Narcissus/ROCI USA (Wax Fire Works)
Published November 5, 2024
Narcissus/ROCI USA (Wax Fire Works)
by Emma Reinhardt
Published November 5, 2024
Creating world peace through art.
While many people have professed that art can change the world, very few have put their boots to the ground to ensure that reality. In the mid to late 1980s in America, there were several artists and activists who were working to push back – either through commentary or direct action – against what felt like imminent global war.
Robert Rauschenberg’s handwritten draft of a statement about Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), 1982. Courtesy of The Rauschenberg Foundation.
Among other things, Israel was invading Lebanon for the second (and far from last) time, South Africa was on the verge of economic collapse thanks to successful anti-Apartheid boycotts, and the US was on a global rampage to roll back the USSR’s creep of Communism by invading every nation that had even a single seed of Socialist ideology in their politics.
Robert Rauschenberg was always a very politically active artist, regularly participating in numerous international projects in the 1970s and 1980s. The product of all this work was the eventual creation of his self-funded artist outreach program called Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange or ROCI (pronounced Rocky, the name of the artist’s pet turtle). This project emulated the very heart of Rauschenberg’s belief, that art is “the only remaining uncorrupted vehicle” and must be carried “person to person” to ensure that its message of peace is not only heard but understood and enacted.
ROCI would be realized as a collaborative creative process that traveled through 10 different countries before returning to the US for a final exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, DC in 1991. Rauschenberg visited each country and immediately ingratiated himself with the local communities, tailoring the project to the specific needs of every place he went.
Narcissus/ROCI USA (Wax Fire Works) (1990) is one of the concluding pieces of the series. Wax Fire Works is the term Rauschenberg used to describe encaustic paints, which are pigments suspended in wax that must be melted in order to be worked with.
Rauschenberg worked on this series of pieces with fellow artist Donald Saff. Together with Saff, the two artists fabricated these monumental steel pieces in their studios in Oxford, Maryland and Captiva, Florida. The encaustic was heated and then painted or screenprinted onto the surface of each slab of polished steel so that the viewer might see themselves in one-on-one dialogue with the subject of the piece. The artist used images taken around the United States rather than any of the other countries he visited, treating the US as its own destination in need of the outreach work of ROCI.