Detail from the BLVRD Features AR episode: Robert Rauschenberg, featuring the 1963 silkscreen painting Retroactive I (Coll: Wadsworth Atheneum) © 2021 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was a restless experimenter who revolutionized Postwar art, starting in the early 1950s, by blurring traditional boundaries between genres and disciplines, as well as the distinction between artist’s studio and his life. Later in life, he became an important activist for animal rights and the environment (making the first “Earth Day” poster in 1970).
BLVRD Features’ eleventh augmented reality episode centers on Rauschenberg’s early 1960s practice through an exploration of a radical silkscreen painting at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. Created in 1963, Retroactive I combines imagery sourced from television, popular magazines, and the everyday (for instance, a seemingly random Polaroid of a glass of water inked in green) with references to art, culture, and politics. A picture of an astronaut ‘s flight simulation test, taken from Life Magazine, emphasizes the period’s exciting “space race,” while an abstracted dripping mushroom cloud above a well-known photo of J.F.K. speaks to the threat of nuclear war that hovered over his presidency. Begun before Kennedy’s assassination, but finished shortly afterwards, the painting was not only as a testament to Rauschenberg’s artistic innovation, and a vivid document of its historical moment, but, like its title “Retroactive I” implies, a picture that already looked solemnly to the past.