In 1996, Providence Journal Arts Writer Bill Van Siclen sat down with Robert Rauschenberg. Here is that interview:

June 13, 1996

One of the highlights of last week’s 16th International Sculpture Conference was the lifetime achievement award given to Robert Rauschenberg. Now in his early 70s, Rauschenberg is a true original, a painter, sculptor, printmaker and artistic provocateur who almost single-handedly changed the course of American art.

But coping with a true original can be difficult. Just ask the International Sculpture Center, the Washington, D.C.-based arts group that sponsored the conference.

During an interview arranged by the center and held just a few hours after the awards ceremony, Rauschenberg quickly takes aim at art awards in general and his own award in particular.

"They shouldn’t give artists awards," he grumbles. "It doesn’t do anybody any good. You simply can’t put a value on something as fluid as creativity. Once you single out one artist or one point of view, you isolate everything else."

Rauschenberg is equally dubious about getting an award from an organization that specializes in sculpture.

"All of my activities are controlled by my appetite for life," he says. "I don’t get up in the morning and say, ’I’m going to make sculpture.’ I get up and say, ’What interests me today?’ It’s not a matter of painting or sculpture or something else. I don’t think in those categories."

Taken out of context, these comments would easily qualify Rauschenberg for stuffed-shirt status. But the man himself is anything but stuffy.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, a hardscrabble oil town overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, he still speaks with a faint good ol’ boy drawl that turns "garden" into "gaahden" and "short" into "shaawt." He’s also a born raconteur, at one point launching into a long story about taking patients from a Navy pyschiatric hospital on a golf outing during World War II.

"It was just like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,"

Rauschenberg also turns out to be a snappy dresser, having arrived for an afternoon of interviews at Providence’s Westin Hotel in a blue and white seersucker suit, blue shirt and blue tie. Rather than your typical dour, black-clad artist, he looks more like somebody’s slightly disreputable uncle, the kind who’s always ready with a funny story or a racy joke.

This mix of playfulness and provocation has been a Rauschenberg trademark from the start.

In the 1950s, he caused a stir in New York art circles by incorporating bits of newsprint, magazine advertisements and other forms of mass media into his prints and paintings. The result was an early form of Pop Art - and a direct challenge to the slash-and-drip school of painting practiced by Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

In 1964, Rauschenberg caused another furor when he skipped the awards ceremony at the prestigious Venice Biennale art festival. In his defense, he cited prior commitments to the dance company run by his friend, choreographer Merce Cunningham. But Biennale officials, who had awarded Rauschenberg their Grand Prize that year, were outraged.

Even today, Rauschenberg’s liberal use of X-rated body imagery can shock unsuspecting viewers. (One of the great experimenters and improvisers in contemporary art, Rauschenberg typically mixes dozens of different images in a single work. Some can be fairly explicit.)

But to hear Rauschenberg tell it, most of the fuss that has surrounded his life and work isn’t really his fault. Like any good artist, he’s just doing his job - breaking down barriers, testing limits, prodding people to see themselves and their world in a new way.

"I’ve never set out to be scandalous or subversive," he says. "It’s just that I did things that I hadn’t seen anybody else doing. It was never a conscious effort to be rebellious. But I do feel that it’s a waste of time to do something that somebody else is doing or did or can do better than you. You have to do your own thing."

Nor does Rauschenberg have any regrets about the various collaborative projects that have consumed large amounts of his time and energy through the years. These include Experiments in Art and Technology, a mid-’60s effort to bring together artists, engineers and scientists (and which is better known by its acronym, E.A.T.), and the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, a self-financed program that fosters ties between artists in different countries.

"Collaborating with other people, whether they’re artists or dancers or scientists or somebody else, has been one of the great experiences of my life," Rauschenberg says. "It’s the best antidote to an exaggerated ego that I know."

Still, Rauschenberg continues to find time to make his own art. When he’s not on the road, he works every day - and often far into the night - at his studio on Captiva, an island off the southern coast of Florida. And when he is traveling, he always takes along a camera or two to take pictures.

"It’s my way of sketching," he says. "In fact, as soon as I checked into the hotel here in Providence I grabbed my cameras and went out. I spent the whole morning taking pictures."

And what did he take pictures of?

"Nothing in particular," he says. "A few buildings, a sidewalk, some shadows.

"It’s not the individual pictures that matter. It’s the range of possibilities that they offer in the studio that counts."