One of my guilty pleasures is this stuffed goat sculpture by Robert Rauschenberg. If you try to argue me out of this I'll have no choice but to turn and run. That's 'cause I don't have the slightest idea why I like it, I just do.
I confess that I like some of his environmental art, too. My favorite is the large, enclosed field of bubbling mud, above. I don't blame you if you're skeptical, but trust me, I've seen it and it looks a lot better than it reads in print. In real life it oozes, plops, bubbles and slaps, and you can't take your eyes off it.
Architects were dying to figure out a way to incorporate it into buildings, but nobody could think of how. It's not structural. You can't walk on it. Eveybody agrees that it's somehow architectural, but how? Nobody knows...but it certainly is inspiring. It's all about bringing nature into buildings. Rauschenberg made us want to see the wonders of the natural world inside our homes and workplaces, not just in zoos or museums.
Here's (above) some workers in an ugly modern room. But wait, what's that above their heads? You can't see it clearly here, but the designer put LCD screens above the workers' heads, and on the screens are videos of moving clouds, including thunder clouds. Imagine if the whole ceiling were like that. Imagine your overhead light being alternately dappled or partly cloudy. Imagine the mood of such an office at night with video moonlight illuminating the rims of clouds, and moody low-level lighting taking up the slack. The spirit of Rauschenberg strikes again!
Everybody wants to try out flight simulators. Soon LCD displays (above) will be so cheap that, sitting at home or at work, we'll see what an airline pilot sees outside his window, or what a ship captain sees when he's caught in a hurricane, or what a submarine commander sees when he looks out into the Marianas Trench. Maybe we can put little cameras on ants and see what they're seeing when they work all day inside their hill. Imagine that as a background while you work at a desk filling out insurance forms. Rauschenberg would have loved it.
Or maybe he wouldn't. I picture him saying, "No, no, no! What I meant was that we should bring real nature indoors!" That seems to imply indoor trees or birds, or aquariums.
Imagine a quarter mile-long, giant aquarium with mysterious caves and corals, as well as fish. Imagine if various businesses along its length shared walls with it. That may not be practical now, but you know it will be somewhere down the line.
Or maybe it's cheaper to have people look at other people rather than fish. If more buildings were shaped like inverted pyramids, we could have floors like this (above).
It would be best if the floor was clear, structural glass (above), with a minimum of metal bars. Here we're bringing nature indoors, but it's not trees or plants...it's the awesome fact of gargantuan real world volumes and spaces.
Rauschenberg did a lot to popularize the idea that architecture (above) should be fun. It doesn't have to cost a lot of money.
Thanks to the site "Crooked Brain" for most of these pictures. That's a terrific design site, frequently updated. Check it out!
21 comments:
I don't think many people have associated Rauschenberg with architecture, but its an interesting thought.
He's usually thought of in relation to performance, like with the Combines, which the goat is one of, and are thought of, in a general way, as "performing" paintings. He also participated in many performances in the 60's
He took Pollock's manner of painting, which was working with the canvas flat on the floor, and working from all sides of it, a logical step foward. If you're going the make the painting on the floor,why bother hanging it up on a wall afterward?
I've never known of that mud installation before. thanks for posting!
Why not have a floor that's the mud sculpture under glass?
I'm all for glass floors. They should be installed forthwith - in all women's dormitories and Catholic schoolgirl high schools and colleges around the world.
Hey Eddie, when are you putting up your store? I wanna buy some music from ancient geese.
Thomas: Yeah, later in life he did a lot of consulting on environmental art. Some of it was wsn't too good, but maybe that wasn't his fault. Anyway, his heart was in the right place.
Anon: Aaaargh! I should have thought of that! The glass in such a floor would require a lot of cleaning, but you could argue that it's not an artist's job to worry about practical difficulties.
Mike: Haw! Yes, there are other advantages to glass floors.
And "ancient geese"? Did I write that!!??? I'll have to go back and check it!
About that glass floor high about the ground....
Some of us have vertigo... I can't even get up close to a floor to ceiling window let alone such a floor. The mere thought actually fills me with terror. Actually, just looking at a picture of someone else standing on that floor scares me!
Am enormus aquarium in the office would look fantastic.
This isn't related to Rauschenberg, but I was wondering if you've seen this? Any thoughts on the NFB cartoons, Eddie?
http://www.nfb.ca/film/cordell_master_class_1
Thanks for the info about R.R.
Some environmental architecture....
ledoux
boullee
Stephen: Yes, I did see that, but it was nice to watch it over again. Thanks for the link!
