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Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, United States, 1925), ORACLE, 1962 \u2013 1965.
\n\tGalvanised sheet metal, water and sound.
\n\t236 x 450 x 400 cm.
\n\tBilly Kl\u00fcver, sound engineer, installed the electromechanical system.
\n\tGift of Mr and Mrs Pierre Schlumberger in 1976 to the mus\u00e9e d\u2019art moderne Georges Pompidou.
\n\tBathtub 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).<\/p>\n
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 Kl\u00fcver, 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 L\u00e9o 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.
\n\tOracle 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.
\n\tEach 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.
\n\tThis project is the result of three years of collaboration between Rauschenberg and Billy Kl\u00fcver.
\n\tThe work was first presented at the Leo Castelli gallery in 1965 and at the exhibition \u201cThe machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age\u201d (\u201cThe machine considered at the end of the mechanical age\u201d) organised by Pontus Hulten at the Museum of Modern Art in the city of New York.
\n\tHere, the sculpture is made of the useful put out of use.
\n\tIn 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 \u201ccontemporary nature\u201d2 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.
\n\tThe 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 \u201ceveryday technology\u201d. Banal, everyday objects, taken out of their context, removed from their socially codified role.
\n\tThese \u201cprecarious\u201d objects contrast with the advanced technology of the sound installation designed by Kl\u00fcver.
\n\tThe spirit of collaboration marks Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s style. With Kl\u00fcver, he sees the participation of the engineer\u2019s work in that of the artist as the solution for a more humane world.
\n\tThus, with Kl\u00fcver (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\u2019 research into new technologies.
\n\tLike them, the Italian Futurists, the Russian Constructivists and the artists of the Bauhaus had already turned to industry to express their ideas.
\n\tRauschenberg began assembling the pieces for Oracle in early 1962, while Kl\u00fcver created the sound system. Rauschenberg asked him to design a system that the spectator could control.
\n\tKl\u00fcver installed radios in each part of the sculpture. Each radio picks up snatches of broadcasts from all the radios on New York\u2019s A.M. band (F.M. was too \u201chigh-class\u201d and \u201cesoteric\u201d for Rauschenberg.)3.
\n\tThe collaboration between Rauschenberg and Kl\u00fcver on Oracle lasted three years.
\n\tTo 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.
\n\tObjects, words and music mingle. Rauschenberg found that \u201cThe waves of radio sound made the room a funhouse.\u201d4 (\u201cThe sound of the radio waves filled the room with joy\u201d).
\n\tAlan Salomon wrote: \u201cFives pieces in the round with sound.\u201d5 This summed up the composition of the assemblage well.
\n\tOne must recall the decisive influence on Rauschenberg of the composer John Cage\u2019s 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 \u201cCombine Paintings\u201d, 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.
\n\tRauschenberg had already used three radios in his 1959 Combine Painting \u201cBroadcast\u201d and in a series of paintings from 1960 from which emerged sounds that each spectator could control. He had also designed a \u201csculptural environment\u201d 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.
\n\tIn 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.
\n\tFor 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
\n\tRauschenberg 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\u2013sound association is unsettling because of the contrast established between the emission of a natural music and that of a manufactured music.
\n\tAlan Salomon, said then that Oracle reflected Rauschenberg\u2019s special sense of humour as well as his hilarious sense of absurd juxtaposition.7
\n\tAn oracle in the Littr\u00e9 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).
\n\tThus, 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\u2019s 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.
\n\tThe 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.
\n\tClose 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\u2019s case, more tragic than playful.<\/p>\n
Ana\u00efs Rolez<\/p>\n
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1KOTZ, 1990. P. 134.
\n\t2Ibid.
\n\t3Ibid.
\n\t4Cited in KOTZ, 1990. p. 135.
\n\t5Sentence written by Alan Salomon on the invitation card for the first exhibition of Oracle at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York in 1965.
\n\t6BOSSEUR, 1998. P. 82.
\n\t7Cited in KOTZ, 1990. p. 135.<\/p>\n
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