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The World According To Bob Rauschenberg

[[image - photograph, photograph credit EMIL FRAY]] 
[[right side of photograph is on the following page]]
Rauschenberg with assistant Terry van Brunt, at work in Captiva

seems reasonably fit-there is a fully equipped gym on the first floor of his ocean-front house-and his schedule is protected to allow time for "swimming, sunning, fishing, nothinging." A trip to the island supermarket can become an hours-long excursion for the artist. Generally speaking, local residents leave him alone; it is the tourists who prowl around in search of his property, sometimes claiming as souvenirs various oddments and pieces of refuse they find on the land. Out and about on Captiva, a passerby might reasonably mistake him for some prosperous, semi-retired chief executive, exceptional only for the youthfulness of his manner. Rauschenberg is a very young 59, as energetic as any member of his half-his-age Florida staff. He mentions with particular pride the Grammy award he won last year, "Best Album Package," for an LP by the Talking Heads ("That's a distinction not even Picasso could claim"), his love of dancing, his undiminished capacity for raising hell: only by geographic circumstance is Rauschenberg cut off from the electric vitality of his New York past.

   Whatever the shortcomings of an artist's life on the Florida Gulf coast-he misses painters, for one thing, people he finds interesting because "they don't talk about vitamins, or loss of sleep, or how terrible the food was"-Rauschenberg loves it here. New York, where he maintains a five-story studio and residence and a second staff of three, is "so specific for me now... my activities are so planned" that he considers it a place to do business more than live. On Captiva, where he spends as much as half the year, the artist is at peace, and it shows in his work. A silkscreen completed in April, photographs and oddments picked up from the beach and then washed over with gentle tones of pink and gray, possesses a lovely softness, a tranquility that suggests the last hour of light at the end of a perfect Florida day. This is not part of the "Quarter Mile," but elements of that work carry Florida symbology and tone as well.

   Rauschenberg discovered Captiva something around eighteen years ago, a few years after he'd won the Venice Biennial and passed over the line into cultural stardom, not long after a difficult period that he describes best: "All my friends were getting divorces, and there were a couple of suicides, and I couldn't figure out why all this sadness should be present, and I decided to take the blame myself. I didn't know whether to go into drugs, or hibernation, or psychoanalysis, and I thought, no, I'll just see an astrologer. So someone recommended this astrologer as 'the second-best astrologer in the whole world,' and that appealed to me, and I went to him and he told me, 'Oh, no, none of this is your fault, Pluto and something else are in a coordinate here. My God, it's a wonder you've even survived.' Any time I'm feeling in trouble, he told me to head for the water, so I went out and I followed every beach road in the United States. I went to Dog Island, Pig Island, Fig Island, islands nobody's still ever heard of, and eventually I got here. Every time I came to Captiva something magic happened, like having to stop the car because of a big turtle crossing the road, or stepping out of the car and having forty yellow butterflies all of a sudden come at you. Always, something very personal happened. I had this ghost of having been here before. There was something familiar about it."

   It is not difficult to understand how anybody might have been drawn to the sparsely populated little island it must have been 18 years ago, nor how Rauschenberg continues to respond
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22 MARQUEE MAY 1984