I exhibited, in a one-night show, no less than forty ceramic artworks done in Shigaraki and I had a rather hysterical press conference. One of the questions that I remember the answer to was, "What is your greatest fear?" and I said, "That I might run out of the world".1
What you see in the output of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) is urgency. This is him at his house in south Florida, talking about a past project with artisans in Shigaraki, one of Japan's six big pottery centers. Indexical traces of other people's lives–stamps, footprints, X-rays, empty bottles–litter Rauschenberg's work and lend it a striking immediacy. His Japanese Clayworks series (1982/1985) is no exception to this, where 35mm photos that he took on his visit to Shigaraki are bonded to ceramic bases. Out of the forty ceramic works, maybe you got to see the one that was at the Nasher Sculpture Center.
Installation view of Rauschenberg Sculpture, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, January 31–April 26, 2026. Left to right: Robert Rauschenberg, Revolver V, 1967; Robert Rauschenberg, Moondragger: East (Japanese Claywork), 1982. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photo by Kevin Todora, courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center
At nearly 6'7", Moondragger: East (Japanese Claywork) brandishes a convex body like that of an ATM or an arcade game machine, two monuments of the 1980s. Today, the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company installs tile mosaics in a couple of the country's plazas and railway stations–inside the Minatomirai Line, for instance.2 The kilns and the industrial glazes at Otsuka Ohmi were very high-tech to Rauschenberg, who visited and worked again with the company in 1985. That said, it is a logical outgrowth of three millennia of clay practices in Shigaraki, where coarse orange clay is plentiful in nearby mountains.3 Ikumi Matsumoto, Otani Workshop, and Tanaka Yu are a few ceramicists who use clay from Shigaraki or Shiga Prefecture today.
Japan, undated. Photo: Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg color slides. ACC 7. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York
Rauschenberg assigned a Moondragger to each direction: four, identical block bodies with their own textures and color pairings. Head-on, Moondragger: East is the grittiest sibling because of the insane stockpile of street photos from Osaka and south Florida, save for a rose flower puddled underneath it like strawberry milk.4 Studied separately, the photos still give little indication of place. Mickey stickered on a moped; the stars-and-stripes; a faded Coke sign above a loading dock; a shopfront spelling "TIRE TOWN." Harnessing in photo the power of his early Combines, this side invokes the true immediacy of 'the street', while the look of Moondragger's backside is comparably abstract. A grid is created by an Argentine-blue stripe crossing an 18-wheeler's steel running-board to meet a bottomless, poppy-red vat of Rothko slime. I asked tour groups lightheartedly how many tires they can pick out in Moondragger (the answer is eight), the activity becoming a CAPTCHA "verify you are human" test on a sculpture. I Spy doesn't sum up what this is.
Dish with flowers and birds, 18th century, Chinese with Dutch decoration, hard-paste porcelain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Hans Syz Collection.
I wanted to know if this claywork fit the aims of Rauschenberg's other international projects like ROCI ("Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange," 1984-1991), including "sharing experiences" and "communicating 'worldly' in art".5 Working in Visitor Experience, close looking is as impactful to me as listening to the visitors' lived anecdotes. It helped me discover that the rosettes trailing Moondragger's right side (and in Dirt Shrine: East, 1982) could fulfill these aims. As noted by Vivian Li, the Dallas Museum of Art's Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, these are Kakiemon plates, a porcelain dating back to the Edo period (1600-1868) that was mass-produced into kitsch items in homes in Japan and the U.S.6 I have to think encountering the porcelain here is something like the Windsor-style chairs of The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr) (1981) that opened this exhibition. Fixated on the floating chairs, visitors would say: "I'm back at my grandmother's kitchen table."
The clustered look of Moondragger also borrows from Japan's visual history. In the post-occupation years, intermedia (janru no sojo) visualized the influx of mass media technologies in Tokyo, an event that cannot be isolated from the U.S.'s uneasy commercial presence in the country.7 This layered form of video installation (as Pop did in the U.S.) brought many citygoers closer to exacting what filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio put into words: the "feeling of Being in the contemporary age".8 Therefore, when a critic Tono Yoshiaki covered early work by Rauschenberg in the pages of Geijutsu shincho and Mizue, they were real to a band of readers in Tokyo who kept the same, hyper-extractive "everything but the kitchen sink" attitude.9
Film still from Matsumoto Toshio, For the Damaged Right Eye, 1968, three 16mm projectors, 13 min.
