Time Capsule, 1970 : Rauschenberg's Surface Series from Currents
By 1970 American culture had moved into a period of enormous social and political change. The enthusiasm of the 1960s surrounding the Kennedy Administration, the emergence of the civil rights movement, broad economic growth, and the start of the space program had succumbed to pessimism by the end of the decade with the advent of political assassinations, violent social unrest, ballooning budgets, and the ongoing war in Vietnam.
Rauschenberg’s career as an avant-garde artist blossomed in the 1960s as he mixed screenprinted images collected from popular media with an eclectic array of found objects, gestural painting, and performance art to produce some of the most effervescent, daring works by any artist of his generation. By the end of the decade, Rauschenberg was internationally famous; at the same time, his work was becoming darker as he began to focus on his long-held interest in social activism.
Rauschenberg and his assistant Bob Peterson began the project by collecting stories, headlines, advertisements, and images cut from more than fifteen newspapers and tabloids—eight of which, the New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star, Minneapolis Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Times, and Herald Examiner, were published in January and February of 1970. These clippings, combined with drawn, printed, and transferred images, were pasted together to make thirty-six collages that were then photographed. The photographic negatives were enlarged and used in a variety of combinations to create screens for three series of photo-screenprints.
The exhibition took the title Currents from the key work of the installation: an enormous silk screen hand-printed in black and white on a continuous sheet of paper six feet high by fifty-four feet long—the largest work of its kind to date. This monolithic print reproduced all thirty-six of the original collages, while Features from Currents consisted of twenty-six collages printed over pastel grounds on individual sheets of paper. Finally, for Surface Series from Currents, Rauschenberg superimposed two different negatives when making each of the screens for eighteen additional prints, resulting in a nearly illegible cacophony of words and images. The accidental patterns that are distinctive in this series are the result of having enlarged the negatives to the point where Benday dots from the reproduced newspaper photographs are clearly visible. When the original collages and three groups of prints were shown at Dayton’s Gallery 12, they engulfed the visitor in a cascade of current events, repeated over and over again. The works formed, according to Branden Wayne Joseph, “a sort of time capsule from the end of the ‘Great Society,’ buried so that future observers would know how it ended: in escalating violence, warfare, political backlash, and police repression.”
The Art Museum is fortunate to have in its collections the entire suite of eighteen screenprints in Surface Series from Currents. Today, forty-nine years after Rauschenberg immersed visitors in his stark barrage of the printed daily news, we have a chance to peer inside his time capsule and witness the political and cultural events within.
Calvin Brown
Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings
This exhibition is curated by Calvin Brown, associate curator of prints and drawings, and Juliana Dweck, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Engagement, with the invaluable research support of curatorial assistant Annabelle Priestley.