Barker is great, and the best of the NFB films are terrific. I tried to get Barker to work on Tales of Worm Paranoia with me, but he said he only wanted to work on his own projects.
Gordon: Nothing wrong with being scared of heights. That's how I feel when I see those classic pictures of the riveters who built the Empire State Building.
Thomas: I'm not crazy about that first picture. The second one had interesting scale, but I'm not in favor of simplistic concrete shapes like that. The human eye and brain are adapted to complicated patterns like the leaves on trees. I do appreciate the links, though. Thanks!
Offtopic but I was thinking about that "Noises Off" play from your older post and how funny and entertaining to see that play butchered as well as classic intricate skits like "who's on first" etc. Haven't been able to find anything like this yet but I think you're the expert on this sort of thing.
Anon: Compare The Billy Wilder version of Front Page with the Hawks version, called His Girl Friday. Hawks beats Wilder by a mile, even though Lemon and Mathau turn in great performances. Netflix has both. You can learn a lot from the comparison.
Thanks! I meant more that it would be interesting to see performances of really intricate stuff like who's on first where both performers get lost and they try to find their place without giving away they've screwed up.
I was in a play in Junior high whose name I can't remember but it was a drawing room whodunnit which involved solving a rebus left by the murderer and the audience had no idea what the hell was going on cause we always ended up skipping over entire pages of the play and sometimes had to improvise backtracking on the spot which was kind of pointless cause it usually happened when a character had an epiphany 10 pages too early and would make a grand accusation before someone would say "aren't you getting a little ahead of yourself? Shouldn't we be focusing on line 3 of the rebus?......" and then there'd be deja vu when the character had the same "aha!" moment ten minutes later."
This sort of stuff is fascinating and hilarious to me. I read an interview with a comedian who had a long falling out with a comedian roommate over posession of an excruciating vhs tape of a comedian bombing and making it worse by getting combative with the audience.
They had some glass floors over at Otis in the Fine Arts building. I couldn't for the life of me walk over them though! I'd feel faint @___@.
Hey Eddie!
This is off-subject, but I recently bought the Mighty Mouse disc and was sorry to not see you in the interviews. How come you weren't involved?
I LOVE that bus stop swing! They should have those everywhere. I would be in heaven. Great post!
Trevor: Probably because I only completed one film there: "Witch Tricks." My next film was slated to be "Catastrophe Cat," but I let that go through undirected, so I could spend twice as long developing the film that was supposed to come after that. I felt that I was ready for a giant leap forward, and the third film would have been it.
That turned out to be a big mistake. NEVER put through an undirected film! It'll turn out worse than you could ever imagine, and YOUR name will be on it! If I'd been able to make the third film nobody would have cared about the bad, undirected one, but alas, the third film was given to someone else and I was kicked out.
Actually I was fired for Witch Tricks, which seems very tame compared to some of the later shows, but was drastic for the beginning of the series, when directors were ordered to play it safe. Ralph saw the unedited footage of Witch Tricks and got pretty mad.
BTW, I still like Ralph a whole lot. Creative people are bound to have differences, and it's best not to take them personally. His heroism on that series helped to make the animation boom that followed possible.
I was fired by Ralph's production manager Tom Klein on the technicality that I asked for the fast action on a scene in Witch Tricks to be done on ones, even though Tom had told us not to use ones.
It was a quick, frantic scene where the fleeing mouse opened several doors in a row extremely fast. I figured that it was repeat animation, requiring no new cels, and the savings in pencil milage would make up for the expense of doing it on ones, not to mention that it would strobe if done on twos. For Tom all that mattered was that I'd ignored what he said about twos, so I was out of there.
As for the audio commentary: I can't remember if I was asked, but It was done when I'd just gotten a new job at a place far from the recording studio, and was no position to ask for time off.
Wow! I was having a hard time trying to spot your drawings, now I know why! It's a bit misleading because your name's on every episode of the end credits.
Trevor: My name's on every episode? Son of a Gun! Well, I wrote some scripts, maybe that's why.
The goat lives in Stockholm, and so do I. It is the most loved art work in Stockholm, no competition. It is displayed at the Museum for Modern Art. There's a glass cage around it now, because children fall in love with it on sight and run up and try to pet it all the time.
And the mud pools, oh yes, they are mesmerising. They appeal in so many ways, the sounds, the movements, the texture of the mud. The people who gather around it get a very relaxed "glow". When you look at other artworks it often feels as if you have to analyse and interpret, but the mud pool you just experience.
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