Only recent historians like Hiroko Ikegami have gone even further to out Pop Art as an international invention.10 It's telling that it took form as agents of globalization started operating and were felt in all stripes although the words for 'globalization' still did not exist yet. (Pop was one way for it to enter language.) The name brands that you recognize as Pop iconography like Coke, as early as 1943, secured suppliers outside of the U.S. to aid a relentless "think global" strategy.11 So, it's no accident that you'd meet Pop's cheeky signifiers outside of the U.S. when global communities are eyewitness to the fallouts of these bottling plants and multimillion-dollar marketing strategies. The Tokyoite artist Shinohara Ushio, for example, couldn't have readily imitated Rauschenberg's Coca-Cola Plan in 1964 if not for the litter of bottles within-reach of Shinohara's backyard.¹²
All this considered, I see in Moondragger: East muted signs of emergency. In one way, street photography lets you zero in on a mightier enterprise the instant that it is outpacing you. "Coca-Colonization" was operating again in Osaka by 1982, shown by the logos populating a good bit of Rauschenberg's photography. He collaged these with his own transfer images of Florida, like I mentioned, offering a face to a mighty distribution network that reveals itself in streets. However, Rauschenberg was an outsider to Japan–he didn't speak the language or the local customs–so I assume that for him the Coke bottles and Colonel Sanders were also intermediaries to its streets, markets, neighborhoods, and arcades, when someone was not around or able to help out.
This last setting helped me speculate if Moondragger's shape is a video game machine, which by 1982 had severe curvatures–these flyers deserving their own art history. No sources, however, verify that this was the intent of Rauschenberg or the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company. Seen in this way, Moondragger's clustered look would be mimicking the cinematic experiences created by the CRT screens then. Apart from the interactive element, I think he would've liked the neon glow and the fake intergalactic planes, if not the chiptune music of PacMan. In addition, an arm-wrestling game with a sumotori even makes it into his photographs and other clayworks in this series, including All Abordello Doze 2 (Japanese Recreational Claywork), 1982.
Flyers advertising Atari, Taito's Space Invaders, and Namco's Pac-Man [originally PuckMan], 1978-1982. Courtesy of the Arcade Flyer Archive™.
Somehow, looking at things like Moondragger: East (Japanese Claywork) helps you find your way back to yourself and to your body. It's not even this sculpture that I want to know really, but the people who had first encounters with intermedia who faced the logos and screens head-on. Sometimes I think about those experiences. Like, how did they try to be OK in this reality? How were they trying to push past the intensity of that encounter and the intensity of what they were feeling? Things that they alone knew. It's not enough to wonder who globalizes communities and who squeezes them down in one swallow.
Detail of Robert Rauschenberg, All Abordello Doze 2 (Japanese Recreational Claywork), 1982, transfer and glaze on high-fired Japanese art ceramic, private collection. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
Remy East was a Visitor Experience Facilitator at the Nasher Sculpture Center and is currently a graduate student at CUNY (Hunter College).
Endnotes:
[1] "A Conversation About Art and ROCI: Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Saff," in ROCI: Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art and Prestel, 1991), 179.
[2] "Product Guide," Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Co., Ltd., https://www.ohmi.co.jp/en/product/material/#m01.
[3] Hitomi and Takuro Shibata, "Wild Clay," Interview by Ilsy Jeon, Book Talks, MOCA New York, July 27, 2023, https://explore.moca-ny.org/2023/07/27/wild-clay/.
[4] Interview with Fred Winship, United Press International (UPI), 1983, RRFA 01: Robert Rauschenberg papers, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York, 25.
[5] Robert Rauschenberg, R.O.C.I. Letter of Intention: Tobago, October 22, 1984, in I Don't Think About Being Great: Selected Writings, ed. Francine Snyder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 223.
[6] Vivian Li, "Rauschenberg Study Day," Lecture, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, February 20, 2026.
[7] Miryam Sas, "Intermedia, 1955-1970," in Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 139.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 162-163.
[10] For more information, see the anthology Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023).
[11] Christin J. Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 14.
[12] Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator, 179.