Untitled (For Virginia with Hook) 1965

Here we see a mixed media piece made by Robert Rauschenberg. It's a playful construction, a collision of textures, colors, and fragments. The printing is imperfect with the kind of mis-registrations which let you know this was made by hand. For me, that makes it so much more interesting. Look at how Rauschenberg layers the materials, the textures of paper and the crispness of the printed elements. There's a yellow square with a dollar sign, clipped to the surface as if it's been pinned on a mood board. It juts out against the halftone dots printed below. That hook at the top asks the work to be hung, like some piece of washing or a commercial sign. Rauschenberg is taking a throwaway aesthetic and asking it to be art. It's this conversation between the handmade and the mass-produced which reminds me of the work of someone like Andy Warhol, who took an interest in how the most banal subjects and materials could be transformed into compelling images.