Photo By Gail

Robert Rauschenberg  (1925 to 2008) made Grand Black Tie Sperm Glut (1987) in response to the recession in the 1980s in his native Texas when a “glut“ in the oil market threw the state’s economy into a tailspin. Here, and in the artist’s larger series of Gluts to which this work belongs, he assembled metal scraps, often the debris of American car culture. He observed, “I think of the gluts as souvenirs without nostalgia.” This amalgamation of weathered road signs, some of which are riddled with bullet holes, rejects the idea that there’s a single way forward.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.