Robert Rauschenberg: The Artist Who Made Movement His Medium

Feature image: Costumes and set, entitled Tantric Geography, designed by Rauschenberg for Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Travelogue (1977). Photo by Charles Atlas via Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Robert Rauschenberg rarely stayed still. He dipped into painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. Many forget that Rauschenberg also treated the human body as a brushstroke and performance as a living collage. In the 1960s, when art was bursting out of frames and marching into streets, Rauschenberg took to the stage as a performer and choreographer in his own right. His work in performance art continued his restless, curious need to collapse boundaries.

In 1954, Rauschenberg began designing sets, costumes, and lighting for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Working alongside Cunningham and composer John Cage, he immersed himself in a world where sound, space, and movement existed in playful unpredictability. The experience transformed his sense of composition.

To Rauschenberg, designing for dance meant activating the stage. He gave dancers objects to carry, costumes that moved against expectations, and lighting that sometimes left them in the dark. It was art made to be moved through, not simply looked at.

His time with Cunningham lasted nearly a decade, shaping his artistic philosophy. It was also the first time he seriously considered how his body could be part of the work.

The most iconic example of Rauschenberg’s performance work is Pelican, first performed in 1965 at the First New York Theater Rally. It was absurd, beautiful, and gravity-defiant.

In a former CBS television studio that doubled as a roller skating rink, Pelican featured Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and Alex Hay, all on skates. Rauschenberg wore a parachute attached to steel rods that jutted out from his back like wings. As they glided and spun, the dancers navigated space like moving sculptures.

The performance was risky. The parachutes were unwieldy, and the choreography required careful, intuitive balance to avoid collision. That tension became part of the thrill. It felt dangerous and joyful.

Pelican expanded his practice. It was a painting in motion. The skaters traced invisible brushstrokes across the space, bending time and balance to Rauschenberg’s rhythm.

Rauschenberg’s performance art echoed the same ethos that powered his Combines. In both, he gathered found materials, be it a taxidermy goat or a pair of roller skates, and let them collide into something strange and new. His performances treated bodies like objects, and objects like characters.

In Linoleum, Rauschenberg once again strapped on roller skates, this time performing alone in a gallery space. Wearing a suit printed with silkscreened images, he glided across a painted floor, leaving behind both physical and metaphorical marks. The performance was recorded on video, capturing the tension between spontaneity and structure. Linoleum played with surface and movement, using the floor as both stage and canvas. It was a painting you could walk through, watch, and hear.

Created as a multi-sensory environment, Map Room II featured projections, layered sound, and live performance. The piece combined architectural elements, collage-like visual fragments, and Rauschenberg’s signature interest in spatial interaction. The viewer entered the room rather than observing it from the outside. This immersive work marked an important step toward installation-based performance art, where the room itself became a participant.

Antic Meet stands as a key early example of Rauschenberg’s collaborative stage work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He designed both sets and costumes for the performance, introducing props like a chair strapped to a dancer’s back. His visuals invited humor and contradiction. The costumes often restricted movement, creating moments of awkwardness and surprise. This work set the tone for a decade of interdisciplinary experimentation.

In the late 1960s, Rauschenberg co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which brought engineers and artists together to create hybrid works of light, sound, and motion. These collaborations extended his performance vision even further.

With E.A.T., Rauschenberg explored how technology could interact with the body. He worked with engineers to create responsive environments, kinetic sculptures, and multimedia stages. For Rauschenberg, the body operated like circuitry. Space became an interface.

Rauschenberg’s contributions to performance art remain foundational. His paintings and prints often take the spotlight, but the stage was where his ideas stretched their limbs. He helped make performance a viable mode of contemporary art that could live in galleries as much as in theaters. His work anticipated artists like Matthew Barney, Joan Jonas, and the immersive installations of today’s digital age.

He made art that moved. In doing so, he moved art forward.

All archival images in this article are used under fair use for educational and non-commercial purposes. Proper credit has been given to photographers, archives, and original sources where known.

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