(no subject)
This is the only Robert Rauschenberg I own. The JPEG, not surprisingly, doesn’t do the piece justice.
It was only a poster, and it was a gift. My first accompanist (and subsequently director of New Student Relations at the university, and even later the Executive Director of the first orchestra I played in professionally) Melissa Postnikoff (1961-2005) gave it to me at the radio station upon returning from her Master of Arts Administration internship with the Van Cliburn foundation in 1989. It took me a while to make the connection between the poster that Melissa had given me and the Jasper Johns American flag that hung in my mother’s boss’s office at the campus computer store.
Of course, nobody in the Texas Panhandle cares much to think about the connection between Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, but that’s a story for another time.
Ten years later, I was living in Houston with Tom, and the lawyer-turned-state advocate I was semi-dating at the time came down for a visit. Tom didn’t like the lawyer too much - he thought I was the victim in an abusive relationship - but, again, that much is a story for another time.
Two places I was obliged to go during the visit: IKEA (at the time, the Houston location was the only US location between the east and west coasts), and the Menil Collection, which is housed not far from Tom’s Montrose address. I can remember only a few things from that particular collection, which is kind of sad, but my state of mind was not particularly solid throughout my time in Houston. I remember being awestruck by the permanent collection of Surrealist pieces, some warehouse wall-sized abstract canvases as part of some visiting exhibition of work by a living artist whose name I forgot very quickly, and the corner of the museum where they had hung pieces by some of the bigger modern names; no more than one or two pieces by Basquiat, Johns, and Rauschenberg.
My brain made the connection. One of the few fully lucid moments (apart from the serious lust I had for my seriously buff orthopedic surgeon) I had while living in Houston, in fact.
Robert Rauschenberg
22 October 1925 - 12 May 2008