Robert Rauschenberg

Acquired by the present owner from the artist in 1962

This sculpture is in good working condition. There are various areas of minor oxidation to the metallic components throughout as to be expected from the nature and age of the found bicycle wheel and motor. Various cracks, paint accretions, losses and abrasions to the found wood objects are inherent to the artist's choice of media. There is a triangular shaped loss, approximately 2 x 2", to the top of the Plexiglas sheet, which has been reinforced by a newer sheet of Plexiglas. This sculpture should only be plugged in on a very limited and occasional basis, and the running time should not exceed 5 seconds. This work is wired for European electrical current, and is accompanied by a US electrical current converter.
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For Robert Rauschenberg, one of the most radical innovators among a phenomenally creative generation of young artists who started their careers in the 1950s, dance was a great and singular passion. Indeed, as an introverted child growing up in the Texas town of Port Arthur, dance became a crucial mode of expression; the artist himself recalls, “The only way I related at all socially was that I loved to dance.” (Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, New York, 2005, p. 14) This deep enthusiasm and love for the art of movement would inspire, sometime later in New York City, a personal relationship and professional collaboration with the groundbreaking choreographer Paul Taylor. Rauschenberg and Taylor met early in 1954 at an exhibition of the artist’s work at the Stable Gallery, and went on to engage in a prolonged period of creative exchange, with Rauschenberg creating bespoke set and costume designs for Taylor’s nascent company and Taylor assisting the artist with commercial window displays, which Rauschenberg created for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Co with his friend and fellow painter Jasper Johns. Tracer, created in 1962 as the sole set piece for a dance by the same name, is a rare and magnificent example of this most significant of artistic partnerships.

As much as Rauschenberg’s identity as a visual artist was profoundly informed by his reverence for and engagement with the performance arts, Paul Taylor was likewise influenced and inspired by a desire to paint. Before forming the now world renowned Paul Taylor Dance Company, Taylor had performed to much acclaim with pioneering choreographers Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham; before that, however, he had considered becoming a painter. Rauschenberg’s distinctive aesthetic, classified by a near worship of the everyday found object, resonated with Taylor’s innovative approach to modern dance. Distinguished Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector distills the fundamental conceptual commonalities between the two artists when she says, “In his early experimental work Taylor broadened the choreographic parameters of modern dance to include the vernacular gesture and stillness itself. Inspired by Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s embrace of empirical reality as material for their art, Taylor stripped dance down to its essential movements: breathing, posing, walking, sitting, thinking, and so on.” (Nancy Spector, “Rauschenberg and Performance, 1963-67: A ‘Poetry of Infinite Possibilities',” in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, 1997, p. 231) Bolstered by a great mutual appreciation for each other’s artistic pursuits, Taylor and Rauschenberg produced a number of theatrical masterworks together, from Jack and the Beanstalk, which was the first public performance of Taylor’s choreography and premiered at the Henry Street Playhouse in New York on May 30^th 1954, to Tracer, which premiered at the Théâtre des Nations, Paris on April 11th 1962, and for which Rauschenberg created the present work.

For the purposes of the dance, the bicycle wheel that comprises Tracer was mechanized to rotate at different speeds according to the movements of the dancers. Placed on an otherwise empty stage, and surrounded by performers wearing costumes that Rauschenberg had decorated with tire treads, Tracer was in a position of absolute prominence and significance. Though the details of the choreography have since been forgotten, the memory of Tracer lives on through beautiful photographic images that show the Taylor dancers in the midst of fluid, curving movement that one can imagine being the perfect physical accompaniment to the mechanical revolutions of the sculpture. After the performance, the present work travelled with the company back to the United States, where it has remained in Paul Taylor’s collection for over half a century. This significant record of achievement can only be described as a spectacular artistic collaboration that traversed conventional notions of boundaries between different art forms and media. Together Rauschenberg and Taylor pioneered a new synthesis of visual art, performance, dance and music to create an enduring legacy of groundbreaking work. While the nature of performance is fundamentally transitory, Rauschenberg’s works, such as Tracer, provide a lasting vestige to these remarkable events.