Transcript
A (0:08)
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm grateful that you're here. And a special thanks for being here during our fall pledge drive. Your support really matters. Coming up on the show today, we're going to hear the future of audio storytelling. I'll speak with local student reporters and storytellers who are finalists for the NPR Student Podcast Challenge. They are taking on topics like accessibility, teaching and cell phones in schools. They'll be here in studio to talk about their work. But first, we'll spend an hour on two artists who use photography to document a New York that has radically changed. Coming up later in the show, we'll learn about a new exhibit featuring the work of David Wojnarowicz. Then that's the plan. Let's get started with Robert Rauschenberg's New York Pictures from the Real World. Robert Rauschenberg is best known as a groundbreaking and experimental artist, someone who blurred the lines between sculpture, painting, photography, even dance. But before he became one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he was an observer of the world around him, driven to relentlessly photograph it. In fact, one of his early ideas was to photograph the country inch by inch. That plan eventually got downsized. Now a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York shows how he approached photography and used it in his artistic practice. It's called Robert Rauschenbag's New Pictures from the Real World. Joining me now to talk about it is Sean Cochran. He is the senior curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. Also written part of the catalog that accompanies the exhibit. Sean, welcome back to all of it.
B (2:07)
Great to be here. Thanks so much.
A (2:08)
It's always good to see you. I want to say that today would have been Robert Rauschenberg's 100th birthday.
B (2:14)
That's correct.
A (2:15)
So before we go on, before we start, is there anything you'd like to share about him, about his work, what he's meant to you?
B (2:22)
Well, I think looking back over at 100 years, what we see in his work is that he broke all the rules. And in fact, he broke all the rules allowing future generations to break the rules to have artistic freedom. And that's really, I think, his legacy in a beautiful way to look back at his work.
A (2:45)
Why did McNy want to take a look at his work?
B (2:49)
Well, we're always interested in seeing how artists see the city. And for him he had a long history with New York. He came to New York in the late 1940s and was here for several decades and then off and on in the later part of his life. But the city changed so much over the years and he took a break from photography in most of the 60s and 70s. But there are these early photographs from the 1950s where the city was in the post war boom. Yet he was a. A pretty starving artist at the time. So there's that perspective and then there's the perspective of a fairly successful artist, a very successful artist, actually in the late 1970s at a time when the city was kind of at the doldrums and trying to pick itself back up off the floor. So there's two different times of seeing the city from an artist at two very different places in his life.