Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy.
He visited places like Cuba, Chile, the USSR, touring a retrospective of his work and making new art in response to all the visual stimuli he encountered. The results are on display here in the first gallery show dedicated to ROCI since 1991, and it’s all classic late-period Rauschenberg. Overlapping, clashing screenprints are a chaotic mess of imagery: architecture, road signs, animals, monuments, flags. Symbols of statehood are overlaid with symbols of everyday life: a bust of Lenin, a topless bather, a squealing boar, the Twin Towers, machinery, newsprint. Rauschenberg is documenting the visual reality of 1980s life under oppressive regimes around the world. By touring the work around those very countries, he hoped to offer a way out, a path towards liberation.
It’s a very old fashioned and now-problematic form of cultural outreach. It’s the Western artist as saviour, it’s Rauschenberg thinking that showing his art in oppressed nations will help free their people. It’s naive, arrogant American imperialism under the guise of art. He’s left no space for the artists of these countries, it’s just his voice. And in 2024, it doesn’t sit all that comfortably.
But that doesn't mean that his intentions weren’t good. At the heart of this body of work is the idea that art can ‘produce peace and understanding’, as he says himself in big block capitals on a yellow notepad.
Has it aged badly? Sure. Did it lead to world peace? Absolutely not. But as a document of a world gripped by paranoia and tension, of the slow demise of communism, of international despotism and the fight for liberation in the late 1980s, of the birth of neoliberalism, it’s great. It offers hope, and the genuine, totally uncynical belief that art can be the answer.
