Oracle

Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, United States, 1925), ORACLE, 1962 – 1965.
Galvanised sheet metal, water and sound.
236 x 450 x 400 cm.
Billy Klüver, sound engineer, installed the electromechanical system.
Gift of Mr and Mrs Pierre Schlumberger in 1976 to the musée d’art moderne Georges Pompidou.
Bathtub with shower (178 x 115 x 60 cm), staircase (149 x 140 cm), window frame (158 x 236 x 47 cm), car door (160 x 133 x 85 cm), pipe (143 x 116 x 73 cm).

In the 1950s, Rauschenberg developed a practice based on the collage of various objects borrowed from different domains of experience and culture. Made in collaboration with Billy Klüver, Oracle is a sculpture in five elements consisting of an assemblage of salvaged objects (car door, ventilation ducts, window, bathtub with shower, staircase) belonging to the world of everyday technology, into which is integrated a system of radios picking up various broadcasts from the place where the piece is presented. the five elements each have a particular structure and operation. close to certain sculptures by Tinguely, this environment of machines living their own life is more tragic than playful. presented in 1965 at the Léo Castelli gallery (NYC), this work was conceived as an interactive work: spectators moved around inside the elements and could change the radio programmes. Each of the elements comprises a battery, a radio receiver and a loudspeaker.
Oracle is an interactive sculpture. The receivers scanned the wavelengths of New York radio stations; remote-controlled by the spectator, a motor made it possible to move at variable speed from one wavelength to another, as if to trap the sound messages of a city. The noises of the modern metropolis here constitute a sonic material whose speed the public, armed with a remote control, could vary.
Each moving piece of the sculpture contains a motor. This motor continuously moves the dial of a radio across the AM band. The visitor can control the speed of the motor and the sound level of the radio in each part of the sculpture by turning the knobs.
This project is the result of three years of collaboration between Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver.
The work was first presented at the Leo Castelli gallery in 1965 and at the exhibition “The machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age” (“The machine considered at the end of the mechanical age”) organised by Pontus Hulten at the Museum of Modern Art in the city of New York.
Here, the sculpture is made of the useful put out of use.
In this work, Robert Rauschenberg blends art and technology. He does not see technology as a force to be avoided or as the influence of the dehumanisation of society1. For him, technology is “contemporary nature”2 and he often represents human/machine interactions in his work. For him, environmental problems or the growing military industry cannot be solved by a return to a simpler way of life.
The elements that make up the installation are so many salvaged objects (bathtub with shower, staircase, window frame, car door, ventilation ducts), belonging to the world of “everyday technology”. Banal, everyday objects, taken out of their context, removed from their socially codified role.
These “precarious” objects contrast with the advanced technology of the sound installation designed by Klüver.
The spirit of collaboration marks Robert Rauschenberg’s style. With Klüver, he sees the participation of the engineer’s work in that of the artist as the solution for a more humane world.
Thus, with Klüver (engineer), Robert Whitman (artist) and Fred Waldhauer (engineer), he created Experiments in Arts and Technologie (E.A.T.), a permanent association in which artists and scientists combine their work under industrial patronage. The organisation is intended to steer artists’ research into new technologies.
Like them, the Italian Futurists, the Russian Constructivists and the artists of the Bauhaus had already turned to industry to express their ideas.
Rauschenberg began assembling the pieces for Oracle in early 1962, while Klüver created the sound system. Rauschenberg asked him to design a system that the spectator could control.
Klüver installed radios in each part of the sculpture. Each radio picks up snatches of broadcasts from all the radios on New York’s A.M. band (F.M. was too “high-class” and “esoteric” for Rauschenberg.)3.
The collaboration between Rauschenberg and Klüver on Oracle lasted three years.
To avoid wiring between the sculptures, a signal is sent from a central control panel located in one of the sculptures, relayed by a small transmitter, and controls the others.
Objects, words and music mingle. Rauschenberg found that “The waves of radio sound made the room a funhouse.”4 (“The sound of the radio waves filled the room with joy”).
Alan Salomon wrote: “Fives pieces in the round with sound.”5 This summed up the composition of the assemblage well.
One must recall the decisive influence on Rauschenberg of the composer John Cage’s teaching at Black Montain College, his taste for the mixing of categories, the opening of the work onto life. Thus, from 1953 on, his works incorporated all kinds of heterogeneous objects and materials not belonging to the usual register of art. These montages, in which found objects (bottles, chairs, string, etc.), waste, natural materials and newspapers are mixed, Robert Rauschenberg called “Combine Paintings”, that is to say combined works that avoid categories (painting, sculpture, collage). Oracle is a transposition into space and sound of his first Combine Paintings.
Rauschenberg had already used three radios in his 1959 Combine Painting “Broadcast” and in a series of paintings from 1960 from which emerged sounds that each spectator could control. He had also designed a “sculptural environment” in the labyrinth of the Stedlijk with Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, in which he had incorporated the sound of an electric pump sending air into a tube filled with water and clocks turning at different speeds.
In 1997, Experiments in Art and Technology built and installed a new system with the financial participation of Robert Rauschenberg and donated it to the Centre Georges Pompidou.
For Rauschenberg, Oracle represents the culmination of research into sound collages, intended to enter into counterpoint with visual collages. For Jean-Yves Bosseur, Oracle makes it possible to live and hear reality in what is fundamentally experimental about it. For him, seeing and hearing in the present breaks with artistic illusion.6
Rauschenberg wished to create a sculpture like an orchestra in which the spectator could be the conductor. The radios broadcast a continuously changing cacophony of real-world sounds emanating from each piece of the sculpture. Oracle opens an auditory contact with the city; it is a concentrate of its situation. The work is both finished and unfinished: it obeys a precise programming but its programme is adjustable and open. The hushed atmosphere of the museum is broken by a circulation of water and sounds. This water–sound association is unsettling because of the contrast established between the emission of a natural music and that of a manufactured music.
Alan Salomon, said then that Oracle reflected Rauschenberg’s special sense of humour as well as his hilarious sense of absurd juxtaposition.7
An oracle in the Littré is, among the pagans, the response of the deity to those who consulted it; it was given in temples and other places consecrated by religion. The very deity who gave oracles. (To go and consult the oracle).
Thus, Oracle, representing everyday life (bathtub, window, sheet metal, etc. found in the streets of New York), would be the deity, that in which we believe (in material things, consumer objects), moreover situated in the temple of art, the museum. This modern deity would reveal to us the oracle, the noises of the city, music, the radio like a jammed message. Sound lends the work its dramatic and funny character, all the more so since the spectator can personally change the frequency of the oracle. Sound here is an integral part of Rauschenberg’s intention to mix art and life. Everyday life with everyday objects and sounds. One picks up Algiers, Paris, Budapest, Milan simultaneously. The radios remind us of the universal dimension of the modern subject: the world is a heterogeneous collage of simultaneous sounds.
The sounds one hears will never be reproduced. The Oracle here is a very precarious deity; the meaning it delivers is never definitive, truth is a perpetual becoming.
Close to certain machines by Tinguely (who also created radiophonic sculptures), this environment of machines living their own life, questioning the relations between Junk Culture and technology, is nevertheless, in Rauschenberg’s case, more tragic than playful.

Anaïs Rolez

1KOTZ, 1990. P. 134.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Cited in KOTZ, 1990. p. 135.
5Sentence written by Alan Salomon on the invitation card for the first exhibition of Oracle at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York in 1965.
6BOSSEUR, 1998. P. 82.
7Cited in KOTZ, 1990. p. 135.