Beschreibung:

Robert Rauschenberg Meta Meta Glut 1987 Assembled metal parts. 70 x 98 1/2 in. (177.8 x 250.2 cm). Signed, titled and dated “Meta Meta Glut 87.59 Rauschenberg” on a metal plate adhered to the reverse.
Provenance Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich Catalogue Essay It’s a time of glut. Greed is rampant. I’m just exposing it, trying to wake people up. I simply want to present people with their ruins... I think of the Gluts series as souvenirs without nostalgia. What they are really meant to do is give people an experience of looking at everything in terms of what its possibility might be. Robert Rauschenberg taken from M. Kotz, Rauchenberg / Art & Life, New York, 1990, p. 246-247 After an absence of forty years, Robert Rauschenberg returned to his native Port Arthur,Texas to attend the opening of the Public Library and Historical Association’s exhibition in his honor. At the time, Rauschenberg discovered that Port Arthur’s downtown was a dilapidated, crumbling ghost town—broken down oil refineries, an aftermath of the mid-1980’s oil glut, exhibited a rather grim side toTexas. With theTexas economy in shambles, the sight of abandoned gasoline stations where weeds grew beside gas pumps advertising rock-bottom prices became tantamount to the economic crisis at hand. Rauschenberg responded with a series of artworks created upon his impressions of the environment.The first pieces in the Glut series related literally, composed of crumpled remnants of the detritus and debris left after the closing down of gasoline stations. Soon, however, the artist developed his Gluts into more elaborate conceptual schematics, wherein a sociological message was mounted within the aesthetic of the materials used. “The Glut sculptures don't broadcast any obvious political messages, but in his care for the cast off and thrown away a deeper kind of politics may be read: a radically democratic resistance to established, discriminating hierarchies of valuation. If utopia can be built on a foundation of simple spiritual generosity, then Mr. Rauschenberg is your architect,” (K. Johnson, “Under Rauschenberg’s Spell, MundaneTurns Uncanny”, NewYork Times, March 19, 2004). Rauschenberg, whose artistic oeuvre strives towards a fixed, common narrative, in which commonplace objects are utilized in innovative, suggestive contexts, has always, at his core, been a great storyteller. The present lot Meta Meta Glut, from 1987, displays the artist’s unwavering agility at revealing its source in a completely original arena. For the viewer, it becomes an ultimate expression of America, with the basketball hoop rim, street signs and scrap collected from automobiles and industrial wayside, forming a distilled abstraction of the American flag. Rauschenberg’s version of red, white and blue becomes an ultimate testament to a former display of wealth and prosperity of his country, revealing a level of pathos on par with art historical canons from the past. Read More