Robert Rauschenberg
50 quotes
Biography
"An empty canvas is full."
"You begin with the possibilities of the material."
"It is completely irrelevant that I am making them. 'Today' is their creator."
"Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh)."
"I don't feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. With the standard you can make any two pictures appear either alike of different. I don't think whether they're alike or different is really very interesting."
"Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio.. .But it hasn't anything to do with your own art or the artist's intention."
"I didn't even know that there was art until I left Texas when I was eighteen. The only painting I knew (and I didn't know it was a 'painting' until much later) was 'Hope' [of George Frederic Watts, 1886] the woman sitting on the globe with.. .that green [of the painting 'Hope'] you only get in reproductions]! I think that negates the idea of a painter's relation to official – old master art. It was neutral ground – that one picture – I responded to visual things.. .'Hope' was just sort of visual thing there, not art."
"Every minute everything is different everywhere. It is all flowing.. .The duty or beauty of a painting is that there is no reason to do it nor any reason not to. It can be done as a direct act or contact with the moment and that is the moment you are awake and moving. It all passes and is never true literally as the present again leaving more work to be done."
"I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about jeep axle my work. The concept I plantatarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical continuity lift tab inherent in language horses and communication. My fascination with images open 24 Hrs. is based on the complex interlocking of disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliche. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object Freight-ways by this, I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built-in.."
"The character of the artist has to be responsive and lucky. Personally I have never been interested in a defensible reason post card for working achievement functionally is a delusion. To do a needed work short changes art. It seems to me that a great part Indian moccasins of urgency in working lies in the fact that one acts freely friends and associates may become more closely allied with you real soon."
"I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness. [around 1965]"
"[Art is] a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint."
"Albers [on Black Mountain College ] was a beautiful teacher and an impossible person. He wasn't easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, I'm still learning what he taught me, because what he taught me had to do with the entire visual world. He didn't teach you how to 'do art'. The focus was always on your personal sense of looking.. .I consider Albers the most important teacher I've ever had, and I'm sure that he considers me one of his poorest students."
"I don't think he [ Josef Albers ] ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. .I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing – I didn't want color to serve me, in other words."
"With the black ones [his 'Black Paintings'] I was interested in getting complexity without their revealing much – in the fact that there was much to see but not much showing. I wanted to show a painting that could have the dignity of not calling attention to itself. In both the blacks and the whites [paintings] there was none of the familiar aggressiveness of art that says, 'Well, here it is, whether you like it or not'."
"It was because of the general inclination, until very recently, to believe that art exists in art. At every opportunity, I've tried to correct that idea, suggesting that art is only a part – one of the elements that we live with.. .Being a painter, I probably take a painting more seriously than someone who drives a truck or something. Being a painter, I probably also take his truck more seriously. In the sense of looking at it and listening to it and comparing it to other trucks and having a sense of its relationship to the road and the sidewalk and the things around it and the driver himself. Observation and measure are my business."
"It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that."
"You could waste years arguing. All I had to do was make one [image] and ask: 'Do I like that?' 'Is there anything to say there?' 'Does that thing have any presence' 'Does it really matter that it looks bluer now, because it is late afternoon? Earlier this morning it looked quite white.' 'Is that an interesting experience to have?' To me, the answer was yes. [on his 'White Paintings']"
"I have another feeling that in working with a canvas, and with something you picked up off the street and you work on it for three or four days or maybe a couple of weeks and then, all of a sudden, it is in another situation. Much later, you go to see somebody in California, and there it is. You know that you know everything about that painting, so much more than anybody else in that room. You know where you ran out of nails.. .At the time I did that early piece, I didn't know it was the lower right-hand corner that had the new element – that that part would grow and that other parts would relate more to the past."
"I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I don't find theater that different from painting, and it's not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes."
"I feel a conscious attempt to be more and more related to society. That's what's important to me as a person. I'm not going to let other people make all the changes; and if you do that, you can't curt yourself of.. .I'm only against the most obvious things, like wars and stuff like that. I don't have any particular concept about an utopian way things should be. I have a prejudice or a bias, it is that there shouldn't be any particular way. Being a complex human organ, we are capable of a variety; we can do so much. The big fear is that we don't do enough with our senses, with our activities, with our areas of consideration; and these have got to get bigger year after year."
"I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world."
"I still have a struggle reading [dyslexia] and so I don't read much.. .Probably the only reason I'm painter is because I couldn't read yet I love to write, but when I write I know what I'm writing, but when I'm reading I can’t see it, because it goes from all sides of the page at once. But that's very good for printmaking."
"[I have] various tricks to actually reach that solitary point of creativity. One of them is pretending I have an idea. But that trick doesn't survive very long because I don't really trust ideas – especially good ones.. .Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown. It is then that I begin to work.. ..when I don't have the comfort of sureness and certainty. Sometimes Jack Daniels helps too. Another good trick is fatigue. I like to start working when it's almost too late.. ..when my sense of efficiency is exhausted."
"[I] could not design forms and colors that would achieve some preconceived result.. .I wasn't going to hire them. I was more interested in working WITH them than in their working for me."