A self-portrait of inner man: Examining Rauschenberg’s Booster

‘I’m thinking of doing a self-portrait of inner man’,¹ Robert Rauschenberg announced when he arrived at Gemini GEL print studio to work with master printmaker Kenneth Tyler. For an artist who regularly denied the presence of biographical traces in his work, this clear intent to create a self-portrait is significant. The self-portrait that he was to produce, Booster 1967, would cause a stir as the largest hand-pulled lithograph ever made at the time,² at a little over six feet [183 cm] tall. Central to the work is Rauschenberg’s X-rayed body, fragmented into six segments. This index of the artist’s body has scientific or medical connotations and is confronting in the way technological images of a sick person or dead body might be. Surrounding this central motif are numerous seemingly unrelated images: sports photographs, two drills, a chair and other more obscured pictures. Overlaid over the entire composition is a moon and planetary map drawn in red, tracking the movement of heavenly bodies for the year 1967. The overall impression is that this work could be about technology, the human body, and the Cold War obsession with space exploration.

Robert Rauschenberg produced his first life-size images of the human body in the 1950s while creating works with his wife at that time, Susan Weil. In late 1949, Weil had introduced Rauschenberg to working with photosensitive blueprint paper. She would place objects on its surface and then expose the paper with a handheld sunlamp. Wherever the light fell the paper would turn a brilliant blue, but the paper would remain colourless in the places where the objects had touched the surface and show gradations of blue where they had cast shadows. Rauschenberg and Weil would use their friends and their own bodies to make indexical impressions, such as the work Female Figure c 1950.

Booster recalls these life-size photographically exposed bodies. Standing naked except for a pair of hobnail boots, Rauschenberg had his body X-rayed in segments from head to toe at a Kaiser medical facility. X-rays had been a familiar part of Rauschenberg’s early adulthood, when he worked on medical wards during the Second World War. Rauschenberg had been responsible for bathing the bodies of recently deceased tuberculosis patients before burial. This close experience of death may lead us to read Booster’s X-ray as a memento mori, as a reminder of the fragility of life. However, Rauschenberg is clear that the ‘occasional skull [in his work] doesn’t necessarily mean death’.⁹ This X-ray may instead signify his psychological self-examination. Rauschenberg had previously drawn on medical language to describe the act of introspection, in this account for his origins as an artist, for example: ‘I sat in the coffee shop, embalmed in coffee, and did an autopsy on myself … Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have become an artist’.¹⁰

Using this same language in visual form, Booster uses the X-ray to look beyond the exterior of the artist to an ‘inner man’. Significantly, the same X-ray would reappear in his work Autobiography 1968, and here the swirling text detailing his life to date makes explicit the work’s purpose as the site of biography of the self.

Surrounding the X-ray is a series of newspaper clippings from the Los Angeles Times. Rauschenberg took these images, which are kept for only a short time in what are known as ‘photo morgues’, from the metal photoengraving plates used to print the newspaper. There is a time-lapse photograph of the baseball pitcher Sandy Koufax swinging a golf club at an amateur tournament. In the bottom right corner is an image of the early 1960s world- record holder Ralph Boston competing in the long jump. A sequence of four photographs runs down the side of the work from top right, showing pole vaulter Bob Seagren in action.

These images of athletes may reflect Rauschenberg’s enduring fascination with the human body in movement. Since 1954 he had worked with dancers at both the Merce Cunningham Dance company and the Judson Street Theater, designing sets, costumes and occasionally the choreography. But whether these images of athletes carry significance for the artist is uncertain: Rauschenberg would often speak of the need for images in his work that would ‘dull the social implications, to neutralise the calamities that were going on in the outside world’,¹¹ and would instruct his studio assistants to source ‘dumb’ images, or pictures that don’t support a simple narrative.¹² In 1962 the art critic Brian O’Doherty witnessed Rauschenberg’s selecting such images at the New York Times photo morgue. Rauschenberg described ‘avoid[ing] his own taste … I like images to be as general looking as possible’.¹³

On the right-hand side of the composition are two drills with directional arrows. The frequent reading of Booster as an artwork concerned with space-race technology has led writers to label these as ‘a pair of jet engines’,¹⁴ but a more compelling account is that Rauschenberg saw these drills as code for body parts: reproduced from an advertisement for the Skil Corp Drive-R-Drill electric drill, the drills appear in proximity to Rauschenberg’s pelvis, giving them sexual connotations. While Rauschenberg didn’t include the original advertisement’s eye-catching heading—‘Meet the most useful power tool ever invented!’—he likely included the drills because of their clearly phallic association. Indeed, the drills draw our attention to what the X-ray has inadvertently picked up: the artist’s penis. Kenneth Tyler recalls that when the X-rays arrived at the studio, Rauschenberg ‘was thrilled to death that both his hobnail shoes and his penis were in the X-ray’¹⁵ and would ask the print staff to ensure this detail was not lost in the printing process.¹⁶ The small section of the advertisement that was chosen by Rauschenberg advertises the drill’s ability to move forwards and reverse at the flick of a switch, a choice that reinforces the humorous sexual connotations.

