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Rauschenberg/Performance

In 1968, Robert Rauschenberg made an enormous billboard-sized triptych called Autobiography. On the first panel, the artist's astrological chart is superimposed upon a X-ray photograph of his skeleton. In the second, the important names and dates of his life form a spiral around a bucolic snapshot of him as a small boy fishing with his family. In the third, he appears as a man, wearing an open parachute on his back, roller skating across a montage of New York City roof tops. He has chosen, in his panel, to portray himself in the costume for Pelican, 1963, the first of nine performance works he created between 1963 and 1968. On this panel braided into the litany of titles of the early masterpieces whose production constituted the substance of his life are the names of dancers and dances; winning the international prize at the Venice Beinnale in 1964 is just a parenthesis mentioned in the context of a world-wide tour of many cities visited as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Almost half the words in Autobiography relate to his involvement with dance and the state. Because Rauschenberg is one of the two or three most influential artists of the mid-20th century, we think of him only as a painter. Yet, from 1954 to 1965, the period when his ideas were revolutionizing contemporary art, Rauschenberg regularly designed sts and costumes for the Cunningham Company. He also worked with Paul Taylor for several years, collaborating in some of his most radical dances. From 1962-1965 as a participant in the iconoclastic Judson Dance Theater, he shared in the early development of postmodern dance. Rauschenberg was a profoundly and intimately involved in the transformation of modern dance in America as he was central to the development of contemporary visual art. 

Rauschenberg's first exposure to experimental performance took place in Black Mountain College, Beria, North Carolina, where, in the summer of 1952, he participated in a theater piece organized by John Cage. Cunningham danced, Cage and David Tudor made music, M.C. Richards and Charles Olsen recited poetry, and Rauschenberg projected slides onto blank white canvases and played scratchy tunes on an antique Victrola. The performers were joined by an uninvited but enthusiastic dog, which added greatly to the success of the event. "The Event," as it is now known, has become a mythic occasion in the history of artists theater and is considered a seminal influence on Happenings in the '60s and on the performance art which has become an increasingly important phenomenon in the '70s and '80s. In "The Event," Rauschenberg employed strategies that he was later to elaborate on repeatedly in his own theater pieces. And, it was the first episode in along and fruitful three-way collaboration with Cunningham and Cage. From 1954 until 1964, Rauschenberg worked on twenty dances with Cunningham, many of them with music by Cage. His first set for the Cunningham Company was a free-standing painting-and-collage structure, similar in appearance to his red paintings of the same period. Through its opulent, somewhat mysterious presence worked beautifully with the dance, it functioned very much as a discrete object: as a Rauschenberg painting placed on the stage rather that as a Rauschenberg stage set. This was consistent with Cunningham's and Cage's ideal of artistic collaboration as a parallel activity which would fuse into an aleatoric whole at the moment of performance. In his most recent work for the stage, Set and Reset, with choreography by Trisha Brown and music by Laurie Anderson, Rauchenberg created a similarly autonomous sculpture with images provided by superimposed black-and-white film projections. 

His second performance work, Shot Put, was made for the "Sur +" theater evenings at Stage '73, a film studio hired by the Judson group in February of 1964. Rauschenberg's dance was performed to the accompaniment of Oyvind Fahistorm's sound piece. "A Lecture on Bird Calls of Sweden." In a darkened room, with a flashlight attached to his right foot, Rauschenberg executed a series of arabesque plies, drawing with light in space. After the second performance, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm during the Cunningham Company's world tour, muscular exhaustion made him decide that henceforth he would leave dance movement to the dancers. His subsequent works were, indeed, closer to non-verbal theater than to dance. As well as inviting the Cunningham Company dancers who were a part of the Judson group to perform their work at the Moderna Museet, Pontus Hulten, then the Museum's director, asked Rauschenberg to create a new piece for the occasion. Rauschenberg describes this work, Elgin Tie, as "a duet with a Swedish cow." In it, he descended from a skylight down a rope strung with a heterogeneous collection of objects, including items of clothing which had been harnessed unsuccessfully to the truck during rehearsals was then led in, and the truck, pushed by museum guards, followed the cow out of the performance space. The action, with its peculiar blend of drama, risk, and absurdity, is perhaps a metaphor for theater itself. 

Though Rauschenberg used eccentric materials and unconventional visual techniques, much of his work for the Cunningham Company consisted of essentially traditional sets and costumes. In Summerspace, for example, the dancer's tights and leotards seemed to merge with the painted backdrop as though their bodies sometimes actually were moving behind it. Costumes and sets, quite ordinary in themselves, produced an astonishing, exquisitely lyrical ambiance for the dance. In other works Rauschenberg's ideas intersected with Cunningham's, affecting the stage action. In Antic Meet and Aeon a wide variety of disparate objects was added onto practice clothed during the course of each performance; props and costumes became part of the choreography. For Story, he improvised a new decor from materials found at each stop on the Cunningham Company's world tour. During four consecutive performances in London in 1964, Rauschenberg made a new painting on stage. Gradually,