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“My father who arts in heaven.”

CHRISTOPHER RAUSCHENBERG (SON) AND ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

When Erica asked me to write about an imagined lunch with my mostly deceased father,¹ I knew it would have to be in his kitchen on Lafayette Street. Everything happened in that kitchen, even though it was just a small part of his five-story New York building.

For this lunch, I wouldn’t have any agenda of unfinished business or scores to settle with him or anything like that. My father and I loved each other, were excited about each other’s work, and told each other so. This is a great gift that many of the others in this book may be seeking at their lunches.

Lunchtime is the very beginning of the day for both my father and me; we’re both serious night owls. My father was a great cook and was an early foodie. Though he loved to cook, this lunch would be simple. Plenty of different cheeses and an array of various crackers. The TV would be on, roaring away as usual. He always had the TV on as a second kind of window, the same way you wouldn’t be comfortable in a room that didn’t have a normal window. For him, this TV window was not something that one controlled; he didn’t ever change the channel. It was there to let the culture roll into the room and be part of his large understanding of the world. For those of us who don’t normally watch TV, it was very distracting, but not for him. He could follow multiple simultaneous conversations in the room, plus whatever was happening on the TV, plus whatever sounds were coming in through the window, all at once. He was a great juggler of sensory input in his life, as in his art.

Many years ago, Bob and my mom both came to the opening of a show of my photography at the Portland Art Museum. After the opening, we were hanging out in Bob’s hotel room when he asked Mom with a very serious expression, “Where do you think we go when we die?” Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “To the studio!” He was very happy with that answer. Consequently, the first question that I would ask at this imaginary lunch is “Was she right? When you died, did you go to the studio, and what have you been up to in that studio for the last nine years?”²

When my wife Janet and I visited Bob down in Captiva, I always loved to go with him in the evenings to his studio and watch him make work. Since he was an artist who was driven by his gigantic curiosity—who loved to make work of every possible kind out of every possible material—I can’t begin to imagine what materials he would get his hands on in heaven and what he would do with them. Actually, I’m not confident that I could imagine it even after he described it to me, but I’d sure like to try.

My second question would be about which other people he is interacting with up there. When I imagine him in this heaven that I don’t believe in, of course I know that he would be drinking (ambrosia, perhaps? At our lunch he’s drinking white wine with ice cubes), carousing, and collaborating with his close friends who have also died. That goes without saying. He won’t have stopped there, though. (For example, his dance piece Pelican, with Bob in a big round parachute and roller skates, certainly has room for Leonardo to join the dance in his flying machine.)

When Bob was near the end of his life, he said, “I’m not afraid of dying, but I don’t want to miss anything.” The best part of Erica’s imagined lunch scenario is the implication that, rather than missing things, he is instead getting to explore a new world with new rules to break and new previously unimagined combinations, collaborations, and conversations to revel in.

My father, in his youth, wanted to be a minister until he found out that his mother’s church didn’t allow dancing. That was an immediate deal-breaker for him. Some people don’t believe that animals can go to heaven, but that would be another deal-breaker. Bob’s dogs would have to be there for sure, as well as his turtle, Rocky. Rocky didn’t like the beautiful nature in Florida when Bob moved down to Captiva.³ That makes me a bit worried about whether Rocky might be too much of a city turtle for heaven, but she would have to be crawling under the kitchen table at our lunch, trying to bite our feet a little, to remind us to set down a nice big piece of watermelon on the floor for her.

Once we’d stuffed ourselves with cheese and crackers, I’d get down to business for a few minutes. Bob had so many philanthropic interests that his Foundation has to take them in rotation, a couple at a time. I’d ask him what issues we should choose to shine our “moving spotlight” on next.

Our artists-in-residence often report seeing Bob still lurking around in his Captiva studios and houses, customarily clad in his white shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, and matching painter’s pants, but I wouldn’t ask him about that. If he wants to discreetly check out what’s going on there, that’s more than fine with me.

If we have time, before our miraculous lunch is over, I’d want to ask him about his depiction of God in The Happy Apocalypse. This was a rood screen that the Catholic Church commissioned him to make for their new Padre Pio Liturgical Hall—they asked him to depict the Apocalypse but to not make it look too depressing. As its central image, Bob depicted God as a huge satellite dish enveloping the whole earth. When the finished work was presented to the Pope for his approval, in 1999, the Pope could not accept this depiction of the Lord, but I’d want to know what God himself thought of it.

Christopher Rauschenberg is the President of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, is the board chair and a co-founder of the nonprofit Blue Sky Gallery, and is an active artist photographer who has had 117 solo shows in eighteen countries. His work is held in the collections of eleven major museums.

¹ I say “mostly deceased” because the whole purpose of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is really to minimize the amount that he is gone. We have his Captiva studio full of excited artists making collaborations, experiments, and beautiful artworks; we have his philanthropy chugging along merrily helping interesting, good things happen; we are sending his work out into the world where it’s still inciting curiosities and blowing minds.

² For starters, I would expect him to be jamming on the “prepared harp” with John Cage and others.

³ She disgustedly shook the sand off her feet and put her head against a cinderblock until Bob gave in and sent her back up to New York, where she had her beloved wood floors and radiators and her favorite rectangle of sun.