Remembering Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg died Monday night at the age of 82. The world has lost an extremely talented and exceptionally prolific artist.
It’s odd, for some reason I knew he was going to die this year. I wish I had a better sense of my own matters.
It should be obvious that he was a huge influence on me and one of the few creative heroes of mine — sadly, most of them have passed away. I was familiar with his work but I didn’t get into it until I was in college. I was attracted to it because it was similar to a lot of the things I was doing and continue to do. I was surprised to find he stole a lot of my ideas and techniques — yes, I’m aware he did them way before me.
In my senior year of college I did my thesis for contemporary art history class on The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, sort of a one-piece retrospective of his long career that was almost 1,000 feet long when it was shown at MASS MoCA in 2000. The paper was titled “Robert Rauschenberg’s Enormous P… hurumph… Painting,” which is available for download if you’d like to read more about it and glean further evidence of how poor my writing skills were.