by Team Treanor
You are in the lobby of Round House Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, in America, waiting to get into Forum’s bobrauschenbergamerica. The problem is that you don’t know whether you’ve actually wandered into the play or not. The walls are festooned with American flag bunting. An attractive young woman in a floral dress enters, carrying a gaggle of balloons. Is she part of the play? Or here is a young girl wearing a helmet and in-line skates (Kallei Isaac). Surely she is! But what about that very tall man with the backpack in the corner? Or the young woman with the surprisingly bright red lipstick? Here’s somebody dressed up as Post critic Peter Marks! Oh, wait, that is Peter Marks. bobrauschenbergamerica is not about art in America – it’s about the art of America. Another way to say this is that it is about you.
Bob Rauschenberg was an artist whose work looked like this:
Robert Rauschenberg, untitled, 1963
He made what he saw. Unlike, say, Rembrandt, he did not try to control what you thought about his art. He put it together – painstakingly, and with great attention to detail – and let you think what you wanted about it. He was an American. He believed in freedom.
Thus Bob’s mom (Annie Houston) gives us a tour of his art...
