
When we first enter the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at the Tate Modern, my parents’ eyes brighten as if they’re greeting old friends. Before they suggested we spend their last day in the UK here, I had no idea who Rauschenberg was, no idea that he was such a major influence on their own work. Dad gravitates to a print of a tyre track that spans an entire wall, Mom to a monoprint of two figures in a field of blue. I split myself between them, not wanting to miss anything.
Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953
Can a drawing be made of erasing? Rauschenberg asked, then tried to answer his own question by erasing a pencil drawing drafted for him by de Kooning. It took one month and forty erasers. “I have a drawing from Interlochen that I partially erased,” my mom says, leaning in close, examining the ghosts of graphite. “I couldn’t bring myself to completely destroy it.”
I look at my parents, run through the calculations. My dad and mom were born in 1946 and 1949. Both went to Interlochen Arts Academy for at least a year of high school, but then what? Names and places swim in my head: Tyler School of Art, Wash U, Philadelphia, St Louis. I can’t remember who went where, or when, or even exactly how or where they met. How many times must I have heard these stories? If I can’t remember basic facts, what do I remember? What remains after memories are rubbed out?
This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so, 1961
I am three or so. My first memory of my parents’ art is the smell of sawdust in the sculpture studio at the university where they both taught. The bandsaw has a shrill whine that gets into my flesh, jitters my bones. I can’t recall any of my dad’s wooden sculptures, but I like to make footprints in the shavings that blanket the floor like thick, timbered snow.
No, wait. I am three or so. My first memory of my parents’ art is the smooth, waxy feeling of oil paint on skin. I’ve covered myself with cadmium green because I want to look like a sea monster. I’m in the bathtub and my mother is trying to scrub the paint off my body with a rag soaked in turpentine.
Rauschenberg, says our notes from the exhibition, questioned the distinction between art and everyday objects. “It’s funny,” my mother says, “for someone who was ‘very happy’ for an object to ‘be itself’, this all looks so contrived, so intentionally constructed.”
Untitled (Red Painting), 1954
What am I now, four? Five? I’ve got a thick brush and am painting the side of a building. My dad hovers high above my head on scaffolding, painting the broad outlines of the shapes that his students will fill in. It’s an abstract mural, full of vivid primary colours. I am painting with red. Rauschenberg once said that he thought red was the most difficult colour, but this paint goes on so easily.
Dirt Painting (for John Cage), 1953
I am seven. We’re in the new house, the one with the basement that dad uses as a studio. It’s dark and unfinished and sometimes damp, but occasionally, when I’m brave, I sneak downstairs to look at all the materials my dad has collected for his sculptures. I remember driftwood, snow-fence, charcoal, chicken wire, black plastic buckets full of bright red dirt.
No wait, I am seven, so it’s too early for the buckets of dirt. I am on the great expanse of green by the Humanities Building, helping my dad make long, narrow corridors of snow-fence which he’ll fill with driftwood. Does he spray-paint all of it pink? I remember pink, but its not the sculpture but the preliminary pencil sketches that I recall most clearly, and those are in black-and-white.
Pink Clay Painting (To Pete [Paul Taylor]), 1953
“And you made fun of me for those buckets of red dirt!” dad says.
I must be nine, maybe ten, because my sister is sitting in the back seat with me. We are somewhere in the middle of a four-day drive to Wyoming, to visit Dad’s parents. In Nebraska, my father is so taken with the rich red soil that he drives eighty miles to the nearest store, buys some black buckets, then drives back to the redness and fills his buckets with it. That dirt will sit in our basement for years until dad finally uses it in a sculpture.
“I never made fun of you!” I reply, although I’m not so sure. Eighty miles is a long drive when you’re a child and bored and carsick. But then, now that I think of it, it couldn’t have been anywhere near that far, could it?
Cantos I–XXXIV, 1958-60
Mom tells me her high school art teacher was very influenced by Rauschenberg’s lighter fluid transfers. “He encouraged all of us to use those techniques,” she says. “I don’t remember that,” dad says, his eyes blank. There is an awkward pause until my mom steps in. “That was Peter Romsey,” Mom says. “Didn’t you have Jean Parsons and John Rush?” “Right,” says dad. I don’t realise that I’ve been holding my breath until I exhale.
“This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time”, 1948
I look at my parents, run through the calculations. My dad turned seventy this year. How old was his father when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s? How old was his mother when she had her first stroke? Grandpa died age eighty, Grandma at eight-one. Both of them had problems before they were seventy, didn’t they? Or did they? And when did my mother’s parents start having their troubles? What age were they when they moved into a retirement home specialising in dementia?
I walk by this piece but I forget to look at it. I’m too busy thinking about other things that pass with time.
Rhyme, 1956
I am thirteen, looking through some large paintings I’ve never seen before. One is blue and textural, and I assume it’s dad’s because of the shapes and colours and abstraction. I am shocked when mom claims it as a piece of hers from grad school.
My memory of that piece is here, hanging on the wall, just with a different colour palette. “Rauschenberg was so influential in those days,” my mom says with something like nostalgia, something like regret. “It was a long time before I felt feel free to paint the way I wanted to paint.”
Nabisco Shredded Wheat (Cardboard), 1971
“Oh!” dad says, breaking out in a grin. “I heard about these at Tyler!” Mom looks at my father, runs through the calculations. “1971,” she says, tilting her head. “Weren’t you in Vietnam?” Dad frowns, looks at the label, then back at the installation. “I thought I heard about the cardboard boxes at Tyler,” he says, then sighs. “I’m conflating everything.”
Duet [Anagram (A Pun)], 1998
We enter the last room of the exhibition. I am three, four, five. I am seven, I am nine, I am thirteen. I am all these ages, and none of them. “How am I forty?” I ask my mother. “I don’t know,” she says. “How am I the age I am?”
In his final years, Rauschenberg recycled material from his earlier works, mixed them with photography, objects, images from friends. After his two strokes, his right had was paralysed. On these pieces, his signature is faint and shaky. “It’s something that he kept working,” Mom says.
My dad’s face falls as he reads through the final information panel. “I didn’t realise Rauschenberg died in 2008,” he says. “Oh, we must have known once,” my mother says. “We must have heard.”
I look at my mother, now walking with a cane, slightly stooped, a little too skinny, what one might call frail. I look at my father walking next to her, moving slowly, the corners of his eyes drooping. I do the calculations. My parents live in the US, I live in the UK. We get together once, maybe twice a year. How many more times will I see them? How long will their memories, our memories hold? How much time do we have left? How much might be lost already?
I feel a stinging in my eyes, a tightness in my throat. I don’t want to be like this in front of my parents, so I turn to the wall, take out my notebook, scribble down something that’s printed there—something Rauschenberg once said. My writing is faint and shaky. When I get home, the only part that’s legible will read, “facts are changing like the light we are seeing them in.” As we leave, I think I recognise a hint of turpentine and sawdust in the air. “What a show,” I say to my parents. “What a life,” my dad replies.




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