the side of utterly inanimate objects that yearned with me. Maybe I wished it into being. But I feel something similar here, as I think about these sculptures… asynchronous glimmers of connection, recognition, and directional ambition. As we look, awash in the want of what the sculptures cultivate into hopeful gazing, we help create the scene.
Somehow, in the meantime, I also feel like a materialized version of the past coexists with a material incarnation of the present in these Rauschenberg pieces. They’re beautiful in their vulnerability. The artworks are grounded, but they reach towards themselves, each other, and if you’re visiting one, you.
These invoked flashes of space, form, presence, and the time behind it all combine in each encountered instance into the arc of a place and whoever is in its midst, there together. It’s togetherness amid the non-individual, which tracks with my own observations and experiences of the world.
Purely material instances — like cast off objects of our surrounding, created worlds — they’re imbued with and reflect something back to us of our many particular individualities. They give our time its contours in the first place as we move through our actual days; they’re key subjects of our outwardly looking experience. They’re… there, looking back.
Rauschenberg’s sculptures spatially transcend themselves, similarly meeting us.
We ultimately see ample, visual markers of these objects’ originally intended uses and material contexts, but it all gracefully moves into a broader plane in which these assembled visuals join together. With each glance, the individual objects comprising one of these sculptures feel truly in the same experienced place.
The sculptures are so material, so grounded in the instant that I’m looking at them or thinking back to them. They’re so… right in front of me, bringing my focus to their own spaces. For each sculpture, the impact emanates from and resides within it. It is its own. And when I look at these sculptures, I start to really see that same power elsewhere, long there. There is surprising consistency.
These sculptures, they are just so… present. And it’s reassuring.
Robert Rauschenberg: “Sympathy for Abandoned Objects” closed on June 14 at Gladstone Gallery in New York. Thank you to the gallery for their help in putting this article together.
