Elizabeth Rivenbark

Twentieth century artists have frequently turned to interior furnishings as familiar objects that possess multiple meanings and thus can be manipulated in such a way as to recall personal experience yet indicate broader cultural significance. The anthropomorphic nature of many furnishings makes the chair or the bed an appropriate location for discussions of the corporeal. Using Saussure’s theory of semiotic iconography, this article identifies the broader use of the chair in history as a signifier of the human body then analyzes the multiple meanings of the chair to mid-twentieth century artists. From autobiographical readings to socio-political ones, the artists of the 1960s adopted the form of the chair to replace the corporeal human body in a time when the human body was rife with political meaning.

“Rauschenberg’s Religion: Between Art and Life,” SECAC Review, vol. XVI, No. 1, (2012), 39-48.

As part of our everyday experience, from the clothes we wear to the sheets we sleep in, textiles have a direct relationship to our bodies and our selves. For this reason many artists use textiles to express issues related to the body or to imply a narrative dimension through their intimate, familiar nature. Robert Rauschenberg is known principally for his mixed media paintings and other compositions, dubbed " combines " by the artist. In this study, I intend to examine the roles and meanings of the artist's use of textiles in these compositions, especially early in his career, a period less well understood by scholars.

The repetitive use of chairs and other furniture in sculptural forms in the 1960s in particular, certainly suggests, in a “real” way, the presence of the human form without the figure, but not merely to suggest man’s rise or fall but the contemporary state of humanity. Artists in Europe and America used the iconography of the empty chair as a way to respond to social conditions that reflected the lack of heroic humanism in contemporary society; Europe in the 1960s was still recovering from the destruction of World War II physically and psychologically; alternately America was involved in the Cold War and the Red Scare of communism. The fact that these sculptural forms occurred across various art movements suggests an accepted iconography for the absent body among artists who wanted to address the human condition in its contemporary state without addressing the heroic classical form. The only way they saw to reject that classical heroism was to avoid the human form altogether.