Explore with Senior Conservator for Works on Paper and Photographs Jeffrey Warda, how Rauschenberg blurred the lines between mediums, embracing experimentation and the unpredictable “magic” of printmaking to create works that constantly expand beyond any single technique.


Transcript:
I'm Jeffrey Warda. I'm the Senior Conservator for Works on Paper and Photographs at the Guggenheim, New York.

I started my career as a printmaker, so I always think back of the time I had making prints and that process. And part of what we do as a conservator is to identify media. So we want to have an accurate description of what an artwork is.

When you walk into these galleries, you notice there's works on paper on one side and  paintings on the other side. As you look at these pieces closely, you realize they're all kind of blended into one, and they all incorporate different techniques. He's always overlapping into other areas, and this gallery is an example of that.

Nothing is a monolith, and this is very typical of Rauschenberg. One of many fun reasons to look at Rauschenberg is you see, he's never interested in just one thing. He's always mixing things up and maybe messing with you sometimes when you try to figure out how he made something. And I think that it shows this appetite that he had where he wasn't just limited. He wanted to expand always, and printmaking is in all of it.

So much of it is about  the process of replicating and making another through this sort of mysterious process of pulling a print. Which is so much fun. It's like this magic that happens where you lay down paper, you run it through a press, it's all invisible, you don't know what's going on, and then you get this other thing that was not necessarily the mark you made on a plate. I think Rauschenberg loved that.

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