Mostly About Rauschenberg

Mostly About Rauschenberg is an unfinished, mostly unreleased documentary about artist Robert Rauschenberg.

• 45 - 50 minutes
• 16mm

7 minute excerpt on Vimeo

Background

• Mayo Thompson Records Nature on the Rauschenberg Estate

Crew

Directors:

• Christine Kozlov
• Robert Rauschenberg
• Mayo Thompson

Original director:

• Jacques Clement

Producers:

• Reiner Moritz
• Michèle Arnaud

Production companies:

• RM Productions, Munich
• Technisonor, Paris

Screenings

	Date	City	Notes
	1975-09	Venice	Premiere
	2008-06-02	Munich	Source (unverified)

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2005

• We worked on a version of a biography of, you know, one of those art documentaries about him. There was a company in France making a film about him and the director was a guy named ClŽmente whose brother was this actor in Belle du Jour, you know, the one with the golden teeth. Anyway, Mr. ClŽmente started this film and Bob wouldn’t let it go out as it sat. And there was some discussion: Well, what do we do? And he said, Do you know anybody who can film because maybe we can do some more parts? And I said, Well, I had some background in film when I was in college: We used to make movies and shit like that. So we rented a movie camera and started shootin’ film with Bob reading his aphorisms, like, The only value of a good idea is that it’s an excuse to work. Stuff like that. Anyway, we cut our version of the film together and played it in Venice, but it never was released. It was handed on to somebody else, who then made another edit and then another edit. I think it finally came out, but I never saw the end one. I have a version of the one we made on VHS.
• Do you think that it will go out for release?
• I doubt it. That’s one of them business things. And Bob is involved in big business at the level he operates. So you have to be extremely circumspect about these things. But on the other hand, maybe the attitude toward copyright will change to some extent, and then the attitude could maybe accommodate a view of it as just information. If it is seen as missing information, and therefore it would be valid for it to be considered just as some more information about the same thing. We’ll see.

Mayo Thompson, 2010

RO: How did you wind up assisting Robert Rauschenberg?

MT: Accident. I was sitting in Europe in the summer of '73, and I went to Greece to make a record with a guy named Manos Hadjidakis, the guy who wrote "Never on Sunday." And he was ill and couldn't work, so I just sat there for a month waiting and waiting and waiting and finally I just couldn't stay there anymore. I was running out of money; there was nothing I could do. And there was nothing for me to do there.

I begged his pardon and said, 'I think I'm just going to have to leave. I can't stick around here and wait forever.' And I went, 'On my way home I think I want to stop in Paris.' So he organized a ticket for me and I went to Paris. I was sitting there and it was August, and I was walking around one day with my second wife, who was an artist, and we were walking down the street one day and we saw Rauschenberg sitting in front of Illyana Sonovan's [sp?] gallery.

[My wife] knew him from New York a little bit, and we got to chatting and he invited us to come in, and I wound up working for him through that. He needed to write a press release for this exhibition they were putting together, and they needed a little something because they were launching this printing company. He had a printing press called Untitled Press, and they needed something to write. I knew how to use a pencil, and so I got the job. 'Oh yeah, I can do that. Sure, I'll help you do that.'

So I helped write the press release, and in proving oneself handy at this and that, opportunity will knock. And so when we got back to New York, where I was living at the time, there wasn't much of anything going on and I asked Bob could we have a job. And he found something for us to do because he liked us.

He liked people around him, he liked to hang out, he liked to have fun, and we had had some fun together. So it seemed a natural, and pretty soon we were working for him. I worked for him for about 18 months, almost two years.

RO: What other kind of work did you do for him?

MT: Walked the dog, pick up the dry-cleaning, you know, wash the dishes. Whatever. I suppose the most interesting thing I got to do was working on a film about him. There was a documentary being made about him by a French film company, and the guy who was making it - when Bob saw this film, he said, 'Oh, I can't let this out this way. I need to do some more on it.'

So he asked my wife at the time, Christine, he asked her, 'Do you know anybody that can make movies?' And it happened that I had made some movies when I was at St. Thomas; I had gotten interested in film there. They didn't have a media department there, but I was just making movies. Barthelme and I were working on a film together before we started the band.

And she said, 'Oh, he can.' Like the press release, you know: 'Can anybody write around here?' 'Yeah, I can write.' 'Okay, you get the pencil.' 'Can anybody make a film?' 'Yeah, I think I can probably do it.' I'm not easily intimidated by those kinds of things, or as nervous as it might make me, I'm not going to be so scared that I won't have a go. So he said, 'Can you?' and I said, 'Sure, we'll try.'

I went and rented a camera and wound up finishing this film. The guy who had been making it before was terminally ill, and it fell to Rauschenberg. He backed it up and we did some more filming on it. It's a film called Mostly About Rauschenberg. My version of it, I should say, or our version of it, was never shown until after Bob's death, in fact, in Munich. We were invited to show it there. We went along with some people from Bob's organization, David White, and showed the film then. That was the most interesting thing I got to do.

We traveled around with him some, and worked on installations of exhibitions in various places. We went with him to Israel, for example, and we sat in Jerusalem for a couple of weeks and helped put together a show of his work there, and helped make things. We helped make things in Paris. The usual stuff that assistants do. Some of this, some of that.