In the mid-1980s, Robert Rauschenberg's creative attentions turned toward the visual and plastic properties of junk metal when he began to assemble found metal objects and screenprint his photographic images onto aluminum, bronze, brass and copper. His first body of work in this vein was Gluts, a series begun in 1986 and continued intermittently until 1995, in which ornate metalwork seemingly derived from a bedpost might attach to a slice of...