notes(rauschenberg 1925-2008
tanya: I remember when Bob erased the drawing of de Kooning ... like
somebody writes and he erases it, makes a sort of collage out of it.
bob: It was nothing destructive. I unwrote that drawing because I was
trying to write one with the other end of the pencil that had an eraser.
tanya: (dreamily) You went over it ...
bob: I had plenty of erasers but I didn't have any art and I'd only
figured out fifty per cent of this problem but if I did the drawing and
then erased it it would go back to nothing so I had to take something
that was accepted as art to use the eraser as a drawing tool. I don't
think Bill de Kooning would let anybody else do it now.
tanya: At the time he was fascinated.
bob: Terrißed! A new generation of erasers! I was trying both at the
same time to purge myself of my teaching and at the same time exercise
the possibilities so I was doing monochrome no-image. It was only
natural that I would use the other end of the pencil and that's not
like having an idea if it's in the middle of your life and the way
you're working.
I mean, to have an idea I've gotten many invitations: 'Please, send me
your work, that I can burn, because I understood what you meant by the
erased de Kooning!'
The erased de Kooning, it's like a picked ßower, and not even stolen, I
asked permission, and so it wilts and the other end of my pencil was
the wilter.
It wasn't a gesture, it had nothing to do with destruction. I would
never part with it. How much could you charge for a de Kooning drawing
that took three weeks to erase by an artist who also has a reputation?
In what way do you add that? That goes back to the flowers again too.
If you've ever really looked into a rose that you have asked for, it
lasts much longer than anything sent to you or that you're growing. I
may have to raise the price!
Milton Ernst Rauschenberg
Calvin Tomkins (a biographer to whom anyone writing about the artist is greatly indebted) has described Rauschenberg’s expulsion from the University of Texas: “He refused to dissect a live frog in anatomy class.… Having had any number of frogs as pets, Rauschenberg was not about to cut one up himself. Just before going to see the dean about it, he released his frog in some bushes. The dean suspended him.” Before Rauschenberg could tell his father what he had done, he got his draft notice and joined the navy.
By stating that he had no intention of using a gun, Rauschenberg got himself assigned to the hospital corps, where he worked as a nurse, first in a tuberculosis ward, later at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, helping to rehabilitate maimed servicemen and caring for men suffering from combat psychoses and brain damage. “I was in the repair business,” Rauschenberg said. “Every day your heart was torn until you couldn’t stand it.”
At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg made friends with a stylish and original young artist from Virginia named Cy Twombly. This friendship left him all too little time for Susan and the baby, and she finally filed for divorce. As Rauschenberg has put it, he had come to feel “too married.” Also, his sexual orientation was changing. Off he went to Italy with Twombly, equipped only with a camera. When funds ran low, he flew to Morocco and got a well-paying job with a construction company. To amuse himself, Rauschenberg knocked together a number of subversively crude artifacts—collages and boxes—out of Moroccan trash. He took them back to Italy and exhibited them at galleries in Rome and Florence. A lot of them sold; those that didn’t he threw into the river Arno.
Back in New York, Rauschenberg remained involved with Twombly until, a year or so later, he fell for a young man from South Carolina named Jasper Johns. Johns worked in a bookstore, but had aspired to be a painter since the age of five. “I have photos of him then that would break your heart,” Rauschenberg told Tomkins many years later. “Jasper was soft, beautiful, lean, and poetic.”
‘Words like ‘tortured,’ ‘struggle,’ and ‘pain’—I could never see those qualities in paint,” Rauschenberg has said, but this has not stopped him from being an activist. When, in 1965, Life magazine commissioned him to visualize a modern Inferno, he did not hesitate to vent his rage at the Vietnam War and a whole range of horrors, including racial violence, neo-Nazism, political assassinations, and ecological disaster. From being an activist he became a philanthropist. Now that his work was fetching ever higher prices, he started giving away large sums of money. (The record price for one of his paintings—Rebus—is $7.3 million; the going price for recent works on paper is anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000.) In 1970 he co-founded Change, Inc., a nonprofit organization that has helped thousands of sick and indigent artists of all persuasions.
Rauschenberg creates a place for uncertainty in art and destabilizes notions of objecthood and spectatorship. This enrages his detractors who view him as an artistic anti-Christ, the American most responsible for art going to hell.
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