[0:10]Who's Robert Raschenberg? Robert Raschenberg's my personal hero. Raschenberg is one of the most fecund artists of the second half of the 20th century. He married painting and sculpture. When he did so, he invented a word to come up with the thing that he had done and that word was combine. What is a combine and why do we use that word with Robert Raschenberg's work as opposed to say assemblage or construction? The word combine has a couple of meanings. On the one hand, it's the combination of painting and sculpture into a third term. Raschenberg is deliberately trying to frustrate our preconceived ideas of what sculpture and painting are. Is painting made with paint? Is sculpture seen in the round? He's really not interested in those questions. And the other hand, combine is his method. It's literally the combining of all of these different elements. Whether it's paint squeezed directly out of the tube, his shirt, a stuffed chicken, a tire, a stuffed goat, newspaper clippings, photographs of a lover, whole pages of the newspaper, combined into one compositional form. Raschenberg was really interested in, um, taking things out of the real world and putting them in an artwork, and he wanted to do that because he was interested in the world. He's interested in non-sequiturs. He's interested in these collisions, the way that these things are going to collide and make sense or not make sense or make a weird kind of sense together. We're made to be aware that we look at works of art from some place, from within the world. We're not in some kind of outside zone voristically looking upon a scene, right? That the works of art and our own relationship to them are happening in a kind of shared space. Raschenberg is often quoted as saying he wanted to work in the gap between art and life. It's not so much that art and life are polar opposites. It's suggesting that they're two poles of a continuum and that the gap is not mere empty space. That's where everything is happening. That's the texture of our lives. It's the things that happen in the background, so to speak, that we're not focused on because we don't think of it as special. Art is something we pay attention to. Life is something that happens on in the background. A lot of people when they look at a Raschenberg, they see mostly the life stuff. They see the stuffed goat. And it's hard not to, it's a stuffed goat. But on the face of that stuffed goat is paint. And so I think that tension between those materials that come from everyday life and the materials that come from the sphere of art is the way he's able to get at that space. I'm not, you know, I'm not so sure there there is a gap or there was a gap for him. I feel like the way he was making art was the way non-artists are also living life, which is to say, we're social, we're human, we're interacting and that was just his way of doing it. Raschenberg gave artists an enormous sense of permission. As long as you are committed to seeing your idea through to its logical or illogical conclusion, you get to do whatever you want. That's enormous.
[3:56]Yeah. He's my hero. He's totally my hero.
