“I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.” —Robert Rauschenberg
In Wagon Wheel (Galvanic Suite), executed in 1989, Rauschenberg makes a defiant return to silkscreen – a medium he had overlooked since the 1960s. Compelling in its materiality and esoteric in its subject matter, the present work is a testament to the artist’s career-long dedication to blurring the distinction between the artist’s hand and the mechanically produced image.
Wagon Wheel (Galvanic Suite) centers on a curious photograph of a wooden structure, posited in an outdoor setting, and framed by overgrown trees. Stark brushstrokes atop the photograph create an illusion of clouds in the sky, while a strip of empty steel along the right vertical edge of the work flattens the composition, reminding the viewer of the two dimensionality of the aluminum medium. The name “Leo”, is written in mirror along the bottom. A tarp hangs down from the wooden slats of the wooden construction, anchored at three points. Mounted at the center is a rubber tire – while not quite a wagon wheel, one assumes this to be the namesake of the painting. The dramaticized folds of the tarp, set against the tripartite structure of the central tableau, may even recall historical representations of the Crucifixion.
The artist originally began creating silkscreen paintings after visiting Andy Warhol’s studio and seeing Warhol’s experimentation with the process. Thus began an extended series of ‘Silkscreen Paintings’ executed between 1962 and 1964, combining silkscreened photographic images with colorful, gestural passages of paint. The present work, however, comes from a suite of works that, while the artist also considered paintings, were printed onto galvanized steel. The works in this ‘Galvanic Suite’ were executed quite late in the artist’s career – between 1988 and 1991 – and often incorporated bright shades of paint which were exuberantly applied to the surface. Wagon Wheel (Galvanic Suite), in contrast, is rendered purely in greyscale – serving to, intentionally or unintentionally, maintain the nostalgic, hazy quality of the work. The present work is in fact one of only a handful of works within the series that features a single screenprinted image.
“I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.”
—Robert RauschenbergThe works in the Galvanic Suite primarily referenced Rauschenberg’s black-and-white photographs, rather than appropriated images from magazines and newspapers that inspired his Silkscreen Paintings. The photo in Wagon Wheel (Galvanic Suite) was in fact taken by the artist in Venezuela in 1985; the artist was visiting Venezuela as part of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange project (ROCI; 1984-91), an endeavor in which he traveled to countries around the world with the purpose of achieving a mutual understanding through the creative process. Even with this context, however, the meaning behind this particular image remains unclear to the viewer; above all, it seems to represent the artist's dedication to capturing ephemeral details of day-to-day life. Nevertheless, the use of the tire in the present work draws upon the artist’s fascination with the wheel throughout his oeuvre. Emerging in the artist’s visual lexicon in his 1952 photographs of Roman flea markets, wheels would take on dozens of incarnations throughout Rauschenberg’s lifetime. The symbolic meaning of Rauschenberg’s tires has been interpreted as references to motion, speed, orifices, modernity, Americanism, and cycles of life and death. Perhaps most infamous of all is the use of the tire in his 1955-59 work, Monogram, in which a tire encircles the head of a stuffed Angora goat.
Rauschenberg is of course not the first artist to be fascinated by wheels; Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 Bicycle Wheel comes to mind. Speaking of the readymade’s calming effects, Duchamp once said “To see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day . . . I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace.” Perhaps for Rauschenberg, the humble wheel or tire served a similar purpose; at once a simple object to gaze upon, and simultaneously a semiotic tool, detached from its function.
