Robert Rauschenberg’s Penchant for Invention and Spectacle
In 2007, he and Merce Cunningham put a new twist on a famous 1981 sculpture.
Collaboration, for Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, began with the arrangement of chairs.
In the summer of 1952, when Rauschenberg was 26 and Cunningham was 33, both were living at Black Mountain College, a nontraditional art school in North Carolina that encouraged exchange and experimentation among its students and faculty. One August night, the composer John Cage—Cunningham’s partner—convened an impromptu performance in the dining hall featuring Rauschenberg, Cunningham, and others. No one took any pictures of the event, and firsthand accounts and recollections vary. Cunningham, who later became famous as a choreographer, was chased by a dog as he danced. Rauschenberg, a pathbreaking visual artist, seems to have provided paintings for the “set,” and played old songs on a gramophone. There was no script, and certainly no rehearsal—but not everything was left to chance. Chairs were carefully laid out in a square, in the middle of the action, so that audience members could look at one another while they watched the performers. The people were part of the art, and not knowing exactly what, or whom, to focus on at any given moment was the point.
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Cunningham and Rauschenberg remained friends and collaborators. Of his work with Cunningham, Rauschenberg reportedly said that he felt more at home with dancers than he did in the world of painting: “The idea of having your own body and its activity be the material—that was really tempting.” Much of Rauschenberg’s art was three-dimensional; he was widely celebrated for his “combines,” which incorporated found objects into canvases and freestanding sculptures. In a 1981 sculpture, The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr), he used wood-and-metal stands and two wooden chairs to create a pyramid of sorts—an elegant, if impractical, seating arrangement.
By 2007, Rauschenberg and Cunningham were 81 and 87, respectively. They still had a penchant for invention and spectacle—and play. At Rauschenberg’s home and studio on Captiva Island, in Florida, after Rauschenberg challenged Cunningham to a wheelchair race, they posed in front of The Ancient Incident, adding another layer of chairs, as well as their own bodies, to the 26-year-old sculpture. As Rauschenberg’s wry grin makes clear, the old friends thoroughly enjoyed their fresh act of mutual creation.
This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “New Chairs.”