In the top left-hand corner of Booster is a reproduction of a polaroid photograph of a blue chair. It is possible that Rauschenberg is alluding to Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual work One and three chairs 1964, signalling that work’s play between objects, language and ideas. Is this chair simply a chair? Rauschenberg elevates this everyday object to the status of an art object, like one of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. He used multiple photographs of this chair in his interactive Soundings 1968, and it featured on the exhibition poster when the installation was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1968‒69.

According to a 1970 exhibition catalogue from Minneapolis Institute of Arts, this is an ‘identification photo of the kind of chair needed for a dance program by Steve Paxton’¹⁷—perhaps a prop for a performance, or a printed program. Steve Paxton was Rauschenberg’s ex-partner, so perhaps this image has emotional significance for the artist, as the year before Booster was made the couple had split. Just as the artist Vincent Van Gogh had painted Gauguin’s Chair in 1888 as a ‘portrait’ of Gauguin during their emotional fallout, the empty chair in Booster may signify Paxton’s sudden absence from Rauschenberg’s life.

The veiled references to Rauschenberg’s relationships signal the momentous change in Rauschenberg’s life at the time. The artist reflected that in 1966, ‘everybody I knew was breaking up. Everything was falling apart. There was such an abundance of bad news’.²¹ He would admit to falling into a depression and felt burdened by a sense of responsibility for his friends who were going through similar experiences, saying, ‘I thought it was my bad influence causing everyone to break up and go crazy’.²² But Rauschenberg would seek out guidance to overcome this tumultuous year and we can view this in the work.

Over-printed on Booster’s X-ray is a chart of planetary movements and the phases of the moon for the year 1967 produced by the Maryland Academy of Sciences. This chart has a scientific purpose; however, for Rauschenberg, its appeal is not astronomical, but astrological: In 1966, Rauschenberg sought therapy for his mounting troubles, but with no ‘time or patience for psychoanalysis’ he instead saw an astrologer called Zoltan Mason, who was a specialist in Jean-Baptiste Morin’s system of horoscope reading.²³ While many people are sceptical of astrology’s insights, Rauschenberg was convinced:

His assessment of my situation was right on … I found out that I had five of my most troublesome stars in conjunction with each other in my horoscope. The advice was to not ever go to the mountain[s] … and to head for the sun and the sea … so I started these various trips all down the East Coast.²⁴

Robert Petersen, a printmaker at Gemini GEL, recalled that Rauschenberg took the astrologer’s advice seriously and would ‘get in his new car and leave Manhattan and take every road to the left that went to the water … He went every exit, all the way down to Florida. I guess he stopped in Captiva’.²⁵ The year after finishing Booster, Rauschenberg made the decision that he would move to Captiva Island, Florida. His astrologer’s advice must have been weighing on the artist’s mind during the print’s production: this astronomical chart, extending across most of the print’s surface, is an insight into the astrological guidance based on the movement of celestial bodies, that Rauschenberg used to navigate his emotional predicament.

Some of the most difficult-to-discern images in Booster occur in the top right and left of the artwork. The writer Robert Mattison has speculated that the image in the top right is a depiction of the Cape Canaveral space shuttle launch site on its side,²⁶ reinforcing the idea that this work is concerned with the Cold War space race. This is incorrect: the image is a newspaper clipping of a fatal car accident: a car that plunged off the San Bernardino Freeway in Los Angeles.

The psychological weight of car crashes and traffic jams is reinforced when the hidden image behind the artist’s X-rayed legs is identified. To the untrained eye, this ambiguous industrial block could be just another ‘dumb’ image, but it is loaded with implications. Originally from an Alcoa aluminium advertisement, the object is a device for stress-testing metals and ‘testing weldments for susceptibility to stress-corrosion cracking’.²⁸ The connotations of this image are clear: placed behind the body of the artist, it suggests an artist under immense pressure. An artist under stress, or about to crack.