Robert Rauschenberg at 100: Tate Modern gains the scrap Gluts that condemned consumer waste

Three pieces of corrugated metal salvaged from abandoned petrol stations on the Texas plains have travelled from a landscape of industrial failure to the ARTIST ROOMS gallery at Tate Modern — and stayed. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has donated three Glut sculptures to the ARTIST ROOMS collection, the national touring programme jointly managed by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland. The gift marks a hundred years since Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas — roughly the same terrain these works drew their raw material from.

Rauschenberg made the Gluts between 1986 and 1994 in response to the oil surplus that had cratered the Texas economy, leaving behind not only hardship but physical debris: idle pump equipment, disused signage, the scrap heap of a boom that went bust. He drove through that landscape and carried the pieces back to his studio. G-I Glut (1986), now in the ARTIST ROOMS collection, assembles crumpled petrol-station signs whose found lettering spells out “$AVING$” — Rauschenberg added the dollar signs; the rest was already there. Rasputin’s Revenge Early Winter Glut (1987) keeps the dents and oxidised colours of the salvaged metal intact. These were not sculptures about the oil crisis: they were sculptures about what a capitalist economy does to its own refuse.

Tate Modern exterior view at Bankside London, the former Bankside Power Station converted into a contemporary art museum — Tate Modern, Bankside, London. Photo: Acabashi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The third donated work, Mobile Cluster Glut (Neapolitan) (1987), carries a specific biography. The scrap incorporated in it was first used as a stage set in Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Lateral Pass (1985), one of the defining works of American postmodern dance, staged in Naples. After the run ended, Rauschenberg folded the metal into the Gluts series. The sculpture holds its performance history inside it — the material remembers two contexts at once. Also on view are costumes he designed for Brown’s Set and Reset (1983), photographs of urban and industrial scenes screen-printed onto transparent fabric.

The display draws together more than twenty works spanning three decades. Almanac (1962), one of Rauschenberg’s first silkscreen paintings, layered images from magazines, books and his own photographs onto canvas — a compression that anticipated the image-saturated culture ahead. The Carnal Clocks (1969) are kinetic works that keep actual time by switching electrical lights on and off at regular intervals; technology integrated into the object, performing continuously. The Jammers (1975–76) are lengths of brightly coloured silk stretched over rattan poles, made after a visit to Ahmedabad in India. The exhibition traces this restlessness as a methodology: Rauschenberg repeatedly folded the world around him — its materials, its movements, its technologies — back into the work.

ARTIST ROOMS: Robert Rauschenberg opens at Tate Modern on 21 September and runs free of charge until December 2027. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, curated by Gregor Muir, Director of Collection at Tate, with Andrew de Brún, Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, and Julia Blaut, Senior Curator at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Tate Modern is located on Bankside, SE1.

Tags: Tate Modern, Robert Rauschenberg, ARTIST ROOMS, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, scrap metal sculptures, Trisha Brown