Rauschenberg: Booster

Booster is a monument of postwar American art. An iconic work by a classic artist made at a significant moment in his career, Booster can be studied from endless points of view. Characteristic for art of the 1960s, its form is as meaningful as the conceptual framework Robert Rauschenberg developed for it. Technically a breakthrough in the scale and complexity of fine art prints, Booster also represents a personal summation by the artist. In this work Rauschenberg evaluates the ability of technology to create increased engagements with the viewer (looking inside his body invites a sort of intimacy different from traditional self-portraiture) as well as to embrace specific qualities of his era and his place in the world in general.

Booster was created in 1967 as a pivotal product of Gemini G.E.L., an experimental print workshop founded in Los Angeles the previous year. The edition included a suite of related lithographs known as the Test Stones, which reflect Rauschenberg’s intellectual working process. Although we can find motifs in the final print—most of them the “found” images that have characterized the artist’s work from his early Combines to the present day—none is retained as a compositional device nor as a given juxtaposition. Neither are the Test Stones remotely the same size or shape as Booster. Each of them relates more directly to the sorts of compositions Rauschenberg had developed in his previous series, the Silkscreen Paintings of 1962-64: compositions based on the painterly sweep of such Abstract Expressionists as Franz Kline. Thus rather than revealing a series of additive stages that culminate in the final print, the Test Stones show the artist working through his past to embrace a new present.