Wooden Gallop

In the early 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg dismissed long-held distinctions between painting and sculpture, and art and everyday life, by creating assemblages, or what he called “combines.” Here he loaded a plywood surface with paint, discarded cans, a piece of a life raft, and rusted metal shards. The meaning remains elusive and nonsensical, and the piece’s vague associations make traditional methods of art analysis useless. Yet, for all its deliberate disorder, the work achieves an unexpected balance and harmony, drawing fragments of our modern civilization into a singular object that celebrates chance and incongruity.

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