A member of the Beat Generation, in the 1950s Rauschenberg became interested in collage and assemblage, which he discovered together with Cy Twombly and guided by an interest in Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. After experimenting with their many possibilities, in the seventies he began to incorporate simple materials such as cardboard, packing tape and rubber. With its deliberately ‘poor’ apperarance, his work Untitled escapes any formal rhetoric. The technical procedure of assemblage not only serves to put different materials in dialogue, but also proposes a visual vindication of the objects. The residual aesthetic of this work contains a direct critique of capitalism and its circular system of production-consumption-rejection.